Above photo: Cashiers wearing masks work in a grocery store in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York City, on April 2, 2020. Stephanie Keith/Getty Images.
NOTE: Yesterday, Gov. Cuomo announced that 66% of COVID-19 hospitalizations are of people who say they are staying home. Amazingly, some people are using this to challenge the lockdown and say that people should not stay home.
Let’s think about that. If the small amount of exposure that people are having from limiting their contact with the outside world is continuing to cause high numbers of people to contract COVID-19, what do you think increasing that exposure by having more contact would do?
The answer is: we would see an exponential increase in the number of cases and deaths. That’s how infectious diseases spread – exponentially. One person infects four others and each of them infects four others and so on.
In China, they also found that the majority of cases were happening within families. One person goes out, is exposed and brings it home to the rest. They started a policy of isolating every positive person until they are cleared even from their families.
To get a handle on this pandemic, we need to be like China. We need to stay in quarantine until we can screen everyone, test those who are suspected of being positive, isolate all of the positives and trace their contacts for testing and possible isolation and provide free healthcare for all who need it. On top of that, we need to provide support to everyone by means of a universal basic income and delivery of basic necessities so people can truly stay home.
The sooner we demand these basics, the sooner we can start to reopen some of our businesses. The longer we delay, the more cases, deaths and financial consequences there will be. – MF
New York is the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S. The state has been shut down for six weeks, yet more than 20,000 people are still receiving positive test results each week, according to official counts.
Now, state Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced that 66% of new hospitalizations are from people who say they have been locked in their homes, according to CNBC.
Admissions from nursing homes rang in second, making up 18% of the total, Cuomo said Wednesday at his daily briefing.
“Much of this comes down to what you do to protect yourself. Everything is closed down; government has done everything it could, society has done everything it could. Now it’s up to you,” Cuomo said, CNBC reported.
Over three days, 113 New York hospitals provided data on their nearly 1,300 patient admissions and their demographics, according to the New York Times.
Nearly half of the hospitalized people were unemployed and African-American or Latino, the NYT reported. The majority of cases are older individuals, too; nearly three in five patients are over 60 years of age, the outlet said.
At the same time, 57% of the cases came from New York City where only 3% of people there reported using public transportation.
“This is a surprise: Overwhelmingly, the people were at home,” Cuomo said, according to CNBC. “We thought maybe they were taking public transportation, and we’ve taken special precautions on public transportation, but actually no, because these people were literally at home.”
But why is that happening after so many battles, arguments and sacrifices were had and made to enforce stay-at-home orders?
The reality is that New Yorkers, along with the rest of the country, aren’t truly staying inside all day, safe from exposure to COVID-19, the disease the coronavirus causes.
“I think that ‘staying at home’ is more than that,” Nathan Grubaugh, an assistant professor in the department of epidemiology of microbial diseases at the Yale School of Public Health, told McClatchy News in an email.
He mentioned that grocery shopping, walks in the neighborhood, ordering food and grabbing your mail can all expose you to someone who may be infected.
”There are lots of ways to get exposed,” Grubaugh said. “I highly doubt that many people are truly locked in with no outside contact.”
This is where the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention coronavirus guidelines come in handy: wash your hands, wear a face mask [that covers your nose and mouth], avoid close contact with others and disinfect surfaces as much as possible.