Category Archives: New York

Coronavirus curve for California compared to New York, Florida – dramatic contrast

New York versus California: A tale of two pandemics

San Francisco Chronicle, by Erin Allday, July 27, 2020
People practice social distancing in white circles in Domino Park New York in May. Photo: Noam Galai / Getty Images

Their journeys began at about the same time, but California and New York immediately diverged down two very different paths during the coronavirus pandemic.

California started in January, with travelers from China carrying a new virus into the Bay Area. New York was probably only a few weeks behind, its virus arriving from Europe.

From there, California’s trajectory was a gentle upward bend in case counts, a long plateau, and then — the surge. New York’s was the classic curve: a sharp climb in cases followed by a long and bumpy descent.

Last week, six months into this pandemic, their paths crossed. California passed New York with the most coronavirus cases in the United States.

That grim convergence occurred as the nation reached its own dark milestone: 4 million reported cases. California, as of Sunday, has about 452,000 cases, to New York’s 412,000. Florida passed New York over the weekend and now has about 425,000 cases.

California and New York have gone through a role reversal of sorts, now that New York’s terrifying outbreak from the spring appears to be over, while California’s summer surge is still swelling. In March and April, New York consistently reported 10 times as many cases a day as California. By the end of June, California was outpacing New York by about the same rate. Last week, California reported about 65,000 new cases to New York’s 4,900.

But the numbers are more complicated than case counts. California has twice the population of New York, and its infection rate is half that of the Empire State — about 1,100 cases per 100,000 residents compared to 2,100 per 100,000. And New York has more than three times as many deaths — 32,600 to California’s 8,400, an indicator of how hard-hit the East Coast’s hospitals were early in the outbreak and how many more people died as a result.

The numbers are even more nuanced when California and New York are parsed into regions. The Bay Area, for example, has experienced a different epidemic, and is in far better shape, than Southern California. Some rural northern parts of the state have barely been touched by the virus. In New York, it has been Manhattan, along with the other four boroughs and their suburbs, that make up the vast majority of the cases statewide.

The two states ended up in roughly the same place — 400,000 known infections — at this moment in time. How they got there says as much about the nature of this new virus as it does about the culture of the East and West coast states and how they responded to the threat.

“The relationship between behavior and virus spread is mathematical, and we see it in those curves,” said Steven Goodman, a Stanford epidemiologist.

In the beginning. The initial trajectory of their curves are fairly well understood. California, the first state in the U.S. to enact widespread shelter-in-place orders in mid-March, shut down ahead of its outbreak. New York acted a little too late.

By the time New York shut down, a large portion of the population in New York City was already infected, public health experts now believe. In the two weeks after Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s statewide shelter-in-place order, confirmed cases doubled every three or four days, and the hospitals were overwhelmed. When the outbreak peaked in the second week of April, more than 10,000 cases were being reported a day and about 1,000 people were dying.

California successfully quashed its burgeoning outbreak. After a gentle uptick in March, daily cases seemed to settle at about 1,000 to 1,500 for a while. They climbed a bit more in May, hitting more like 2,000 cases a day, but still looked stable.

The hospitals were never overrun. The state generally saw fewer than 100 deaths a day. Residents celebrated their “California miracle.” Early, aggressive action had saved the state from the fate of New York and countries like Italy that experienced disastrous outbreaks.

“New York never had the chance to be data-driven and to build up their health care infrastructure and at least mitigate mortality,” said Shannon Bennett, chief of science with the California Academy of Sciences. “Even though we’ve flip-flopped in terms of the endpoint and daily new cases, it’s very different here. We were hearing in New York reports of bodies piling up, the social fabric was kind of crumbling. And I haven’t seen that here in California.

“We’re way better off than New York because we kind of saw it coming,” she added. “But wouldn’t it have been nice if seeing it coming could have prevented where we are now?”

New York: the bell curve. An advantage of having a sharp trajectory up is it’s fairly clear when the peak has arrived. In New York, it was in mid April, when the state reported 11,434 cases on what would have been Tax Day. California saw 1,197 cases that day.

From there, the cases fell far and fast in New York. The state reported a daily average of 7,600 cases in April, and 2,100 in May. The average dropped to about 750 cases a day in June and 700 this month.

New York’s curve, now six months into this pandemic, is an elegant bell with a well-defined peak and a long, steady tail.

There’s no one reason why New York’s case count fell so dramatically, but infectious disease experts point to a few most likely explanations. There were probably very few gaps in New York’s shutdown, which primarily affected New York City, the driver of infections. Residents were scared — a few weeks into the outbreak almost everyone knew someone who’d been infected — and therefore obediently quarantined.

