“Note from Daniel Alman: The above may be a good reason for a lockdown in the New York City metro area (which includes parts of New Jersey and Connecticut), but certainly not for the rest of the U.S. And certainly not for Germany.”
If you take nursing home deaths out of the equation, there is near equivalence in higher # of cases & deaths and higher population density, among the states and within the states. The northeast states running all the way from Washington D.C. up to Massachusetts have the highest population densities and the highest case #’s and deaths on a per million basis. Viruses like the Wuhan virus have easier opportunity to spread in a more densely populated area. NYC has a population density (highest in the U.S.) of 27,000+ per square mile. Montana has a population density of about 7 per square mile. Montana’s largest city, Billings, has a population density of 2,490 per square mile & has the largest single portion of the cases in Montana, while the state as a whole has less than 500 cases and less than 20 deaths. Population density in a pandemic is part of destiny in how it plays out.
And that’s not even counting the old and frail Cuomo and de Blasio flat-out murdered by forcing nursing homes to accept actively contagious patients and forbidding them from keeping the residents isolated from infections staff.