On the surface that seems to be true. NYC has ~8.4 million people minus those who left the city. ~1% of the population has already tested positive (81,803), and compared to yesterday (81,803 - 76,876) = 4,727 people are testing positive per day which would take years before everyone gets it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_N...
More pessimistically, NYC’s CFR is almost 5% while in a growth phase when South Korea’s CFR is 2% after cases peaked when it was 0.6% in the growth phase. This suggests NYC is massively undercounting cases and the actual rate of infection could be something like 5-10x as high, with the virus reaching 50+% of the population in months at it’s current rate of spread.
PS: A more nuanced look taking into account differences in the overall and infected populations could narrow that estimate down. But, it should not be assumed South Korea discovered every case or that each country is counting deaths in the same way.
Death counts are a less unreliable indicator. Current death counts in NYC- over 7,000 using both the health department counts before Apr 5 plus the FDNY counts, tho even that still has to be an undercount- indicate that at minimum around the time of lockdown (Mar 22) at least 300,000 were "infected"- at a 2% CFR and MTTD of 15 days- but more likely closer to 700,000 or 800,000. That's 3 weeks ago.
With known new death counts currently in the mid to high hundreds, that adds tens of thousands of infections 2-3 weeks ago.
My take is- we are already today at over 1M infections in NYC. And we have a grim fork ahead- either we see a steep drop in death counts, or we see a steady or gradual decline.
A steep drop from lockdown means lockdown works, but also means we still have another few million in susceptible population as things start to open up.
If we only see a gradual or steady decline, COVID more quickly becomes the largest cause of death in NYC for 2020, and we know that lockdown doesnt work well enough to keep from progressing through the population, but we also know we have much less of a susceptible population remaining.
For sure we're undercounting. I had it and I'm not part of any official count because there's no way to get tested. My cohabiting girlfriend almost certainly had it, but she was entirely asymptomatic. Once you factor in all the asymptomatic people, in addition to all the symptomatic people who didn't end up hospitalized and thus likely couldn't get tested, the multiplier on the confirmed cases could easily be significantly more than 10X.
Pessimistically it seems that something like up to 10% of the city's population got it by the time that almost everything shut down, and now that almost everything is shut down, the spread has been vastly, vastly curtailed, as we see from new hospital admissions figures (which don't suffer from the same kinds of underreporting bias).
More pessimistically, NYC’s CFR is almost 5% while in a growth phase when South Korea’s CFR is 2% after cases peaked when it was 0.6% in the growth phase. This suggests NYC is massively undercounting cases and the actual rate of infection could be something like 5-10x as high, with the virus reaching 50+% of the population in months at it’s current rate of spread.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_S...
PS: A more nuanced look taking into account differences in the overall and infected populations could narrow that estimate down. But, it should not be assumed South Korea discovered every case or that each country is counting deaths in the same way.