From the Daily Mail:
The majority of people who are still being hospitalized with the coronavirus across the state of New York are staying at home and are not essential workers, new data has revealed, prompting the questions of whether or not lockdown even works or for how much longer it will be necessary.
In a study of some 1,000 new patients admitted to New York hospitals over the last week, 66 percent were staying at home and 18 percent had come from nursing homes, meaning they either became infected by going out to get groceries or other essential items, or from seeing people outside of work.
Or… people locked down in buildings with recycled central HVAC and common hallways, stairwells, elevators, laundry facilities, and mail rooms spreads the virus more than being outside walking past a person who is infected.
New York’s apartment culture is apparently far more dangerous than living in a single family home and going to work in a mid size Middle American town.
Everything about this virus shows that New York City is the infected asshole of America and the rest of the country should not suffer because of the way those people live.
Could be other factors. Consider this:
The one retail location universally remaining open across the world is grocery stores. And the one job in every grocery store, that must have contact with the public is the check out personnel/cashiers. Even at the self service lanes, there is someone.
So, you would figure that a larger then average number of cases would be from grocery store cashiers. And, I see no evidence of that. In fact, not a single case in my city was a grocery store worker.
Infections have to be something other than simple exposure. If it were simple exposure, the grocery store workers would be overwhelmed by this disease.
I read somewhere that it took prolonged contact to catch COVID. So if someone who was sick walked by you and coughed, you will probably be fine.
Breathing into another person’s face for 30 on a subway is much worse.
A contained unit like a building with central HVAC is the most extreme version of that.
On the other hand at a large chain in South Florida the deli workers at Publix along with some of the meat cutters became infected with the kung flu. Now some of them were african american and others were hispanic. So it is hard to know why and where they were infected. So far I have not heard of any cashiers being infected.
Another alternate explanation: the number of infections absent lockdown would have been tremendously greater. In truth, that assumes facts not clearly in evidence.
And, equally likely, the possibility is that “Oh, gosh, yes, we were ABSOLUTELY sheltering at home!” is the patients’ tale, vice actual fact (in this set of assumptions) wherein folks will swear (a) and do (b), in this case wandering about town.
In my experience, there is a substantial portion of the populace who will enter my clinic, reeking of reefer smoke, and when I ask them if they smoke, look me smack in the eye and tell me “Oh, no!”
Blaming subways and apartment buildings etc. seems plausible, except for counterexamples in other parts of the world. Hong Kong seems to have few cases, and it’s at least as dense as NYC.
You are also missing the transmission vector of people touching infected objects with their hands and then passing the virus off to facial openings before sterilizing their hands. Transmission could also include cultural behaviors that are hard to overcome completely, such as hugging and touching others and simply being VERY close to others during conversations.