I can’t take my kids to the park.  Even the playground in development is closed because of the HOA’s response to the Coronavirus outbreak.

My kids are home for the rest of the school year, they will do online instruction over the internet starting next week.

The whole situation sucks.  Why does it suck?

New York City.

I found a fantastic website that shows Coronavirus cases by state and county.

New York City has the most cases by a YUGE margin.  Almost 60,000 cases in New York, with almost 34,000 of those being in New York City itself, and the majority of the rest in outlying NYC suburbs.  New York City represents 42% of the total number of Coronavirus cases in the US.

The poorest areas of New York City, such as Queens and the Bronx have been the hardest hit.

What is the takeaway?

If you want to avoid the mass spread of an airborne respiratory virus, you shouldn’t pack people chockablock into tiny apartments, stacked on top of each other, breathing in the same recycled air heated by a central boiler.

If we draw from our lessons of history, the Black Death wiped out nearly 60% of the population of Europe.  The bacteria Yersinia pestis came from Asian rats and was transmitted by fleas.  It exploded into a plague because of the high population density of European cities.

This is a video from a park in Queens showing people not practicing social distancing.

https://twitter.com/keeltyc/status/1243650632692662272

Honestly, I can’t blame them terribly.  New Yorkers don’t know what social distancing is.

Being packed into a subway assholes to elbows is normal for them.  The average Queens apartment is 711 square feet.  I have a modest middle-class house in Huntsville and it is four times that size.  If I want to go outside, I have a large back yard.  People in 700 sq-ft apartments don’t have yards, they have the park down the street.

I’m not sure how you can get people to stay shut up in 700 sq foot apartments for weeks on end and go outside to stretch their legs.  Especially if they have kids that need to run.

That assumes that it’s safer to say inside breathing in what everyone else in the hermetically sealed building has exhaled.

To put this in perspective, New York has ten times as many cases as our most populous state, California.  Half of California’s cases come from LA county.  Illinois is number five for cases and 75% of those are in Cook County.

This is purely a problem of population density.

Here in Alabama, we’ve had all of 800 cases, and more than one-quarter of those are in Jefferson County, which is where Birmingham is located.  Where I live in Madison County, we have 80 cases.

The only outlier in this is Louisiana, but the consensus is that Marti Gras super-accelerated the spread of the virus, with over a million people packed for hours drunkenly cheering into each other faces.  So it was a temporary extremely high population density scenario.

The point of all of this is: the reason I can’t go to my development playground with my kids this week like we did last week, is because New York City is Wuhan wet market of human beings, all stacked in little cages coughing and shitting on each other.

Back in the day, when Foot and Mouth Disease threatened British agriculture, the British Government came up with a protocol to halt the spread of that virus.  If one animal was found to have the virus, that entire herd was culled before it spread to neighboring farms.

I’m just saying, maybe before we turn off the entire American economy for seven weeks, we try culling New York City down to a low enough population density to halt the spread of that infection.

Then I would be able to take my kids to the playground.