COVID-19 showing suburbs are just as vulnerable as cities

NEW YORK (AP) — Haunting images of an empty Times Square and the daily accounting of hundreds of fatalities in New York City have reinforced the idea of the coronavirus as an urban contagion.

That may obscure an equally sobering truth: Many of the city's suburbs have been hit just as hard. In some, there have been more fatalities per capita than in super-dense Manhattan.

The virus’s rampage through the New York metro region, from the well-to-do towns along Connecticut’s coastline to the bedroom communities of northern New Jersey and Long Island, offers a counterweight to the notion of the suburbs, with their plentiful open spaces, as safe havens.

“You expect to see it spread more rapidly in densely populated areas like cities, but it does that anywhere the virus is introduced and where people are in contact with other people,” said Dr. Stephen Morse, professor of epidemiology at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health in New York. “All it needs is fertile soil because it spreads quite well, unfortunately.”

The first sustained outbreak to be detected in the New York metropolitan area occurred in the suburb of New Rochelle, where an attorney who had attended large gatherings at a local synagogue was the first to test positive.

Another cluster sprang up 5 miles west of the city in Teaneck, New Jersey. The first New Jersey resident to die, 69-year-old horse racing veteran John Brennan, lived in northern New Jersey and worked at a racetrack in Yonkers, a New York suburb.

According to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University, Rockland County, New York, has reported roughly 3,500 positive cases per 100,000 residents, nearly triple the rate in Manhattan and more than double the rate in Brooklyn. Westchester County, which includes New Rochelle, has a rate of nearly 2,900 cases per 100,000...