The first death from COVID in NY was reported on March 14th. Is that really "way too long" to wait? I mean, sure, knowing what we know now with 20/20 hindsight we should have shut things down before we had any confirmed cases, but with the information and limited/faulty testing and info we had then? How much earlier would anyone else have really shut down? Washington State also had an early outbreak and Seattle shut down on March 11. I believe San Francisco closed the same day as NY. Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Jersey, which were also hard hit, closed later than NY. No one complains about any of those, though, do they? Why not?
You didn't need hindsight, you had Milan, Italy. For the record Milan has approximately the same population density as San Francisco. NYC is way denser than Milan. Here is a NY timelne. State of Emergency was declared on March 7th but they kept Manhattan schools open?
EDITed to add - and I was arguing with my NYC wife about it at the time. She said it was for child care reasons. I'm not trying to pick on Cuomo, in the land of the blind the one eyed man is king, and Cuomo might be a king right now.
And before us here in Italy, there was China. I distinctly remember standing the the school courtyard at my kids' school here in Italy and a Chinese immigrant mother telling me, along with a bunch of Italian parents frustratedly, that "Italians aren't taking this virus seriously". She said that she had relatives in China in the area that was already experiencing the shutdown. She said that we should all be wearing masks and shutting things down. Sure enough, about a week later, we were all on full lockdown.
Can I also say as an American immigrant in Italy, that the kinds of lock downs that people did in other parts of the world (from what I could see from social media, the US, the UK, the Netherlands, Australia and probably many other places) was entirely different from what we went through here. Here in Italy the entire country was locked down from March 9 until mid-May. We were not allowed to go outside to exercise or hold socially distanced driveway parties. We were only allowed to go outside alone with a statutory declaration (with criminal penalties for false statements) that we were either going to to 1)food shop at our nearest supermarket or food market, 2) buy necessary pharmaceuticals at our nearest pharmacy, c) going to work in an essential job ie supermarket worker, hospital worker etc -other workplaces were closed or d) walking a dog or jogging/walking within 200 meters of our residence. There was no other reason to go out, children were not allowed to go outside, no exercising in parks. People who lived out in the countryside were not allowed to go hiking in the woods near their homes. We were not allowed to go to our vacation homes, if we had them (although I know some people who did this and were not caught). We live in an apartment with no balcony or outside space so the only time my kids saw daylight for more than 2 months was when we went up on the roof (they were not allowed to go to the supermarket with us). We had to wear masks when inside public inside spaces and still do. Police were checking people's statutory declarations and fining people who were out too far from home, or who were lying on their form.
Looking at what is happening in other countries I now feel like that Chinese mother in the school courtyard - I just don't feel that people in other countries are taking it seriously even DURING their "lockdowns" as there are so many exceptions to rules and gray areas. I just saw on the news that in the UK only now have they decided that in ten days' time masks will be required in shops. During their "lockdown" people were meeting their friends in parks and going to relatives houses.
