[andarleen]

Genuine questions: what makes ca have such lower number of deaths compared to ny, given it has a comparable number of tourists and both are crowded? Also, ca has a somewhat comparable climate to italy and spain, yet CA has fared much better. What the heck is the missing piece here?

Greece is also similar to italy and spain and it has far less numbers of deaths. East EU countries as well yet Russia is doing far worse. Very odd behaviour from this virus and i dont think the gaps are in counting methodology or over/under reporting.

[xdxdx]

One major factor is just how early California ordered residents to shelter-in-place (or "lockdown"). Several San Francisco Bay Area counties issued an order on March 17. Governor Newsom then issued a statewide order on March 19. On that day, California had 1,006 cases. Compare this to New York's 7,102 cases on March 20 when its residents were ordered to shelter-in-place, or Italy's 9,172 cases on March 9 when its national lockdown was instituted. So New York and Italy were already quite behind to start with.

California also has a few other things going for it, for example: CA's urban areas are not as dense as somewhere like NYC. Compared to Italy, the population is relatively young. Many people have professional jobs that can be done remotely (companies like Google and Facebook sent their employees home even before March 12). Public transit is very bad in CA, so almost everyone drives their own car.

[CPLX]

I’ll preface this by saying I definitely don’t know the answer to the question, but I think sensitive dependence on initial conditions and just straight randomness have been severely under discussed as possible contributors around the world.

I think there’s some natural hubris here where humans think they have the ability to control the outcome, without pausing to wonder how accurate that really is.

[danieltillett]

It is possible that the strains in NY and surrounding are different than on the west coast. There is a very interesting hypothesis that the D614G mutation that is found in NY is more contagious than the strains found in CA for example.