Another possible explanation for the drop-off is immunity. By the end of May, one-fifth to one-quarter of people in New York City are believe to have been infected, according to antibody studies. That’s not enough for herd immunity, in which a large enough portion of the population is immune that a virus can no longer find traction to spread.

But if groups of people prone to infection had higher rates of immunity, that could have dampened the outbreak, infectious disease experts said.

“That may have produced some blunting,” said George Rutherford, an infectious disease expert with UCSF. “And they may have just learned their lessons better than the rest of the country.”

California: flattening the curve. California has never come close to that level of community disease. In the Bay Area, only about 1% of people were infected by the end of April, according to a recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study. That was the result of flattening the curve.

The state averaged about 600 cases a day in March, then 1,400 in April and 2,000 in May. That’s an obvious increase with the benefit of hindsight, but at the time the numbers appeared flat, day after day. They were even steadier in the Bay Area. There is no doubt, public health experts said, that sheltering in place prevented the massive spike that New York had experienced.

But when it looked like the numbers had plateaued, and as the rest of the country began to reopen the economy, Californians grew complacent and impatient. People in many parts of the state begged for a loosening of stay-at-home restrictions. They also began to socialize again — visiting friends and family they hadn’t seen since March.

Cases began a notable uptick around Memorial Day, and then picked up speed. Californians thought they’d peaked in April, like New York — but it turned out the worst was still to come. The state reported an average of 4,000 cases a day in June — twice as many as May. And 8,500 a day so far in July.

“We never really allowed the epidemic to reach a peak,” said Lee Riley, an infectious disease expert at UC Berkeley. “When they started seeing a slight flattening of the curve and what they thought was the peak, that’s when they reopened. And then it kept going up. In New York, they waited well after the peak period of the epidemic to begin to reopen.”

But California’s curve is deceptive, infectious disease experts say, because it’s taken different shapes in different regions. Los Angeles’s trajectory, which has been driving the state curve in recent weeks, was on a slow but steady ascent before a sudden spike in June. In the Bay Area, the curve was notably flat for a long stretch in April and May before trending up.

New York’s pandemic may have been deadlier and more destructive, but it was also more easily contained because it was centralized, Rutherford said. “When you talk about New York State, what you’re really talking about is New York City and the suburbs,” he said. “That makes it simpler.”

California held down its initial outbreak with a blanket shutdown on all 58 counties, but that wasn’t going to be appropriate for the entire state in the long haul, public health experts said. The reopening was blundered, in part, because there was no one approach. “Here, it’s like herding cats,” said Riley.

Both states can learn lessons from the other, infectious disease experts said. California looked to New York’s spike in March and April and knew to bulk up its hospital capacity while its case counts stayed manageable. That knowledge is paying off now as hospitalizations climb to new records.

“Certainly we have learned from the New York situation how bad the pandemic can get and how rapidly it can get bad,” said Grant Colfax, director of San Francisco public health, in a news briefing last week.

And New York, perhaps, looked to California’s reopening and saw that a more conservative approach would be best.

“The lessons that Gov. Cuomo talks about are the lessons of Memorial Day weekend,” Rutherford said. “That’s when it got away. And you don’t want that to happen to New York.”

Forecasting this pandemic has been notoriously difficult, so no one can yet say where the New York and California trajectories will go from here. The hope, of course, is that New York stays its course, and California manages to tamp down its current surge and wrestle back some control of its outbreak.

These curves represent only the first chapter of what’s bound to be a very long story, infectious disease experts say. These months may end up being the worst of the United States’ epidemic, or simply the first rise in a dizzying roller coaster with many more swells to come.

“We happen to be crossing these milestones, but we’re still very much in the early phases of this pandemic,” said Nicholas Jewell, a biostatistician with UC Berkeley. “This is a long haul. Let’s try to be strategic, and learn what works and what doesn’t. We need to be in better shape to live with this virus while we wait for a vaccine.”

San Francisco Chronicle staff writer Mike Massa contributed to this report.  Erin Allday is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer.

