Two Coasts. One Virus. How New York Suffered Nearly 10 Times the Number of Deaths as California.

[PeteS in CA]

https://www.propublica.org/article/two-coasts-one-virus-how-new-york-suffered-nearly-10-times-the-number-of-deaths-as-california

Two Coasts. One Virus. How New York Suffered Nearly 10 Times the Number of Deaths as California.

By March 14, London Breed, the mayor of San Francisco, had seen enough. For weeks, she and her health officials had looked at data showing the evolving threat of COVID-19. In response, she’d issued a series of orders limiting the size of public gatherings, each one feeling more arbitrary than the last. She’d been persuaded that her city’s considerable and highly regarded health care system might be insufficient for the looming onslaught of infection and death.
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Three days later in New York, Mayor Bill de Blasio was thinking much the same thing. He’d been publicly savaged for days for not closing the city’s school system, and even his own Health Department was in revolt at his inaction. And so, having at last been convinced every hour of delay was a potentially deadly misstep, de Blasio said it was time to consider a shelter-in-place order. ...
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In San Francisco, Breed cleaned up her language in a text to California Gov. Gavin Newsom. But she was no less emphatic: The city needed to be closed. Newsom had once been San Francisco’s mayor, and he had appointed Breed to lead the city’s Fire Commission in 2010.

Newsom responded immediately, saying she should coordinate with the counties surrounding San Francisco as they too were moving toward a shutdown. Breed said she spoke to representatives of those counties on March 15 and their public health officials were prepared to make the announcement on their own. On March 16, with just under 40 cases of COVID-19 in San Francisco and no deaths, Breed issued the order banning all but essential movement and interaction.
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Breed, it turns out, had sent de Blasio a copy of her detailed shelter-in-place order. She thought New York might benefit from it.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, however, reacted to de Blasio’s idea for closing down New York City with derision. It was dangerous, he said, and served only to scare people. Language mattered, Cuomo said, and “shelter-in-place” sounded like it was a response to a nuclear apocalypse.

Moreover, Cuomo said, he alone had the power to order such a measure.
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Cuomo’s conviction didn’t last. On March 22, he, too, shuttered his state. The action came six days after San Francisco had shut down, five days after de Blasio suggested doing similarly and three days after all of California had been closed by Newsom. By then, New York faced a raging epidemic, with the number of confirmed cases at 15,000 doubling every three or four days.
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As of May 15, there were nearly 350,000 COVID-19 cases in New York and more than 27,500 deaths, nearly a third of the nation’s total. The corresponding numbers in California: just under 75,000 cases and slightly more than 3,000 deaths. In New York City, the country’s most populous and densest, there had been just under 20,000 deaths; in San Francisco, the country’s second densest and 13th most populous, there had been 35.
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While New York’s formal pandemic response plan underscores the need for seamless communication between state and local officials, the state Health Department broke off routine sharing of information and strategy with its city counterpart in February, just as the size of the menace was becoming clearer, according to both a city official and a city employee. “Radio silence,” said the city official. To this day, the city employee said, the city can’t always get basic data from the state, such as counts of ventilators at hospitals or nursing home staff. “It’s like they have been ordered not to talk to us,” the person said.

The city official also said that after the city had been assisting the state in identifying and responding to outbreaks in city nursing homes, the state two weeks ago abruptly told the city its help wasn’t needed. More than 5,000 nursing home residents in New York have died of COVID-19.
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For his part, de Blasio spent critical weeks spurning his own Health Department’s increasingly urgent belief that trying to contain the spread of the virus was a fool’s errand. The clear need, as early as late February, was to move to an all-out effort at not being overrun by the disease, which meant closing things down and restricting people’s movements. The frustration within the department grew so intense, according to one city official, plans were discussed to undertake a formal “resistance”; the department would do what needed to be done, the mayor’s directives be damned.

Dem leadership has been blamed, with substantial plausibility, for how badly the worst states have been hit. The fly complicating that picture is California. NY's cases/million population is almost 9.5X CA's; NY's deaths/million population is almost 17.5X CA's. As the article points out, the difference between NYC and CA's highest population density city SF (~2409/M for NYC, ~35/M for SF) is even more dramatic, not similar. So, whether you prefer "did something right" or "something right happened", the differences between NY/NYC and CA/SF are worth considering.