Are Crowded Cities the Reason for the COVID-19 Pandemic?

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Placing too much blame on urban density is a mistake
Scientific American - continues

 

Bad personal hygiene, fast global travel, inconsiderate folks traveling & spreading it to folks, lack of testing, those are reasons for the spread.

Dense urban areas are going to speed the spread, but it is rapidly growing in sprawling exurbs as well.

 

Yeah the jet-set traveling public has big edge on this spreading and the lack of proper hygiene. I was always wondering why I saw people with face masks on when seeing images of Asia. Oooooo yeaaaah......

This author has the same conclusion regarding density, even argues that it's an asset.

CityLab - continues

 

Hmm....
Well I'm going to say, I never thought crowded cities or population density was the "reason" for the Covid 19 pandemic.
So a lot of what I read in the Scientific American article seems "No Duh" to me.
If people are placing blame on urban density, that's too bad. I think it only reflects on a misunderstanding of how a virus and the spreading of a virus operates.

I think the problem with the acceptance of the ignorance in this regard, resides partly with the media. It's more dramatic to report the big numbers, the fatalities. You'll get the 2 minute news report about the devastated neighborhood in New York, or the Nursing Home that suffered a huge fatality rate.
Most media outlets aren't going to devote a report to explaining the scientific reasons why urban density really has less to do with the risk and spread of the disease than we think.
R, C, T, D, S and a mathematical formula isn't as attention getting for most as a deserted neighborhood or death swept nursing home.

Also it's a little misleading as I think the article kind of interchanges the concept of "Reason For" with "Risk" loosely. As the article itself does admit and cautions:

"The intuition that population density increases the propensity of an epidemic to spread in cities is CORRECT in the sense that increased density likely leads to an increase in the contact rate of an individual, which makes the reproduction number larger and leads to larger infectious disease outbreaks in dense areas."-from the article.

And as the article admits, we are also talking about a wheel that is still in spin. As those dense population areas, first hit with lightening, start to flatten out from a cases reported numbers standpoint, the attention does shift to all those other areas, not yet hit or as of yet far less impacted. So am I misunderstanding if I think a point of the article is that we should realize that the risk and threat of this crisis hasn't passed, even if numbers flatten out and reduce in numerous hard hit densely populated areas?

I also admit to a level of personal ignorance. But I always assumed that a "virus" itself, really has no concept of the surrounding population of a singular person it infects. We just see the results of that infection.

 

It’s like asking “is the pathological inability of the American government to tilt policy in favor of the environment instead of supporting big polluters like coal and oil the cause of the pandemic”. Yes, it is, because cheap ass carbon fuel is why so many millions of people cross the globe each day (.. or did), spreading the virus rapidly around the world. The virus spread a lot less quickly when people rarely went more than two miles from their house during the 1300s. And yet, no, this isn’t the ONLY reason causing the pandemic ...

 

https://www.curbed.com/2020/4/22/212...ll-kate-wagner

 

Human overpopulation. The virus is a consequence of human overpopulation. The virus is not the problem..WE ARE. THE VIRUS IS A CONSEQUENCE, NOT A CAUSE. There have been other diseases, and viruses before (Ebola, Sika, Nile...etc.), but as the human population explodes exponentially out of control the problems are multiplying at an alarming rate.

/.......'Social Distance' means pretending artificially our population density is lower. ....stop gap to slow transmission, and develop vaccine, a stop gap measure only, as things will get worse as the population continues increasing out of contro.\\.... There will more viruses and diseases in the future as the numbers of carriers, humans, will continue to increase without anybody bothering to bring it down and keep it in check.

.....al the signs are there. I don't need a scientist with instrument to tell me about global warming....I CAN FEEL IT and it is ominous....now this, and worst to come......

/......why is so hard for humans to understand, THE LESS WERE ARE, THE MORE FOR EVERYBODY....and the only planet in our solar system, capable of sustaining life, may get to live a little longer.

 

I don't think so.
The virus, is just a virus. There is always a patient 0. Which means the spread always starts with a population of 1.
The virus has no cognitive ability to know the surrounding population of any individual it infects. It infects one person at a time, whether they are living in a densely populated area, or in a less populated area.
The article admits, and it should be obvious that YES the spread of the virus is going to be more rapid and produce higher numbers in densely populated areas, because of proximity and opportunity, which YES is why we take measures like social distancing to try to slow this reality.
But really the whole point of the attached article is to warn that even though numbers in densely populated areas may level off and decline, that doesn't mean less densely populated areas that haven't yet been exposed aren't still at risk.
I think it's precisely incorrect to say the virus is a consequence of over population.
The pandemic reality, and the horrific numbers of infection/mortality in some areas are a RESULT of population density, but IMO not a consequence.
We do live in a highly populated world, with a population that is able to travel all around the globe. Hence the Global Pandemic. But again, that's a reality and result of living in a modern age, with a mobile population not a viral produced consequence.
Humanity has been hit by devastating epidemics before, in times when the worlds population was in totality much less. Those diseases still spread, just not as rapidly or necessarily on a global perspective, but that has much more to do with technology and things like planes. Less to do with whatever the population happened to be.
Viruses don't take a census. They don't care what the population is. They spread through opportunity...as a result of opportunity. That opportunity is more plentiful in densely populated areas, but the fact that the area is more densely populated isn't what caused the virus to appear or exist in the first place.
Nobody knows, but it's likely this virus started in bats, was passed to a domestic animal, and then to a human. One single human.