Look again at NY and see when the preponderance of deaths happened. Right when the pandemic broke out, U.S. citizens were forced to come home from abroad, and m

Look again at NY and see when the preponderance of deaths happened. Right when the pandemic broke out, U.S. citizens were forced to come home from abroad, and many of them transited through airports in New York. If you recall the images from those airports at the time, people, many of whom were probably infected, were packed shoulder to shoulder. New York’s shelter in place restrictions weren’t in place at that point. New York City was slammed with a wave of sickness and death unparalleled anywhere else shortly afterwards. New York has been an outlier in the data the entire length of the pandemic for this reason. If you look at the totality of per-capita hospitalizations and deaths over the last several years, its obvious that shelter-in-place restrictions absolutely made a difference.