If you’re living in New York City right now, the good news is that you’re living amongst some of the best doctors and medical personnel in the world. But you probably live in an apartment. Leaving that apartment requires using an elevator (use a glove to touch the buttons) or the stairs (don’t touch the railings or doorknobs with your bare hands). Once you get on the street, you can try to keep space between yourself and everyone else, but there are just lots of people around. Advocates for public transportation insist the connection between the subway system and the virus is ‘tenuous,†but . . . how many other places are you forced into relatively close contact with lots of strangers with circulated air for a significant stretch of time? How many people use those stairway railings each day? How many people touch the turnstiles and subway poles?
Life in a small town or the suburbs is no guarantee of protection from the coronavirus. Tiny Cynthiana, Ky., population around 6,300, had a cluster of cases, fourteen in the town and surrounding county. My stretch of suburbia, Fairfax County, has 2,306 cases. But we’ve got 1.1 million people spread out over 406 square miles — roughly the size of Los Angeles. At least we can walk around our neighborhoods and the trails in the woods with minimal fear of exposure.*
