Really interesting. So I'll confess as a recent resident of NYC that I think Cuomo has done a much, much better job than de Blasio, who (partisan politics siren alert) I absolutely cannot stand, both w/r/t to his tone-deaf handling of COVID-19 (including traipsing to the gym as recently as MONDAY), and in general.
But one thing that has been striking to me as a recent resident of CA is how much easier it is to go about one's daily life practicing social distancing if one has a car. I have been able to drive everywhere, including to and from older relatives' homes, without any <6-foot contact with others.
There is no way my former NYC life would have been possible with the subway and walking on dense, crowded city blocks. It's also much colder in NYC this time of year, so I would probably have been tempted to keep going to the gym for longer than in CA, where I switched to outdoor exercise methods weeks ago, relatively painlessly.
And while SF has a fair amount of foreign tourists, I rarely ever hear foreign accents or languages on my daily grind, whereas in NYC, it's impossible to walk through high-traffic areas like Soho, FiDi, and Midtown without encountering many, many foreigners, some of whom presumably were asymptomatic (and possibly even symptomatic) carriers. And to that end - NYC has way more direct transit connections to Europe; the anecdotal early cases of transmission in NYC were from residents who came back from Italy, France, and Spain.
So I do think density, climate, geography and modes of transportation matter. All of that said, I have been very impressed with both Mayor Breed and Governor Newsom for getting out on top of this relatively quickly.
But one thing that has been striking to me as a recent resident of CA is how much easier it is to go about one's daily life practicing social distancing if one has a car. I have been able to drive everywhere, including to and from older relatives' homes, without any <6-foot contact with others.
There is no way my former NYC life would have been possible with the subway and walking on dense, crowded city blocks. It's also much colder in NYC this time of year, so I would probably have been tempted to keep going to the gym for longer than in CA, where I switched to outdoor exercise methods weeks ago, relatively painlessly.
And while SF has a fair amount of foreign tourists, I rarely ever hear foreign accents or languages on my daily grind, whereas in NYC, it's impossible to walk through high-traffic areas like Soho, FiDi, and Midtown without encountering many, many foreigners, some of whom presumably were asymptomatic (and possibly even symptomatic) carriers. And to that end - NYC has way more direct transit connections to Europe; the anecdotal early cases of transmission in NYC were from residents who came back from Italy, France, and Spain.
So I do think density, climate, geography and modes of transportation matter. All of that said, I have been very impressed with both Mayor Breed and Governor Newsom for getting out on top of this relatively quickly.