If I'm reading the key correctly, the influenza map has the colors backwards from what you'd expect, and the lighter colored states have higher death rates. So Mississippi and Alabama are still worst off, but there isn't a clear urban-rural divide elsewhere.
It’s true that a larger fraction of what makes urban places desirable is indoors than rural places. But suburban places are basically 100% indoors. No one has sidewalk cafes or strollable boulevards or nice parks with outdoor amenities when everything is a 45 mph hellscape.
In the first couple months of shelter-in-place I was happy with my suburban house and I actually saw families in the streets walking and biking. But once things opened up in May, the suburbs were completely desolate, and I was lucky to move to Austin for six months of 2021, where there’s a lot more outdoor activities available than there are in Bryan/College Station.
"There’s not much of a point to living in a city if the offices are going to be closed and the restaurants and the museums are also going to be closed"
As a family that has rode out the entirety of the pandemic in DC, I would counter that living in a big city has been a blessing during COVID compared to exurban/rural areas. The inherent walkability of city infrastructure gave us tons of things to do outside without having to pile in the car and drive somewhere and worry about bathroom breaks in public. For us, we started walking 3-4 miles daily to get our kid out of the house after virtual learning and get exercise. My brother and sister in law who live in a typical exurban townhouse subdivision with no sidewalks connecting it outside of their small neighborhood had no comparable options.
Rowhouse porches are designed perfectly for social distancing, either from your neighbors next door on their porch, or from friends who stopped by to talk from the sidewalk.
Additionally on the social side, being in a city where overwhelmingly everyone took the virus seriously was a huge boost psychologically. Not having to worry very much about people licking doorknobs at Harris Teeter for freedom while grocery shopping or anti mask mandates from republican governors at schools has been a huge relief compared to what friends in redder areas deal with.
I don't think this is your best take. Rural areas are getting hit harder now because they refused to vaccinate - that's pretty obvious. I think if you could control properly for personal behavior you would find that rural areas are, in fact, dramatically less vulnerable to airborne disease spread. I bet the Starbucks in Kerrville is far less crowded than your typical Manhattan Starbucks and for some very simple reasons. The cost of real estate in a crowded urban area means you need more foot traffic for any given store to be viable.
You are right, though, that we should prioritize creating more housing units AND also lowering the cost per sq foot of housing units.
When is someone going to calculate the age adjusted mortality for Covid. It would probably make sense urban cities look a little bit worse.
I actually calculated the over 65 mortality rate for NY, Texas, LA and Florida. NY was worse by a decent amount. Sorry, I did it at work last week and I’m finally working off work today, so I don’t have numbers handy.
But starting this summer, I think the mortality rate is more a function of vaccine status. 1/2 the 30 to 39 years olds who died from Covid in Idaho, died in September.
Anyway, bigger houses are great, but I think Matt underestimates the value of having a yard.
My brother just moved into a single family house for the first time in his life. Him and his wife are blown away by all the things they were missing that they didn’t realize. The quiet of not sharing walls. Letting dog be able to run free in yard. Grilling. Sitting in the sun half naked.
I get density. And there are definitely improvements. I just really question what proportion of the population wants to live in really really dense cities.
So here is an irony in South America. In many cities here, the middle class live in tall apartments buildings whereas the working class live in more dense single and double story houses. I asked my engineer friend, and he said it was because of security. The apartments building had private security and grounds.
Personally I am in favor of row houses with backyards. Or Charleston style houses on narrow lots.
Anyway, glancing through the comments, I think you will find everyone justifies their preferred living situation.
Personally my ideal would be an apartment or condo in a downtown city for parts of the year. And then cabin in the woods for summers and weekends. Sort of close to what I have now.
I would like to live in NYC for a year. Just to experience it.
Luckily my job allows me to live anywhere. Unluckily, kids keep us tied to Boise.
The lack of accountability to Brett Stephens pumping out one terrible take touches on the core of America's broken politics. Powerful people are wrong over and over and suffer no consequences.
I think a lot of this analysis is incomplete because Covid deaths are highly correlated with age. Therefore, you need to compare using age-adjusted numbers. For example, this:
Secondly, a lot of deaths took place in institutional elder care settings. I can’t find state-by-state data, but globally about 1/3 of covid deaths happened in elder care facilities alone. Again, age and population vulnerability is driving that, not urbanization.
In Asian countries they have a lot more high-rises made up of large units. Not just 3+ bedrooms, but also more common space than 3-br units in America tend to have, like a big living room, big balcony, maybe even multiple floors. I don't see why we can't do the same thing here, or even more so.
I think the state of rural healthcare also probably played a role. A lot of rural hospital have closed since the financial crisis of 2008. That means people have to travel further. There’s also a continual shortage of healthcare workers in rural areas. That means that often times healt problems don’t get diagnosed until they’re more severe and a less healthy population is more likely to have a higher Covid death rate. Primary care doctors have been been quite successful at convincing reluctant patients to get vaccinated. But if there’s a shortage of primary care doctors that type of persuasion is less likely to happen. Rural areas tend to be older (that will raise the crude death rate) and so people tend to have more health problems
In retrospect I would just be very hesitant to attribute COVID death tolls to much beyond random chance, except for the countries that managed to actually suppress the virus by doing lockdowns then keeping case levels close to zero by having closed or heavily restricted borders.
The New Yorker had a lengthy article about how Seattle's response was much better than New York's and this saved a lot of lives. This may be true but Washington didn't really start any pandemic policy until 3/1, community spread was present in the Seattle area starting in mid-January. If spread in Washington had been close to NY levels from 1/20-3/1, the pandemic would have been out of control. Same in California, where there was an identified community spread death on 2/7. Beyond differential vaccine rates I really think you have to squint to see the impact of policy on Covid (this is why everyone was so eager to praise desantis, florida just got lucky with for a while IMO).
I was re-reading some of the communitarian literature of the 1980s and 1990s — both the philosophical (Sandel etc.) and the sociological strains (Putnam etc.)— the other day. One thing that struck me: the sort of places the communitarians should have liked (thick social identities, tradition, rootedness, associational life built around the church) have done terribly, while the more urban, rootless, places have done much better. This really shows up on a post June 2020 county map.
"Sparse places have dense spaces" wrote Matt and I'd add that those dense places are where most people live. According to wikipedia 80% of Americans live in urban areas and suburbs and even outside of that, population is concentrated. No numbers here but have a look at the map of Bloomfield NM (more or less a randomly drawn, somewhere in the west) and it seems to me that most of its 8000 pop. live in an area of less than a km² between Honeylocust street in the NW and Creamer in the SE. I mean, even in a village in an empty state, most people chose to live close together.
And while supermarket aisles are wider, cinema leg space larger and indoor dining less crammed in the country side compared to NYC, they are nowhere close to the 6ft distancing that we'd need.
I can’t read Bret’s oped but April 24th, 2020, there were zero cases in nowhere,Iowa. But it was shutdown just the same. I can see where that was frustrating to people. But we didn’t quarantine New York. They all drove to Maine, Atlanta, etc.
Also, Trumpist policy-makers were happy to let COVID spread, take little or no action on improving testing, and not manage PPE distribution and production when they thought it was a blue state problem. "That's their problem", your old classmate said.
If I'm reading the key correctly, the influenza map has the colors backwards from what you'd expect, and the lighter colored states have higher death rates. So Mississippi and Alabama are still worst off, but there isn't a clear urban-rural divide elsewhere.
It’s true that a larger fraction of what makes urban places desirable is indoors than rural places. But suburban places are basically 100% indoors. No one has sidewalk cafes or strollable boulevards or nice parks with outdoor amenities when everything is a 45 mph hellscape.
In the first couple months of shelter-in-place I was happy with my suburban house and I actually saw families in the streets walking and biking. But once things opened up in May, the suburbs were completely desolate, and I was lucky to move to Austin for six months of 2021, where there’s a lot more outdoor activities available than there are in Bryan/College Station.
"There’s not much of a point to living in a city if the offices are going to be closed and the restaurants and the museums are also going to be closed"
As a family that has rode out the entirety of the pandemic in DC, I would counter that living in a big city has been a blessing during COVID compared to exurban/rural areas. The inherent walkability of city infrastructure gave us tons of things to do outside without having to pile in the car and drive somewhere and worry about bathroom breaks in public. For us, we started walking 3-4 miles daily to get our kid out of the house after virtual learning and get exercise. My brother and sister in law who live in a typical exurban townhouse subdivision with no sidewalks connecting it outside of their small neighborhood had no comparable options.
Rowhouse porches are designed perfectly for social distancing, either from your neighbors next door on their porch, or from friends who stopped by to talk from the sidewalk.
Additionally on the social side, being in a city where overwhelmingly everyone took the virus seriously was a huge boost psychologically. Not having to worry very much about people licking doorknobs at Harris Teeter for freedom while grocery shopping or anti mask mandates from republican governors at schools has been a huge relief compared to what friends in redder areas deal with.
I don't think this is your best take. Rural areas are getting hit harder now because they refused to vaccinate - that's pretty obvious. I think if you could control properly for personal behavior you would find that rural areas are, in fact, dramatically less vulnerable to airborne disease spread. I bet the Starbucks in Kerrville is far less crowded than your typical Manhattan Starbucks and for some very simple reasons. The cost of real estate in a crowded urban area means you need more foot traffic for any given store to be viable.
You are right, though, that we should prioritize creating more housing units AND also lowering the cost per sq foot of housing units.
When is someone going to calculate the age adjusted mortality for Covid. It would probably make sense urban cities look a little bit worse.
I actually calculated the over 65 mortality rate for NY, Texas, LA and Florida. NY was worse by a decent amount. Sorry, I did it at work last week and I’m finally working off work today, so I don’t have numbers handy.
