The numbers out of New York City are way better that I thought possible

A friend in New York, Paul Brill sent me some very encouraging charts.  These show deaths and hospital admissions related to COVID-19 in New York City, and the drop-off in daily counts since the peak is much steeper than I imagined possible. The people of New York are doing a great job of keeping up their social distancing (I guess), and the people who aren't doing so well at that seem to have not significantly slowed the positive trend. If we could get the whole country to have this steep of a decline (through social distancing, wearing masks when you are in public, and so forth), we could really shut down this virus for a while.

The deaths peaked on April 7th, and then had a slow decline until the 11th, but have really been dropping fast since then. This is great news.

New admissions to the hospital were running high with no trend from March 30th to April 8th, but since then, new COVID-19 admissions have been declining at a fairly steady rate. The drop from April 17th to Monday was especially encouraging. I had no idea we could see a fall-off in new admissions occur at such an encouraging rate.

 The change in rate of positive identifications of persons with COVID-19 isn't as accurate an assessment of reality as the hospitalization and deaths, but even so, it is showing a similar trend, and the trend has been very good since April 14th.  Look at what the people of New York accomplished by staying home and maintaining social distance.  We can all do this.

Harvey J. Stein has some even better charts that give us a similar picture of the overall trend: