Longer NYC Commutes, Household Crowding Linked To Higher COVID-19 Rates
BY CAROLINE LEWIS
9/22/2021
TED SHAFFREY/AP/SHUTTERSTOCK
Longer commute times and crowded apartments came with higher rates of COVID-19 transmission at the height of the pandemic in New York City, according to a recent study from Cornell University. The researchers, whose disciplines merged architecture, public health and engineering, looked at a range of environmental factors that could be tied to the spread of the coronavirus in urban areas and found commutes and crowding had the strongest correlation.
Timur Dogan, senior study author and assistant professor of architecture at Cornell, said he and his team wanted to try to identify data that would “link how we design cities with a kind of pandemic resilience.”
Simply being on a train or bus has never been a great predictor of catching the virus. A September 2020 study found no clear connection between coronavirus spread and riding the New York City subway and other transit systems worldwide, noting that cases fell in the five boroughs even as ridership gradually increased. The New York Times pointed out in May 2020 that ridership had rebounded in cities around the world where the pandemic had ebbed without mass transit being linked to any super-spreader events.
The Cornell study made a similar finding, but by looking at a wider variety of potential trends, it revealed a correlation between infection rates and the average number of minutes spent commuting on public transit.
The study relied on U.S. Census data on New Yorkers’ commute times published before the start of the pandemic. It then compared those commuter times against case rates in different parts of the city across five phases of the city’s first wave. Phase No. 1 was the initial outbreak from January 20th to March 22nd. Phases No. 2 (March 23rd to April 5th) and No. 3 (April 6th–June 7th) represented the start of the lockdown period. Phase No. 4 marked the original reopening from June 8th–July 19th, and Phase No. 5 ran from then to August 26th, “when the reopening process concluded and the city entered the ‘new normal,’” according to the study authors.
During Phase 3, each extra minute added onto the average commute time for a given neighborhood correlated with a 0.8 increase in the daily new case rate (the number of new cases per 100,000 people). Add 30 minutes, and infections go up by 24 cases per 100,000. Tack on 45 minutes, and the rise is 36 cases per 100,000.
During the other periods analyzed, there was still a relationship between a neighborhood’s average commute time and case rate, but it was less significant.
Dogan speculated that those who had long commutes on subways or buses before the pandemic may have been more likely to continue taking public transportation during the outbreak because they lacked another alternative. They might have then risked greater exposure to the virus by spending a significant amount of time in close proximity to others during their commutes, he said.
Nicholas Bloom, a professor of urban policy and planning at Hunter College who was not involved in the study, expressed some skepticism that long commutes actually drove transmission. He noted that commute time could simply correlate with people coming from areas outside of Manhattan—where other factors such as housing contributed to high infection rates.
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On the topic of living arrangements, plenty of data show a high rate of COVID-19 transmission within households last year. But the Cornell study distinguishes between crowding, which refers to people sharing rooms within a household, and density, which is defined by the number of buildings and people living in a given geographic area. A higher density of residential buildings in a neighborhood was associated with a lower COVID-19 case rate during the period studied from March through August 2020.
Dogan said that could be because neighborhoods with a larger population often have more services, including access to health care and supermarkets. People living in those areas don’t need to travel as far for food, medicine and other essentials—potentially limiting their overall exposure, he added.
Household crowding, by contrast, came with a higher case rate. “Even in high-density urban environments, there’s not necessarily crowding happening if it’s well designed,” Dogan said.
The study identified the Bronx as an early COVID-19 hotspot that had a high number of occupants per room. The authors acknowledged that additional research would be needed to assess the impact of other variables such as income level and age. But other COVID-19 studies reached similar conclusions, including one that determined that cities in Brazil with a high level of overcrowding had an average of 461 cases per 100,000 people in the first six months of the pandemic, compared with a nationwide average of 88 cases per 100,000.
“Crowding was a pretty well-established problem, even before the pandemic, in terms of public welfare,” said Bloom. “If you go back 100 years, the problem was tuberculosis and the spread of disease in the old tenements.” He said that’s part of why non-family members were banned from sharing apartments in the city’s public housing when it was established in the early 1930s.
Overcrowding remains a growing burden for New York City. In 2018, about 290,000 of the city’s households were overcrowded, a 17% increase from a decade prior, according to an April 2020 report from the city comptroller. It cited this as a factor behind New York becoming ground zero for the pandemic.
It’s not an easily fixed problem, Bloom said: “To basically have the government go in and do occupancy control [in non-public housing] is very controversial and would, of course, accelerate the homelessness problem in the city.”
The Cornell study authors concluded that one solution to the transportation problem could be to design a more decentralized city where jobs are not concentrated in one area but instead spread across different neighborhoods so that people have shorter commutes to work.
1 in 500 US residents has died of Covid-19
By CNN Wire
9/15/2021
(CNN) — The United States has reached another grim milestone in its fight against the devastating Covid-19 pandemic: 1 in 500 Americans have died from coronavirus since the nation’s first reported infection.
