New York Finally Cleans Its Filthy Subways
Far be it from me to criticize New York, but would it kill the city that never sleeps to disinfect its entire subway system more than once every 115 years?
Perhaps you saw them on the news yesterday, masked and gloved city workers - 700 of them - scrubbing down subway cars from top to bottom, giving special attention to those disgusting poles and straps. They were cleaning the turnstiles, platforms and handrails, using special anti-microbial solutions that can kill viruses for months.
It’s the first time in more than a century that the trains have stopped running at night to allow for a thorough sanitizing. It appears that the subways have been cleaned in a desultory manner in the past. Intensive cleaning will take place nightly until the pandemic is over.
Why stop then?
You don’t have to be a microbiologist to know that crowded subways, where all manner of humanity is packed into sardine cans, are a perfect breeding ground for highly contagious pathogens.
Right after September 11, 2001, officials worried that terrorists might unleash some sort of biological weapon on the United States. The most likely place? The New York City subways.
It’s finally happened. A biological weapon has been released, but not by terrorists. Chances are, it was these scuzzy cars and the infected people on them that turned New York City into the sickest place on earth.
MIT’s Jeffrey Harris published a paper on April 24, “The Subways Seeded the Massive Coronavirus Epidemic in New York City,” that blamed the underground trains for the rapid spread of the disease.
By the third week in April 2020, total confirmed coronavirus infections topped 145 thousand, or about one-sixth of all reported cases in the U.S. This cumulative total was considerably greater than the combined number of reported cases in the counties comprising Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, Miami, Boston, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Seattle and Houston combined. The New York City tally has exceeded total cases in the Lombardy region of Italy, the Community of Madrid and the Province of Tehran combined.
How could the epidemic have spread so extensively in such a relatively small space and in just a few weeks? To address this question, we focus here on the city’s pervasive, multipronged subway system. Based largely on observational data, we conclude that in all likelihood, the subway system was a major disseminator – if not the principal transmission vehicle – of coronavirus infection during the initial exponential takeoff of the epidemic during the first two weeks of March 2020. Moreover, the ensuing marked decline in subway use was the main vehicle by which the public’s growing perception of risk was translated into reduced transmission of the virus.
New Yorkers love their subways. Before the pandemic, an estimated 5.5 million of them merrily boarded the cars daily, nose to nose with sniffling, sneezing, coughing strangers. The number of passengers has dropped to about 500,000 a day now. Presumably, these are desperate folks with absolutely no other way to get to work.
Putting aside decades of unimaginable filth that’s incubating in these movable Petri dishes, why did the city wait until 43,676 had been hospitalized and 13,938 had died to thoroughly scrub what must be the source of many infections?
New York City had its first confirmed case of Covid-19 on March 1. Yet it took city officials 67 days to figure out that the cars needed more than just a gentle cleaning?
As a matter of fact, why weren’t the cars taken out of service and sanitized in 2015 after researchers from Weill Cornell Medical College swabbed surfaces in New York subway cars and found 637 different pathogens: bacterial, viral and fungal? Their shocking results were front-page news at the time.
Among the nasty samples the Cornell scientists discovered lurking in on subway surfaces were two with anthrax and three with Bubonic plague.
For years, visionaries calling themselves the New Urbanists tried to shame suburbanites for their love of lawns and their loyalty to the combustion engine. We’re unenlightened and selfish for driving alone in our cars, they said, as they tried to bully us onto public transportation.
No thanks.
I suspect Americans will shun public transit for the foreseeable future as they try to find ways to get around that aren’t crawling with contagions and disinfected once a century.
