|
MIT Professor: Subways Seeded the Massive Coronavirus Epidemic in NYC
[Breitbart] A National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) working paper by MIT Professor Jeffrey E. Harris concludes that the New York City subway system "seeded the massive coronavirus epidemic" in the city.Even more significantly, the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s (MTA) decision to reduce subway service exacerbated the problem because the more crowded subway cars "most likely accelerated the spread of coronavirus." Metropolitan New York City remains the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States. More than half of the more than 40,000 coronvirus deaths in the United States as of April 19 have taken place in two states: New York and New Jersey. The bulk of the deaths in those states have been in the Metropolitan New York City area, which is not only the most densely populated region of the country, it also has by far the heaviest daily usage of mass transit, particularly subways. "New York City’s multitentacled subway system was a major disseminator — if not the principal transmission vehicle — of coronavirus infection during the initial takeoff of the massive epidemic that became evident throughout the city during March 2020," Harris, who has a Ph.D. in Economics and an M.D. and is both a practicing physician and a professor of economics at MIT, wrote in the abstract of the NBER working paper published on April 13: The near shutoff of subway ridership in Manhattan — down by over 90 percent at the end of March; correlates strongly with the substantial increase in the doubling time of new cases in this borough We should have touched on this early on, heavy air vortices on the subway platforms. Posted by: Woodrow 2020-04-21 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=569343 |