Residents of Los Angeles can go to a county website
to look up how many confirmed coronavirus cases there are in
Beverlywood, or Koreatown, or Echo Park. Officials in Charlotte, North
Carolina, have released figures at the ZIP code level. The South Korean
government is sending geotargeted texts to alert citizens to positive cases near them.
In New York, now at the
center of the outbreak, Mayor Bill de Blasio has resisted releasing what
the city knows about a basic question: Where, precisely, is the virus?
Answers could take the form
of a number of data points — tests, confirmed infections,
hospitalizations or deaths — each of which shed light on a different
part of the crisis.
Instead New York, along with several other state and county governments around the country, has released daily data
only on the county, or borough, level. That means there is just one
figure for COVID-19 cases in all of Kings County — Brooklyn — which has a
population larger than 15 states.
The roughly 4,600
confirmed COVID-19 cases among Brooklyn’s 2.6 million residents account
for 8% of the confirmed cases in the entire country. There is also just
one coronavirus case figure for the 2.2 million residents of Queens,
where there are just over 5,000 confirmed cases.
The lack of detailed
information makes it difficult for medical workers, journalists and the
public to establish whether particular communities in the city are being
harder hit and to get beyond anecdotal accounts of which of the city’s
roughly 60 hospitals are already overwhelmed.
Dr. Michael Augenbraun,
director of the infectious diseases division at SUNY Downstate Medical
Center in central Brooklyn, said that while he knows the city has its
hands full, the data could be useful for doctors. “Everyone is
struggling to make sense of this evolving picture,” he said. “I think it
would be useful to us in the hospitals to get a detailed situational
appraisal, to know how much of the burden we are confronting.”
Augenbraun noted that more
precise data could reveal important trends in how the disease is
affecting different New Yorkers. “There are many things that may
correlate with the spread of infectious diseases,” he said. “Race might
be one, poverty might be another.”
But some of those same
factors, particularly ethnicity and race, may account for the city’s
reluctance to make public more localized data that could point to
clusters in particular neighborhoods, among certain communities. Around
the country, there have been disturbing reports of bias attacks against Asian Americans by assailants blaming Chinese communities for the spread of the virus.
“The risk is that certain
communities would be unfairly stigmatized, especially if communities
with many COVID-19 cases already shoulder poverty or high crime,” said
Dr. Jessica Justman, associate professor of medicine in epidemiology at
Columbia University. “On the other hand, communication and information
are always important and especially important in a pandemic setting.”
Some experts argue that the city should be releasing more granular information, perhaps even down to the block level.
“More detailed information
will allow everyone to target their efforts much more effectively than
only county-level information,” said John Mollenkopf, director of the
Center for Urban Research at the CUNY Graduate Center.
In Newark, the largest city
in neighboring New Jersey, Mayor Ras Baraka has disclosed that there
were three coronavirus hot spots where residents should take extra
precautions. On March 21, the city released detailed maps of the areas, which cover between 50 and 100 square blocks; it did not release the specific number of cases for each area.
New York has held fast on
the policy the mayor laid out during a March 12 press conference when he
was asked by a reporter if the city could go beyond borough-level
numbers and break down cases by neighborhoods. The mayor declined,
saying only that the city would release figures in the case of what he
called a “cluster.”
“When we say ‘community
spread,’ the assumption should be that this is something that is going
to reach every corner of the city, whether we like it or not,” he said
at the press conference. “And I don’t think it’s particularly
productive. I don’t know what you do with that information. I don’t know
how you change your life. Unless there is an indication of a cluster,
that’s something we absolutely will talk about.”
THE CITY
THE CITY
The city is sending homeless shelter residents and public hospital patients with coronavirus to hotels — but won’t say where.
And
officials aren’t providing hotel staff or the city employees monitoring
the infected guests with masks or any other form of protective
equipment — instead instructing them to maintain social distance.
“Going
into a hotel room with an infected patient is the same as going into a
room of a hospital with an infected patient,” said City Councilmember
Stephen Levin (D-Brooklyn), who called for protection for the workers.
The news came as officials confirmed the first death of a homeless New Yorker who succumbed to COVID-19.
The
city’s Department of Homeless Services and the Health + Hospitals
Corporation said the shelter residents and patients sent to the hotels
are all experiencing low-level symptoms and do not require intensive
medical care.
As of Wednesday, DHS had placed 65 individuals from shelters into hotel rooms.
Among
them: residents who are infected, people who came in close contact with
those who tested positive and shelter clients with potential
coronavirus symptoms who haven’t been tested, officials said.
Overall,
the city has lined up 500 rooms in four hotels, though only two
facilities were being used as of Wednesday afternoon, officials said.
Isaac McGinn, a DHS spokesperson, declined to reveal the locations of the hotels, citing shelter residents’ privacy.
HHC
wouldn’t say how many patients it had sent to the hotels so far. At
least one HHC patient with COVID-19, the illness caused by the
coronavirus, had no known address and was routed to a hotel, via DHS.
The number of shelter residents infected with the virus jumped from 17
to 39 between Sunday night and Tuesday night, with the illness spreading
from 12 to 27 separate shelters across the city during that time, DHS
officials said. Twelve people have been hospitalized — including the
unidentified person who died Tuesday.
Queens has the most COVID-19 cases in the city with 6,420 and had the biggest gain in the last 3 days at last count on THE CITY's website.
Followed by Brooklyn with 5,232, Manhattan with 3,616, Bronx with 3,532 (second biggest gain) and Staten Island with 1,166.
A total of 285 citywide have died by the virus.
I'm going to take a break for a few days.
