Decided to do a little diving into local NYC COVID data, courtesy of @THECITYNY https://projects.thecity.nyc/2020_03_covid-19-tracker/

tl;dr - I think NYC is a case study of how you can only slow the spread of COVID with mild indoor limitations, you can't stop it. But some areas of the city look alright.

This isn't the whole city, but this is enough of it to show what I mean: with few deviations, there's central areas where there seem to be low sustained positivity rates (around 14th St in Manhattan, most ZIPs have under 3%) and it's the opposite in a ring around those areas

Perhaps someone has a solid socioeconomic explanation for that, but I'm guessing the light shaded ZIPs have more of a correlation of people working from home. I'm not sure that accounts for much of this difference.

One thing is that "underground parties" of both the wedding/religious type and of the nightlife/nightclub type are pretty much being found everywhere, but it seems attendees live in dispersed areas (not necessarily right near the venue). Positivity doesn't correlate to venues

Positivity also doesn't correlate to indoor dining use. All of these areas have 25% occupancy-limited indoor dining available & the ranges of positivity is 1% - 12%, and the 1% areas aren't known for not-having-restaurants, quite the opposite. The same for gym and salon use, too

Does positivity correlate to political alignment? It seems to. Once again, certain areas are known to have enclave-like religious communities that seem to only loosely agree with the American legal system & have decided to disregard inconvenient COVID regulations & guidelines

Similarly, certain areas of NYC have more of a concentration of suburbanites that lean right-wing, small government and anti-public (and, frankly, racist/sexist/homophobic/etc.), and many are openly condescending about anything COVID-related

...and in both of those cases, their home areas have skyrocketing positivity rates that are much higher than the Manhattan CBD, where residents live in close proximity with shared elevators, cramped supermarkets, and tight seating at restaurants. But they all wear masks!

But the shitty thing is that no matter where you live, your COVID positivity rates have gone up about 2-3x and your cases are up in the same range. My ZIP has gone from 15-17 new cases a day to 38.

And that seems to be the longer trend.

Regardless of almost any minor control, policy change or social event, the current major policy framework results in a slow upward crawl. Spot restrictions lead to better results in a small area temporarily, but it's whac-a-mole, and relatively worse areas stay worse.

We're doing so much better than a lot of other places (notably, LA/Chicago) but it just seems like the results won't be different in the long run unless we change something big.

Full shutdowns knock back the virus a lot better than anything you do when most work/retail is open

And the generally convenient thing is that effective full shutdowns only need 2-3 weeks to knock back transmissions significantly. If you know you can come back to the same current policies in 3 weeks and resume the slow crawl FROM A LOWER STARTING POINT, that seems tolerable

Again, we're not interested here in preventing all COVID transmission. That's impossible. Our experience is that draconian measures are flouted and there are only diminishing returns to harsher policies in most cases. We're only interested in reducing transmissions substantially.

The question is whether Cuomo is going to buy into this. And I don't think he will in the month of December, not with the holidays and with end-of-year activities that Cuomo has no interest in disrupting at the expense of public outrage. But he might feel okay in January.

I think we should have done a full shutdown inclusive of Thanksgiving, and I wouldn't mind starting one next week. I think it's actually more ideal to shut down when the most amount of people would be taking unneeded risks. But a January shutdown would work regardless.

Anyway, I strongly feel like we should all advocate for that. I think we should get off of the "blame dining patrons & gym patrons" bandwagon. I think we should make measured moves but not panic. I think we need to knock it back one more time before we start getting vaccines.