As of Tuesday night, 663,913 people in the US have died of Covid-19, according to Johns Hopkins University data. According to the US Census Bureau, the US population as of April 2020 was 331.4 million.
It’s a sobering toll that comes as hospitals in the US are struggling to keep up with the volume of patients and more children are grappling with the virus. In hopes of managing the spread and preventing more unnecessary deaths, officials are implementing mandates for vaccinations in workplaces and masking in schools.
They are fighting against a sharp upward trend in cases and deaths: The US is reporting a more than 30% increase in average daily cases and a near tripling of average daily deaths over the past month, according to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
But with only 54% of the population fully vaccinated, the rate of people initiating vaccinations each day has declined over the past month.
Health experts have hailed vaccinations as the best source of protection against the virus, noting that the majority of people hospitalized with and killed by Covid-19 are unvaccinated. In Pennsylvania, from January 1 to September 7, 97% of the state’s Covid-19 deaths were among unvaccinated people, Pennsylvania’s acting secretary of health said Tuesday.
Another layer of strong protection, experts say, is masking.
The CDC recommends people — even those fully vaccinated — wear masks indoors in areas with substantial or high community transmission. More than 99% of the population lives in a county with one of those designations.
In Ohio, where children’s hospitals are overwhelmed with Covid-19 and respiratory cases, Gov. Mike DeWine is encouraging schools to issue mask mandates since the state legislature has told him it would overturn any mandate he issued.
“Reasonable people may disagree about a lot, but we can all agree that we must keep our children in the classroom so they don’t fall behind and so their parents can go to work and not take time off to watch their kids at home,” DeWine said.
The combination of masks and vaccinations is the way to keep children in school, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told CNN Tuesday.
“If you surround the kids with vaccinated people and you have everybody wear a mask, you can get a situation where the children will be relatively safe in school,” Fauci told CNN’s Jake Tapper.
Fight brewing over vaccine mandates
In the effort to manage the spread of the virus, many officials and experts have promoted vaccine mandates — but others are opposing such measures.
New York issued an order in August requiring all health care workers be vaccinated against Covid-19 by September 27. But on Monday, 17 Catholic and Baptist medical professionals filed a federal complaint seeking to prevent the state from enforcing the mandate, saying they oppose getting the vaccine for religious reasons.
On Tuesday, a federal judge issued a restraining order temporarily suspending New York state from enforcing its vaccine mandate if health care workers claim a religious exemption.
Because the mandate does not require health care workers to receive their first dose of the vaccine until September 27, the judge’s order states the temporary restraining order “does not, as a practical matter, go into effect until that date.”
A hearing is scheduled for September 28.
After the ruling, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s press secretary, Hazel Crampton-Hays said in a statement that the governor is considering all legal options.
“Governor Hochul is doing everything in her power to protect New Yorkers and combat the Delta variant by increasing vaccine rates across the State,” Crampton-Hays said.
In Los Angeles, despite a mandate that all city employees be inoculated against the virus, nearly a quarter of the police force is seeking an exemption, according to Mayor Eric Garcetti’s office. Those who are not vaccinated will be required to show evidence of weekly testing and a negative COVID result if regularly reporting to work.
By November 1, Nevada workers who serve “vulnerable populations” must show proof of vaccination under a new emergency regulation passed Tuesday.
New hires must have at least one dose by their start date and must follow through on the required vaccination schedule to remain employed. Workers are allowed to ask for a medical or religious exemption.
Booster meeting won’t be a slam dunk
On Friday, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will meet to discuss whether most Americans need a booster of their Covid-19 vaccine.
Unlike other meetings to discuss the vaccine, this one, with requests from Pfizer to authorize a third dose for most people, won’t be a slam dunk.
“This will be much messier than in December,” said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt University. The FDA committee was quick to recommend authorization of vaccines made by Pfizer and rival Moderna last December.
When the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee meets Friday, it will be presented with dueling data, some of it suggesting there’s a need for boosters, but other pieces of data suggesting there is no such need.
Three separate articles published last week in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report suggest that we don’t need boosters.
On the other hand, an Israeli study found that over time, the vaccines’ power to keep people from getting very sick with Covid-19 diminished. Looking at illnesses in the second half of July, that study found that those who’d received their second dose of Pfizer’s vaccine in March were 70% more protected against severe disease than those who received the second shot in January.
President Joe Biden announced plans last month to begin administering booster doses next week. While she wouldn’t say directly if that date would be met, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said Tuesday she is hopeful about the timeline to get doses administered.
If the booster does get approved, experts will still have to wait and see how much protection is added by the third dose.
“I would hope that that would sustain us for an extended period of time, but I don’t know that right now,” Fauci said. “We’re just going to have to do the boost, and then follow people long enough to determine what the durability of that protection is.”
