I heard New York is having such a large problem is because they waited and shut down their state two weeks after New York and California shut down their states.

I heard New York is having such a large problem is because they waited and shut down their state two weeks after New York and California shut down their states. If you remember correctly, Seattle started with the largest number of cases, but since they did a great job at containing it, the COVID-19 case growth has been linear but not exponential allowing many other big cities to surpass it.