COVID 19-Lombardy Lessons As Applied to NYC
To those that say that COVID 19 preparations here in the USA are being overblown and a leftist plot by democrats in the USA…well USA leftie Dems don’t live in the Lombardy Region of Italy do they? Is that really where they hatch their dubious plots from? No. So I doubt that they are running the news there as well. What exactly is the news from Lombardy? Why am I even talking about a region of Italy and what does it have to do with the dangers of COVID 19 here in the USA?
Lombardy is a region of Italy that holds approx. 10 mllion. COVID 19 showed up there about 30 days ago.
Here’s where things stand today, March 22, 2020.
There are currently 25,515 known cases in Lombardy and the virus has resulted in 3,095 deaths so far in that region. That’s about a 12% mortality rate from those cases that we know of. Divide that over 30 days and you get 100 newly critically ill ICU patients every single day for a month in that region alone…who all eventually died. That translates to a completely overwhelmed medical system. And you’ve likely heard about it in the news.
If you keep hearing the name “Bergamo”, that’s a city in Lombardy that has been featured a lot lately. Doctors and nurses from the ASST Papa Giovanni XXIII hospital in Bergamo have been asking for equipment and new/more employees to help handle the massive influx of patients. News crews have been in and out of there trying to capture what’s been going on. That’s how bad it is. As Lombardy residents are trying to tell us, it’s about putting the health and safety of the entire medical community ahead of your own ideas. The influx of patients, even at a percentage rate that may seem low to some of us, is a massive crisis for a healthcare system.
Here in the USA though it may seem like what is happening there simply can’t happen here. For comparison with a similarly sized region here in the USA and how it all could happen the same for us, I compared Lombardy to New York City.
In NYC, we have a city of 8.6 million. A tad over 10% smaller than all of Lombardy in terms of population. However NYC is very densely populated. In the graphs above I have compared the “same day” numbers of deaths. We are only on day 8 of finding new cases and experiencing COVID deaths in NYC. We are already seeing double the number of deaths in NYC that Lombardy had on the same day graph.
The images with this article don’t show testing for COVID. Showing testing results is valuable to track the spread of the disease for sure but at this time it can’t show the true number of cases. Testing is still ramping up. We have already discovered 9,654 active cases in New York City. But that is not indicative of how many people actually have it. It’s only a reflection of testing capacity and how many people can make their way to getting tested. In other words, we have no true way of knowing just how many people have the virus at this very moment. It’s likely safe to say, unfortunately, that NYC has as many active cases as Lombardy.
Days matter. March 14th is when the first death in NYC was recorded. Again, this means that we are only on day 9 as of today, March 22nd. Symptoms can take up to 14 days to hit. By that accounting, just look 14 days into the future of Lombardy on the line graph or the spreadsheet and it gives you an idea of what we need to at least be prepared for here in NYC on around March 28th…that would mean around 300 deaths on just that one day. We don’t know if we will see the same numbers that Italy is suffering from but it matters that we prepare as if we will.
People may say that percentage-wise that they can’t concern themselves with the dangers of COVID, and that social distancing is absurd…after all (they will say) we haven’t done this for the seasonal flu. Some will still say that the deaths are relatively low and that COVID is just not as lethal as the seasonal flu. Ask people who believe this: “When was the last time the seasonal flu resulted in an average of 100 deaths per day in a single city, every day, for a month?” Ask them about the lessons from Lombardy.
Lombardy has about 10 million people in an area that is 9,206 sq mi.
New York City has 8.6 million people in an area that is only 302 square miles. Think about that when you are pondering all those COVID cases hitting those hospitals at once from a single city’s population.
Remember too that this article and graph are only referencing one major US city. Just one. Can this happen in other cities? We need to do our part to make sure that this can’t be repeated in other major cities in the USA. It’s that worst case scenario that would leave our nurses and doctors and entire medical system unable to provide care for those who are ill with the virus and for those who were in the hospital or needing care at one-who have no connection with the virus at all. The doctors and nurses said it best…they stayed at work for us, so stay at home for them. Lombardy is trying to teach us, so listen up.
Here is the link to the numbers and graph: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vTATACvqaBOxaPuIud-t0gHTL7wVLgNqvE2jvz6zd-UHKkOM1LiDv3RTmJe7BYJ9B5YMEn9G9Ud-589/pubhtml