4/8 was another rough day for New York. It’s quite a different story between NYC and Los Angeles County, who has .176 cases per 1000 and .004 deaths per 1000. This is about 20x lower on cases than NYC and 50x lower on deaths. I’d really love to know why this huge difference exists. There aren’t a lot of clues in the news. I believe that NYC and California both issued shelter in place orders on the same day. Perhaps the virus was loose in NYC for weeks before any kind of reaction was taken by government, enabling a non-linear transmission effect to occur? If there’s any truth to the effects of latitude that I’ve been uncovering, that might come into play too. See chart below for US States’ Case and Death rates by latitude bands. The results in the US line up with the global results by latitude. Note that the US Population is nearly 2x as large in the 30-40 band, so the narrative can’t be that this effect is simply due to a large number of big cities in the range.
