I'm in the NYC area on Long Island/Suffolk County. I don't know anyone close but I do know of a few cases that are family members of acquaintances. One went from mild symptoms to dead in a few short days, another was hospitalized with pneumonia and released from the hospital with oxygen checks and another was just admitted in Brooklyn. I know of a few more that are a bit more distant.
NYC is worse than the rest of the country because of its geography with islands. It's made up of five boroughs and four of those are on islands. That forces people to use public transit more than they do in other U.S. cities and it gets very, very crowded at rush hour. Add to that Mayor DeBlasio encouraging New Yorkers to continue to ride public transit "without fear" pretty deep into March and that's the main reason NYC is so much worse than everywhere else in the U.S. Even way out here, 50 miles east of the city, there are people who commute to NYC go to work and they brought it home with them. They most likely spread it to their kids who are largely unaffected, then the kids spread it to other kids who spread it to their parents. There's a logic to it if you dig into it that explains why some information seems conflicting on the surface. Other cities have varied reliance on transit and they all have much smaller populations so they're not as likely as NYC is to follow the models established in European cities that have similar density and transit reliance to NYC. LA, Chicago, Philadelphia, DC.....they're all much more spread out than NYC is.
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