The New York Times published an infographic on just how many New Yorkers left New York City during the COVID crisis, and where they traveled to.
In March, the United States Post Office received 56,000 mail-forwarding requests from New York City, more than double the monthly average. In April, the number of requests went up to 81,000, twice the number from a year earlier. Sixty percent of those new requests were for destinations outside the city.
This map of New Yorker destinations matches rates of outbreaks nearly perfectly, with the exception of the New Orleans outbreak, which can be tied to Marti Gras.
The Miami outbreak had almost nothing to do with spring break on a beach and everything to do with New Yorkers bringing the infection to Miami.
Many of the Left, Congresswoman AOC being a prime example, have talked about how poor New Yorkers were the hardest hit by the virus, demonstrating the systemic racism and iniquity of the country.
A plot published in the print edition of the NYT sheds some light on this, nearly one-third of wealthy New Yorkers fled the city to be sick in other locations.
The phrase “rats leaving a sinking ship” comes to mind.
What is so absolutely grotesque about this is that while the media and politicians were clambering for lockdowns, the sheer arrogant ballsiness of New Yorkers to ignore stay-at-home orders and spread the virus outside the city was the cause of most of the problem.
Last week I reported how Hawaiians are not happy about the lockdown. Yesterday The Guardian reported that a tourist in Hawaii from New York was arrested for violating quarantine and taking pictures of himself on a beach.
New Yorkers believed themselves to be exempt from the rules.
While the New York-based media has been attacking Florida Governor Ron DeSantis for Florida’s COVID deaths, it was rich New Yorkers who brought the virus to Florida and spread it.
This is the same media that gave New York Governor Andrew Cuomo a pass for the near deliberate infection of thousands of nursing home residents with terrible policies, then undercounting those deaths with more terrible policies.
More elderly have died of COVID in New York City nursing homes (4,800 reported) than all COVID deaths in Florida (1,900), yet DeSantis is the bad guy and Cuomo is the hero.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo on Sunday addressed the state’s early response to the coronavirus outbreak and said “nobody” should be prosecuted for the those who died, noting that “older people” were most vulnerable.
“Despite whatever you do, because with all our progress as a society, we can’t keep everyone alive,” Cuomo said.
Cuomo continued to stress the point that older and more vulnerable people were “always going to die from this virus.” He said when talking who is accountable for deaths, the most important thing was to make sure “you can have a situation where everyone did the right thing and everyone tried their best.”
New Yorkers spread the virus across America. Where New Yorkers fled to, outbreaks followed. New York policy towards treating the infected needlessly killed thousands of elderly and sick people and the Governor who created these policies says nobody will be prosecuted because those people were going to die anyway. I’m surprised he didn’t end that statement with “fuck ’em.”
To make matters worse, since the COVID Marys who spread the disease are mostly the most upper crust of the NYC population, the movers, shakers, and millionaires who donate big sums to politicians, it is unlikely that anyone else will go after them for what they did to the rest of us.
New York City killed the United States economy and thousands of other Americans with the arrogance of not obeying the quarantine and shelter-in-place they demanded the rest of us.
Forget bailing out New York. New York should bail out the rest of the United States.
And if Trump wins the election in 2020, he should have the DOJ prosecute Andrew Cuomo, Bill de Blasio and the rest of the NY/NYC government for what they did that murdered thousands of New York’s most vulnerable, tens of thousands of other Americans, and the whole of the American economy.
“After being laid off from his job as a theater stage hand, Kurt Gardner, his wife and their young daughter left their crowded two-bedroom apartment in the Windsor Terrace section of Brooklyn for the family’s three-bedroom summer home in eastern Suffolk County, on Long Island.”
A theater stage hand with two residences? Sounds like those renovation show jokes…
Unionized theater jobs explain why Broadway tickets are so damned expensive.
Or it’s been in the family for years.
Re ticket prices … the price of space rental doesn’t help, either. Mrs. B used to be a stage hand, and she has some stories…
To be completely fair you’re going to tell me that if you lived anywhere and shit was going down there and you had the ability to leave to any other better and safer location you are gonna stay put to be neck deep in the shit? I have no love for NYC but come on.
Yea people fleeing NYC spread the virus just like I’m sure the bazillion people flying through or from NYC spread the virus or people commuting from there did.
