One fact that needs to be kept in mind in making sense of reactions to the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 is how terrifyingly hard it hit the media capital of the world, New York City, fairly early in its course. From the CDC’s website of weekly death counts. The blue bars show deaths in NYC from all causes, and the orange line an unusually bad normal week.

The expected number of deaths in the week ending April 11, 2020 in NYC was 1,042, but instead 7,862 died, more than 7 times the normal death toll. How high could it go? If this graph kept growing at the same rate as it had in the first week in April (from 2,804 in the week ending March 28 to 6,296 in the week ending April 4) for another four weeks, the death toll would be 100,000 per week, or probably worse because the hospitals and undertaking industry would have been overwhelmed.

It’s important to recall the terror felt in March in the capital of the world.

As it turned out, deaths then started to fall dramatically. If I recall correctly, one New York City emergency room doctor said ambulances suddenly stopped arriving in droves on April 7 at about 1PM.

We owe a lot to New York doctors who did much to both figure out better ways to treat COVID patients and to get the word out.