By: John C. Lesher
I regard myself as a logical person and sometimes that leads to problems—like now. We are painfully aware of the growing effect the Corona pathogen is having on our lives. At the moment the government has announced the discovery of about 2,000 cases in our nation of 325 million, with 40 or 50 deaths. My sense of logic tells me that something is wrong here, but I am not sure what it is.
A short digression: For many years I was a suburban commuter. I retired in 2013, and from late 1978 to retirement my daily schlep was into Manhattan. My typical day was from my home in Westfield, NJ, to Newark, NJ, by train; switch trains in Newark; train ride to New York Penn Station and from there into the labyrinth of New York’s subway system. It’s important for a reader of this blog to understand the daily impositions attendant to a New York commute. The trains are crowded, the commuter hubs such as Penn Station in New York are crawling with humans and the subways often make the first two seem like a walk in open country.
A recent article in the Newark Star Ledger noted that well over 300,000 workers commute to NYC every day on New Jersey transit trains. Some other large number takes New Jersey Transit buses into the City. Supplement this mix with passengers from other suburban train and bus lines, such as The Long Island Railroad and the Metro North system, and you will see that something like one million workers somehow squeeze into New York every day from suburban locations, most of whom end up in Manhattan. Inter-borough traffic adds tens of thousands more. Once in the City, subways and buses become the preferred modes of transit. The Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) has claimed a daily 2019 volume of 7,200,000 subway and bus rides (not individuals, but rides, because one person often takes more than one ride per day). Recent newspaper articles indicate that ridership on the MTA system has dropped about 20% in the past two to three weeks, but that still leaves millions of daily human-to-human contacts.
The sheer volume of commuting ridership, coupled with the intense crowding of buses, trains and subways, is where my problem in logic is centered. As noted, we have roughly 2,000 reported coronavirus cases documented in the US as of today, 13 March 2020. Given the extensive co-mingling among commuters, why don’t New York, Northern New Jersey, Long Island, southwest Connecticut and the counties just north of the City have hundreds of thousands of cases?
We are advised every day to avoid crowds. Civic engagements, museums, schools and venues for sports and entertainment have been cancelled or postponed. In spite of that, the commuting systems into and throughout New York continue to operate, even if people out of concern have reduced their use of public transit. Surely someone at some point in a commute coughed on someone else. Why haven’t pandemic numbers of coronavirus cases been discovered among the commuting population? Is it possible that untold thousands of these commuters did get sick and contracted “the flu” many weeks or even months ago, when the cause of their ailments was actually coronavirus? Has coronavirus been with us, unrecognized, far longer than supposed?
Right now we have a dearth of objective, fact-based information on coronavirus-19 and I don’t believe the anxiety and uncertainty dominating our headlines will go away until some reputable pharmaceutical company announces that it has an effective vaccine. This might seem like a completely unrealistic thought, but would it be crazy to have our political and medical authorities request those among the commuting public who “had the flu” this winter to volunteer to give a blood sample for analysis? My sense is that coronavirus-19 is not the new kid on the block and that many commuters unknowingly contracted this disease over this winter season and fought their way through it. A blood sample will indicate the presence or absence of antibodies formed when our immune systems resist disease. Those anti-bodies will give our health officials strong indications of the extent of the virus, as well as its potency. More importantly, the antibodies will show the way to a vaccine. As noted earlier, my belief is that only a vaccine will end the disruptions we are currently experiencing.