re: NY Times - Are Protests Unsafe?

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Why are some areas spiking and not others when there were protests virtually everywhere?

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I’m fully on pride’s theory that it’s all about which cities already had their big spike. NYC already had it before the protests, Texas cities did not.

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There's that, and I like the hypothesis that the mythical "herd immunity threshold" is dependent on population density.

New York City and much of the northeast is highly dense, which required a higher percentage of people to get it before the rapid spread stopped.

Cities like Houston and Los Angeles are urban sprawl cities, with less concentrated populations. The initial spread there was slower and reached a lower threshold, but then the protests happened. This concentrated the populations during events, and the previous low threshold didn't work in these denser congregations.

Also, you can't discount what's going on in Mexico when discussing the south and border states.

And perhaps SARS 2.0 in the Sunbelt is behaving more like how a seasonal respiratory illness behaves in the tropics rather than the usual northern latitude/temperate behavior we expect.