Six States’ Attorneys General To Trump Administration: Close Loophole Allowing Trains To Carry Explosive Crude Oil Through Communities

Press release, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman
[Editor: Six state attorneys general, including California’s Xavier Becerra, are asking federal regulators to place new restrictions on crude oil trains that pass through their states.  – RS]

A.G. Schneiderman, Fellow AGs To Trump Administration: Close Loophole Allowing Trains To Carry Explosive Crude Oil Through Communities

Eric T. Schneiderman Press Release, May 22, 2017

“Bomb Trains” Carrying Millions Of Gallons Of Crude Oil Routinely Travel Through Cities And Towns In NY And Across Country, Without Any Limits On Explosiveness And Flammability 

Six-State Coalition Calls For Immediate Action To Set National Limit On Vapor Pressure Of Crude Oil To Minimize Threat Of Explosions And Uncontrollable Fires From Rail Accidents 

Schneiderman: It’s Time For The Federal Government To Close This Dangerous And Nonsensical Loophole

NEW YORK – Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman, leading a coalition of six state Attorneys General, is urging the Trump Administration to immediately close a loophole that allows highly flammable, highly explosive crude oil to be shipped by rail through communities in New York and across the country. These so-called “bomb trains” are responsible for several catastrophic rail accidents in recent years, including the 2013 explosion in Quebec that killed 47 people; in New York alone, these trains cover roughly 700 miles of the state.

In comments filed in response to an Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPRM) issued by the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), the coalition calls on the agency to take immediate steps to require that all crude oil transported by rail in the U.S. achieve a vapor pressure – a key driver of the oil’s explosiveness and flammability– of less than 9.0 pounds per square inch (psi). The comments were filed by the Attorneys General of New York, California [Attorney General Xavier Becerra], Illinois, Maryland, Maine, and Washington

**Click here to read the comments filed by the Attorneys General.**

“Because of a regulatory loophole, these trains can carry crude oil through some of our most densely populated areas without any limit on explosiveness or flammability – creating ticking time bombs that jeopardize the safety of countless New Yorkers and Americans,” said Attorney General Schneiderman. “It’s time for the federal government to put New Yorkers’ safety first and take immediate action to close this dangerous and nonsensical loophole.”

In December 2015, Attorney General Schneiderman filed a petition for rulemaking with PHMSA to set the national limit on vapor pressure of crude oil transported by rail at less than 9.0 psi . In December 2016, specifically citing the Attorney General’s petition, the agency announced that it would issue an ANPRM in order to gather public comment on vapor pressure limits and the safety benefits of utilizing such a limit in regulating the transport of crude oil and other dangerous materials.

Accidents of trains carrying crude oil have resulted in devastating explosions and uncontrollable fires – including the 2016 train derailment in Mosier, Oregon, where the resulting fire caused the evacuation of nearly one-quarter of the town’s residents, and the infamous 2013 Lac-Mégantic, Quebec accident, where a derailed train burst into flames, destroyed the downtown area, and killed 47 people.  Despite the catastrophic impacts that these and other rail accidents have had on communities, currently there is no federal limit on the vapor pressure of crude oil transported by rail. In the comments filed with PHMSA on Friday, the Attorneys General argue that reducing crude oil vapor pressures to levels below 9.0 psi is not only practical, but is necessary for minimizing the explosion and fire danger involved in transporting crude oil by rail.

The Fixing America’s Surface Transportation (FAST) Act of 2015 requires PHMSA and the federal Department of Energy to report the results of a multi-year study conducted by Sandia National Laboratories to assess the volatility of crude oil and make recommendations on improving the safety of its transport. The completion of this study and the development of accompanying recommendations may take years. For this reason, the coalition is urging PHMSA to recognize the substantial present danger that oil trains pose to communities by taking immediate action to set a vapor pressure standard less than 9.0 psi until a final standard is promulgated.

It has been reported that up to 44 “unit trains” – chains of 70 to 120 tank cars – travel on rail routes that bisect New York each week, each carrying from 2 to 3.5 million gallons of crude oil.  These trains cover approximately 700 miles of the state, passing through small communities as well as the heart of population centers such as Buffalo, Syracuse, Rochester, Plattsburgh, Saratoga Springs, Albany, Kingston, and Newburgh, and within a few miles of New York City.  An oil train accident along these routes of the size and intensity of those seen in Quebec and other locations, could endanger the safety of thousands of New Yorkers who live, work, travel, and recreate along the trains’ paths.

Vapor pressure is a key contributor to crude oil’s explosiveness and flammability.  Crude oils with the highest vapor pressures – such as those produced from the Bakken Shale formations in North Dakota – have the highest concentrations of propane, butane, ethane, and other highly volatile gases.  While the vapor pressure of the crude oil involved in train accidents is frequently not disclosed, in the limited number of instances it is known – including the Mosier (Oregon) and La-Mégantic (Quebec) accidents – vapor pressures have exceeded 9.0 psi.