It also obviously at some point had to happen in reverse if this originated in China…
I agree. Many who read this board likely have a BOL that they plan on fleeing to in the even that TSHTF. How is this any different?
The difference, IMO, is their hypocrisy.
It is well documented that “our betters” from that libtard shithole are all about nanny-state guvment and look down their noses on us southern rubes when we don’t agree with their bullcrap (aka. Rules for Thee but None for Me). The moment it looked like they were going to have to obey the rules the voted for, the rats abandoned ship in droves. So much for their finger-wagging about obeying laws..
Doesn’t help that in my 50+ years of roaming around this planet, 95% of the people from NYC I’ve met are rude self-entitled assholes (unlike the folks from upstate), so my opinion of that city and their people has been heavily soiled by experience.
Just my 2 pesetas.
IDK I’m attempting to rise above tribal ignorance and ascribing the sins of a group (the government) to an individual doesn’t really help that IMO.
We all, everyone of us need to take a step back and remember that we are all people at the end of the day that by and large want and do the same things. I think we all spend too much time down in the mud and muck of the trenches so focused on they’re trying to take this or that away and those people are opposed to me etc that we forget that and begin to see the individual as their associated government actors/representatives. They might live under their representation but they don’t necessarily represent them, that’s the case for me at least in CT.
That’s my 2 cents.
I can appreciate and admire that on you, Matt. And I hope you can keep that hopeful attitude into your later years.
As for me, I’m far too stubborn and set on my ways now to overlook that a huge portion of the libtard yankees up north (as well as their invading transplants here) view me an untermensch. Their words & actions for decades are proof enough.
I can forgive but do not forget.
After all, I’m just a meat popsicle. 😉
Fair enough. I’d consider myself extremely jaded but from that is where that desire springs for me.
What you say I also consider true regarding not forgiving and forgetting, so it is difficult for me to articulate my point fully taking that into consideration; it is overall a greater philosophical point to me. To me the individual and the establishment (government, mainstream media, etc) exist in separate worlds and the more apparent that separation becomes to me, the more apparent it is that the establishment is not necessarily “real” individual people.
This goes with what MiniMe said … part of the difference is the attitude and behavior once you get where you’re headed to.
Going out to the beach, partying, and otherwise being obnoxious? (And obnoxiously New York?) As opposed to, say, staying isolated for a couple of weeks to help protect the community you’re looking to for succor and support.
Because this wasn’t a hurricane or earthquake or forest fire. These people were infected and they brought the infection with them. We covered this before, viral DNA shows that every outbreak east of the Mississippi and some in Colorado were from the NYC strain.
A quarantine is supposed to stop the spread of a disease.
You and I are trapped in our homes outside of NYC because people in NYC refused to quarantine and transmitted the virus.
That is fundamental what separates a quarantine form a bug out situation.
If they were fleeing a terrorist attack or chemical spill or anything non communicable I’d not have a problem. But their actions spread a contagion to most of the rest of the country when they were told to stay home and not do that.
Sure that’s what a quarantine is supposed to do. But I still also find it hard to believe you’d willingly sit in a viral petri dish any longer than you had to if you had the means to vacate it and didn’t believe yourself to be sick.
I’m sure there were sick people who knowingly left, but I’d call that no different than shitty people doing shitty things just like shitty people always do.
So you are saying that, if there were a disease in the area where you live, that disease was spreading like wildfire, killing ten percent of the people who had it, and no one in your household had any symptoms, that you would look your family in the eye and tell them that you have a duty not to leave so you don’t spread the disease that you may or may not have? You would be willing to sit there and wait for your family to catch it and possibly die? Or would you do what it took to get out of there and save your family?
You are not supposed to kill the locals in the place you bug out too.
That is an argument that is made only with hindsight, like judging a self defense shooting based upon evidence that the shooter could not possibly have had at the time he pulled the trigger.
How would you have any way of knowing that you or anyone else in your family were infectious? You are asymptomatic. So, I ask again, do you:
Sit in your home and wait to see the people in your family get sick and die, or do you bug out?
That was the choice that the people in NYC had to make. Most of the ones who bugged out never got COVID. Some had it already. A much larger percentage of the ones who stayed in NYC wound up getting it.
