Item — HN Reader

epistasis is correct. Very few people live in the mountains and only come to town every six months.

Density mattered a little bit early on, but SARS-CoV-2 is so infectious that it gets around no matter what, unless the strictest possible measures (such as the police-enforced lockdowns in parts of Melbourne at the moment, or the earlier reports of Chinese buildings' doors being welded shut) are adopted.

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You'd do well providing some studies to support your assertion. Best I can tell, urban centers have suffered disproportionately from C19, and they present an epidemiological nightmare with their shared public infrastructure and public transportation.

The thing that is really strongly associated with covid cases is housing overcrowding, that is the number of people in each dwelling, and not with density. This paper concludes that "Our most important finding is that density is unrelated to confirmed virus infection rates and inversely related to confirmed virus death rates, after controlling for other variables."

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01944363.2020.1...

Lots of verbiage easily refuted by a simple statistic: NYC has C19 death rate of 2279 per million. 19K people died out of 8.337M. In comparison, NY state, as of today, has a death rate of 1693 per million, and it'd have a much lower death rate if NYC was excluded (1253 per million), and lower still if you only consider rural areas.

https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page

Were those deaths in the dense areas or the less dense areas? Turns out that living in a denser area was "protective." But it wasn't actually protective because density is unrelated. It's socioeconomic status and being forced to work versus being able to shelter in place.

Plus all the counter examples where dense places have quickly stopped the spread. What killed NYC was terrible leadership that told people to go out and enjoy social settings, which launched the initial spread, and then people forced to continue in essential jobs where it could continue to spread. Not density.

So, Tokyo? Seoul?

Not the same ball game, body count is so low you probably wouldn't get a reliable signal. And even then, I bet rural Japan and Korea are affected far less. It's simple common sense. R0 depends on fanout exponentially. On average, the higher the density, the higher the fanout.

Downvote all you want, you know I'm right. :-)

Until you get to a extreme rural most people do the same things with the same density. Grocery stores and the like tend to have similar densities everywhere because if you get any more dense someone else opens while any longer less and someone goes out of business. This is my observation in towns from as small 3000 to as large as 2 million.

Similar for other activities, there are less people at the school games or theater, but the density is the same.

Explain NYC.

Churches are a common place for superspreading events. These are uncorrelated with density.

Your conception of Dan our does not match people's actual behavior.

You seem to think that NYC is primarily facie evidence that density is somehow something that can't be overcome when trying to stop spread, but don't even consider other dense places that have not had the same problems. In Italy, rural towns were hit as hard as dense cities.

NYC could have been stopped if the governor and mayor collaborated to institute policies to reduce social contact. Instead they delayed a week later than they should have, and testing failures didn't give them evidence of how far it had already spread, leading to tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths. We are seeing the same phenomenon in rural tourist towns in mountain areas, that had lots of early travelers.

Social contact is the primary cause of spread. And density does not prevent one from limiting their social contact.

Sounds like you're comparing dense areas with lockdowns to less dense areas with little or no lockdowns. Because churches would obviously cease to be a factor if they implemented the same restrictions as done in NYC.

> Churches are a common place for superspreading events

So is public transportation.