But starting this summer, I think the mortality rate is more a function of vaccine status. 1/2 the 30 to 39 years olds who died from Covid in Idaho, died in September.
Anyway, bigger houses are great, but I think Matt underestimates the value of having a yard.
My brother just moved into a single family house for the first time in his life. Him and his wife are blown away by all the things they were missing that they didn’t realize. The quiet of not sharing walls. Letting dog be able to run free in yard. Grilling. Sitting in the sun half naked.
I get density. And there are definitely improvements. I just really question what proportion of the population wants to live in really really dense cities.
So here is an irony in South America. In many cities here, the middle class live in tall apartments buildings whereas the working class live in more dense single and double story houses. I asked my engineer friend, and he said it was because of security. The apartments building had private security and grounds.
Personally I am in favor of row houses with backyards. Or Charleston style houses on narrow lots.
Anyway, glancing through the comments, I think you will find everyone justifies their preferred living situation.
Personally my ideal would be an apartment or condo in a downtown city for parts of the year. And then cabin in the woods for summers and weekends. Sort of close to what I have now.
I would like to live in NYC for a year. Just to experience it.
Luckily my job allows me to live anywhere. Unluckily, kids keep us tied to Boise.
The lack of accountability to Brett Stephens pumping out one terrible take touches on the core of America's broken politics. Powerful people are wrong over and over and suffer no consequences.
I think a lot of this analysis is incomplete because Covid deaths are highly correlated with age. Therefore, you need to compare using age-adjusted numbers. For example, this:
https://www.bioinformaticscro.com/blog/states-ranked-by-age-adjusted-covid-deaths/
Secondly, a lot of deaths took place in institutional elder care settings. I can’t find state-by-state data, but globally about 1/3 of covid deaths happened in elder care facilities alone. Again, age and population vulnerability is driving that, not urbanization.
In Asian countries they have a lot more high-rises made up of large units. Not just 3+ bedrooms, but also more common space than 3-br units in America tend to have, like a big living room, big balcony, maybe even multiple floors. I don't see why we can't do the same thing here, or even more so.
While the Urban plague may be a myth, I'm sure it doesn't feel that way to the good people of Jacksonville, FL.
I think the state of rural healthcare also probably played a role. A lot of rural hospital have closed since the financial crisis of 2008. That means people have to travel further. There’s also a continual shortage of healthcare workers in rural areas. That means that often times healt problems don’t get diagnosed until they’re more severe and a less healthy population is more likely to have a higher Covid death rate. Primary care doctors have been been quite successful at convincing reluctant patients to get vaccinated. But if there’s a shortage of primary care doctors that type of persuasion is less likely to happen. Rural areas tend to be older (that will raise the crude death rate) and so people tend to have more health problems
In retrospect I would just be very hesitant to attribute COVID death tolls to much beyond random chance, except for the countries that managed to actually suppress the virus by doing lockdowns then keeping case levels close to zero by having closed or heavily restricted borders.
The New Yorker had a lengthy article about how Seattle's response was much better than New York's and this saved a lot of lives. This may be true but Washington didn't really start any pandemic policy until 3/1, community spread was present in the Seattle area starting in mid-January. If spread in Washington had been close to NY levels from 1/20-3/1, the pandemic would have been out of control. Same in California, where there was an identified community spread death on 2/7. Beyond differential vaccine rates I really think you have to squint to see the impact of policy on Covid (this is why everyone was so eager to praise desantis, florida just got lucky with for a while IMO).
I admit, I didn't realize Kerrville had a Starbucks. No doubt, that wasn't the take you were looking for, but there it is.
I was re-reading some of the communitarian literature of the 1980s and 1990s — both the philosophical (Sandel etc.) and the sociological strains (Putnam etc.)— the other day. One thing that struck me: the sort of places the communitarians should have liked (thick social identities, tradition, rootedness, associational life built around the church) have done terribly, while the more urban, rootless, places have done much better. This really shows up on a post June 2020 county map.
"Sparse places have dense spaces" wrote Matt and I'd add that those dense places are where most people live. According to wikipedia 80% of Americans live in urban areas and suburbs and even outside of that, population is concentrated. No numbers here but have a look at the map of Bloomfield NM (more or less a randomly drawn, somewhere in the west) and it seems to me that most of its 8000 pop. live in an area of less than a km² between Honeylocust street in the NW and Creamer in the SE. I mean, even in a village in an empty state, most people chose to live close together.
And while supermarket aisles are wider, cinema leg space larger and indoor dining less crammed in the country side compared to NYC, they are nowhere close to the 6ft distancing that we'd need.
I can’t read Bret’s oped but April 24th, 2020, there were zero cases in nowhere,Iowa. But it was shutdown just the same. I can see where that was frustrating to people. But we didn’t quarantine New York. They all drove to Maine, Atlanta, etc.
Also, Trumpist policy-makers were happy to let COVID spread, take little or no action on improving testing, and not manage PPE distribution and production when they thought it was a blue state problem. "That's their problem", your old classmate said.