The Easter and Passover Blip in New York City

Maximilian Vierlboeck; Roshanak R Nilchiani; Christine M Edwards

The first measure that was put in place in NYC was social distancing and the closing of certain institutions and stores to be implemented immediately. This was accompanied by companies moving employees to work from home or stopping work all together. Official orders for example went into place on March 16 th and March 21 st after the national emergency was declared on March 13 th [see 21]. Therefore, the scenario below was constructed for the simulation to evaluate the effects. In a first run, the two dates were utilized to introduce step reductions in the effective contact rate of various heights and the effects on the infection rate were compared in form of a graph. Figure 2 Looking at the outcome, we see that the different effective contact rate steps flatten the curve significantly and stretch out the infections. Looking at the data as of April 10, which would correspond to the day 41 in the simulation, the fatality count in NYC was 5,429, which corresponds to the run above that included two steps with a reduction of 2 each time.