In 1976, artist Saul Steinberg drew a cover for The New Yorker – “View of the World from Ninth Avenue” – that became an instant classic. You know the one: Manhattan heavily in the foreground, the Hudson River, a brownish strip called “Jersey,” the rest of the America vaguely in the distance.
It could almost be a map of the coronavirus epidemic in the United States.
Even now, it is stunning to contemplate the extent to which the country’s COVID-19 crisis is a New York crisis – by which I mean the city itself along with its wider metropolitan area.
As of Friday, there have been more COVID-19 fatalities on Long Island’s Nassau County (population 1.4 million) than in all of California (population 40 million). There have been more fatalities in Westchester County (989) than in Texas (611). The number of COVID deaths per 100,000 residents in New York City (132) is more than 16 times what is in America’s next largest city, Los Angeles (8). If New York City proper were a state, it would have suffered more fatalities than 41 other states combined.
It isn’t hard to guess why. New York has, by far, the highest population density in the U.S. among cities of 100,000 or more. Commuters crowd trains; office workers crowd elevators; diners crowd restaurants. No other American city has the same kind of jammed pedestrian life as New York – Times Square alone gets 40 million visitors a year – or as many residents packed into high-rises. The city even has a neighborhood called Corona, which, it turns out, has among the highest rates of coronavirus infections.