Is NYC Beating Back The Coronavirus? It Depends Where You Look

NEW YORK CITY — Gov. Andrew Cuomo is correct — New York City's coronavirus numbers are dropping.

"So congratulations to New Yorkers," he said Friday. "They rallied, they pulled together and they changed the curve."

But another fact is also true — COVID-19 cases and positivity remain at levels once considered unacceptable as recently as November.

Those dual truths about New York City's coronavirus numbers hang over the city's preparations for the return of indoor dining on Feb. 14. They also put a long-standing and potentially-worrisome mismatch in how the city and state measure the pandemic's effects on New Yorkers.

To paraphrase Obi-Wan Kenobi, New York City is both in good and bad shape, from a certain point of view.

Serving Up Numbers

For the coronavirus crisis's more than 300 days, Cuomo repeatedly said decisions on imposing or lifting restrictions to stop the virus's spread will be based on data.

He dropped the hammer on indoor dining back in December based on the numbers, then lifted it as he said they improved.

But a recent New York Times story raised questions about the numbers behind Cuomo's restaurant decision.

Starting with the title — "N.Y.C.’s Covid Metrics Are Dire. Cuomo Is Reopening Restaurants Anyway." — the piece presented the case that Cuomo's recent rosy assessments of COVID levels in New York City were in part based on cherry-picked data.

"Average Covid-19 hospitalizations in the city, while trending downward, were still 60 percent higher late last week than they were when Mr. Cuomo closed the restaurants," the story states.
Andrew Rigie, who heads the powerful NYC Hospitality Alliance and has long called for a return to indoor dining, quickly fired off a response.

The Times story failed to note that coronavirus numbers rose while indoor dining was closed, Rigie said. He argued that closing indoor dining drove up so-called "living room" spread of COVID.

"As a matter of fact, forcing people from highly regulated restaurants into unregulated living rooms correlates directly with the rise in infection rates," Rigie's response states. "Opening indoor dining in New York City, as with the rest of the State, is part of the solution, not part of the problem."

Rigie's argument illustrates it's often not the coronavirus data itself but the interpretation of it that can drive policy decisions.

And sometimes the data itself disagrees, depending where you look.

A Tale Of Two Datasets

It's no secret that New York State and New York City officials often feud.

Their disagreements come from the top — Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio — on down to how they measure coronavirus levels themselves.

The mismatch infamously played out in November when de Blasio closed schools when the city’s numbers showed the coronavirus positivity rate hit 3 percent. The state-measured numbers at that time were far below and, indeed, consistently remain lower than those reported by the city.

It’s for this reason that Cuomo on Friday said New York City’s average positivity rate measured at 5.08 percent and the city reported the same metric at 8.55 percent.

Cuomo on Friday said the state’s overall positivity rate hit lowest point since Nov. 28.

The city’s data doesn’t necessarily show such good news.

The average positivity in the city stayed at or above 9 percent for all but the last week of January. In November, it stood at 3.3 percent.

Cases on average consistently remained above 5,000 per day through that month as well, as compared to 1,841 per day in November.

But every measurement except for average positivity does appear heading down, just not to the lows seen in the state-measured numbers.

“Generally, the NYC Health Department and the New York State Department of Health will not have matching numbers for the same metrics, though they report the same general trends,” the city’s data page states.