PHMSA’s stated mission is to protect people and the environment from the risks associated with the transportation of hazardous materials, including crude oil.  In July 2015, in response to concerns raised by rail accidents involving crude oil shipments, the agency adopted a new rule that sought to enhance the structural integrity of train cars that ship crude oil, and lessen the chances of train derailments.  Although the new rule imposed new regulations on the design and operation of train cars, it did nothing to increase the safety of the highly combustible liquids carried by these cars.  Because of this, under federal law, crude oil can still be shipped through some of New York’s most densely populated communities without any limit on its explosiveness or flammability.

According to the Association of American Railroads, crude oil shipments by rail increased from 9,500 carloads in 2008 to 493,126 carloads in 2014, representing an increase of over 5,000 percent.  While rail shipments of crude oil have dipped somewhat in recent years, rail is expected to continue to be an important mode of transporting the resource in the future, particularly as crude oil prices and total U.S. production rebound as expected.

“No one should have to live with dangerously explosive materials rumbling through their backyards,” said Congresswoman Nita Lowey. “In Rockland County, trains carry crude oil directly through towns and neighborhoods where children and families live, work, and play. The risk of a crude oil tragedy in New York and across the country is far too great, and I am pleased Attorney General Schneiderman is fighting for this important step to protect our communities. As Ranking Member of the House Appropriations Committee, I will continue working with partners at all levels of government to prevent a crude transport disaster.”

“I join and commend Attorney General Schneiderman in his call for immediate action at the federal level to mandate a safer vapor pressure standard of 9.0 or lower for crude oil transported by rail. The Capital Region remains a major hub for oil train traffic and as long as volatile crude oil is permitted to be transported through the area, residents remain at risk. Almost two dozen Assemblymembers wrote the Administration last fall supporting this safety change,” said Assemblymember Patricia A. Fahy.

“I join Attorney General Schneiderman in calling on the Trump administration to take immediate action to protect our community by reducing the volatility of crude oil shipped by rail to mitigate the impact of accidents involving oil trains,” said Albany County Executive Daniel P. McCoy. “I believe the lower threshold would reduce the possibility of explosions and go a long way toward holding rail shippers accountable for the risks we face every day. I have called for lower thresholds since 2014 after we found out that the Bakken crude in the Lac Megantic disaster had a psi between 9 and 9.3 and my Expert Advisory Committee on Crude Oil Safety Issues made the same recommendation that I sent to the former Secretary of Transportation.  As we near the fourth anniversary of that disaster, we must take every precaution necessary to protect our residents. I applaud the Attorney General for pursuing this requirement and offering his comments to the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration on behalf of New Yorkers.”

“I fully support Attorney General Schneiderman’s efforts to improve the safety of crude oil that is transported by rail through cities like Albany every day,” said Albany Mayor Kathy Sheehan. “Improving vapor pressure standards will help to protect our communities from the harm that can occur if a derailment or accident occurs.  I applaud the Attorney General’s leadership on this important issue.”

“The City of Plattsburgh cares deeply about the movement of the most volatile crude oil products by train through our dense urban core and along our lake. Reducing the permissible vapor pressure for crude oil and chemical containers reduces both the potential for explosions and for chemical inhalation should an accident or puncture occur. I fully support the OAG’s effort to keep our population safe by restricting the allowable vapor pressure of these volatile chemical cars,” said Plattsburgh Mayor Colin Read.

“In the past 10 years, U.S. production of crude oil has nearly tripled—and most of it is now being shipped by rail.  The frequency of related deadly fires and explosions has also skyrocketed across the country,” said Kimberly Ong, Staff Attorney, Natural Resources Defense Council.  “Communities nationwide urgently need the Department of Transportation to put existing safety technology to use to limit crude oil vapor pressure and greatly reduce the likelihood of these dangerous incidents nationwide.  We applaud Attorney General Schneiderman and his colleagues for pushing for immediate action on this critical matter of public safety.”

“Until the state achieves its goal of 100% clean, renewable energy powered economy, an oil train tragedy in New York is sadly a matter of when, not if,” said Peter Iwanowicz, executive director of Environmental Advocates of New York. “The federal government should immediately act on Attorney General Schneiderman’s call for less volatile oil on the rails in our communities.  It could be a real life saver.”

This matter is being handled by Assistant Attorney General Mihir Desai, Environmental Scientist John Davis, and Policy Analyst Jeremy Magliaro under the supervision of Deputy Bureau Chiefs Lisa Burianek and Monica Wagner of the New York Attorney General’s Environmental Protection Bureau. The Environmental Protection Bureau is led by Lemuel M. Srolovic and is part of the Division of Social Justice, which is led by Executive Deputy Attorney General for Social Justice Alvin Bragg.