It’s not just the spreading of the virus. Remember my post about the Hamptons not wanting people from NYC. They were not prepared, they showed up in a seasonal community out of season and bought up all the goods leaving the locals with bare shelves.
These people were not prepared for a bug out. They fled in panic and harmed every community they fled to.
Bugging out doesn’t absolve you of your responsibility to be a decent human being.
These are like the people who when the ship is sinking try to climb into the lifeboats and capsize them.
You don’t save yourself at others expense. That is exactly what they did, in spades.
“You are not supposed to kill the locals in the place you bug out too.”
So now its ok to leave if you take precautions instead of it not being ok to leave at all?
“It’s not just the spreading of the virus. ”
That’s certainly not what I’d call the thrust of the original post. I’m happy to accept that nuance was lost and is being added and the goal posts are not simply shifting.
“You don’t save yourself at others expense. That is exactly what they did, in spades.”
It’s laughable that you could even say that when the literal sentence before is a premiere real world example of the selfishness of human nature especially when it comes to the preservation of self and loved ones.
Sure it shouldn’t happen but it does happen, has happened for the entirety of human history, and will continue to happen until humans cease to exist. We shouldn’t be stuck in ideological lala land like a bunch of hippies instead of acknowledging that that is reality.
I’m not saying anything we are seeing is right, I’m simply saying it is understandable, predictable, and shouldn’t surprise us at this point. Should sick people have stayed put? Yes. Should people who leave one place for the safety of another quarantine themselves? Yes. Do you trust your fellow man to follow the most rudimentary of instructions and safety protocols? Yes; well that is our mistake and the outcomes of that trust are predictable because that is what we are doing. But isn’t that the essence of dangerous liberty anyways; trust your fellow man with freedom?
I don’t see how you can claim that is hindsight.
Starting point: there’s an infectious disease going around, time to bug out. Ok so far.
Next: refugees arrive at their destination. Now what?
Correct answer: I came from an infected zone, so quarantine.
Wrong answer: I got away, time to party.
The fact that you had no symptoms is no excuse. SOP for people arriving from an infected region is quarantine. And this was well known — it was already in place for arrivals from China and from infected cruise ships, for example.
Perfect example: the asshole from New York who was supposed to spend two weeks in quarantine in Hawaii but went to a luau the next day.
That’s not bugging out, that’s putting others at risk.
It’s more about the hypocrisy, if you ask me. The optic is rich liberals sneering at and talking down to “little nobodies” that don’t want to stay locked down, while deciding which of the 13 flavors of chocolate ice cream stocked up in their $24,000 freezers they want to eat today, all from the comfort of their vacation home far from the city they too were ordered to lock down in.
“…he should have the DOJ prosecute Andrew Cuomo, Bill de Blasio and the rest of the NY/NYC government for what they did that murdered thousands of New York’s most vulnerable…”
Cuomo just came out and stated he feels no one should be prosecuted for nursing home deaths in NY. I’m paraphrasing, but the gist of his statement was that these people were vulnerable anyway and it’s really difficult to keep them safe. Pay no attention to his order which condemned over 5000 people in nursing homes to death. One wonders then if Cuomo’s statement isn’t him trying to get ahead of the inevitable Federal investigation. I realize Leftist are above the law, but the optics are still bad for this aspiring dictator’s 2024 Presidential run.
Matt, Divemedic, you have a point.
OTOH, I basically agree with our bloghosts’s point, as well.
The difference that I see is that we (all of us, especially you, Divemedic, if I comprehend your CV properly), BOL or not, would lay about in our destination, isolating for (n) days, in an honest attempt to avoid sharing the Pox Du Jour with our (new) neighbors.
In contrast, based on fragmentary reports I was exposed to in passing (due to my steadfast avoidance of All! Things! Media!), it appears that some of the NYFC diaspora took their “op order” from Prince’s “Party Like It’s 1999!”, and did, indeed, congregate and party. Which is not, or so it seems, reasonable and prudent pandemic behavior.
Who knew?
To your points, Matt and Divemedic: Yep, if I had a hidey hole for me and mine, we’d be “out de doe!” (as we used to term it in Da City), and gather there. Except, (a) with my piles of canned goods, and (b) the Wall O’ TP, there would be no need to mingle for quite some time.