Clockwork Orange – "Your Golden Touch" (1967)

I was a fool to cry so much

I was a victim of your golden touch

In the previous 2 or 3 lines, we met Bill Ashley, the drummer of Clockwork Orange, a band from Paducah, KY, that released a great psychedelic single titled “Your Golden Touch” in 1967.

Here’s part two of my interview with Bill Ashley.

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2 or 3 lines:  The version of “Your Golden Touch” that I heard on Steven Lorber’s “Mystic Eyes” radio program in 1980 was produced by the Cajun recording artist Doug Kershaw and released on his Creole label.  But you had recorded a different version of the song before you hooked up with Kershaw.  Tell us about how the original version of “Your Golden Touch” came to be recorded.

Clockwork Orange

Bill Ashley:  When we decided to record “Your Golden Touch,” we went to a recording studio in Lone Oak, Kentucky – just outside Paducah – which mostly did recordings of school bands and orchestras.  The studio was operated by Tommy Morrison, and we contacted Tommy and set up a date to record “Your Golden Touch.”  As I recall, Tommy was initially not very interested in the project, but he was a competent engineer.  We recorded two songs that day on a four-track tape recorder – “Your Golden Touch” and an instrumental cover of “Ferry Cross the Mersey.”  

2 or 3 lines:  That’s an odd coincidence – “Ferry Cross the Mersey,” which was a hit in 1965 for Gerry and the Pacemakers, was one of the first songs my eighth-grade band learned to play.  Were you happy with how “Your Golden Touch” came out?  

Bill:  The initial recording of “Your Golden Touch” was excellent.  Tommy Morrison added some reverb and that was all it needed.  He thought the record was great, too, and suggested we take it to Nashville to try and get a major label to release it. 

2 or 3 lines:  Is that what you did?

Bill: Yes, Terry and I went to Nashville and played it for several labels, but we got rejected every time –  it wasn’t what anyone was looking for.  Nashville was really only interested in country music at the time.  But Doug Kershaw had been outside of the studio door at one of the places we went to, and he heard the recording and asked us to bring it to his studio. 

2 or 3 lines:  Which I assume you did.

Bill:  Yes.  We went to his studio and he listened to “Your Golden Touch” again, and said he wanted us to re-record the song in his studio and release the song on the Creole label.  

2 or 3 lines: Doug Kershaw was kind of a big deal.  He was the most successful Cajun musician ever, and had a top ten country hit with “Louisiana Man,” which has been covered by over 800 artists.  Were you a fan of Kershaw’s?

Bill: We didn't know who he was, but we were ecstatic that someone liked our “Your Golden Touch.” But just after we got that good news, things started to turn bad. 

2 or 3 lines:  What do you mean?  What happened?

Bill:  Steve Rudolph, our organist, got on his motorcycle to go to his girlfriend’s house to tell her about our record deal, and had a terrible crash.  He was in a coma for days, and was unable to make the recording session, which took place in Birmingham, Alabama. We had to re-record “Your Golden Touch” without Steve – we used a studio musician instead of him.

2 or 3 lines:  So you went from being excited about recording under the guidance of a major recording artists like Kershaw to being devastated by Steve’s injuries.  I assume his condition weighed on everyone’s mind at that recording session.

Bill:  The Birmingham session did not turn out as well as the original session we did in Lone Oak with Tommy Morrison – partly because Steve was not there, and partly because we had been performing live a lot and were exhausted.  But Kershaw released the record even though we were disappointed in it.  The original recording at Tommy Morrison’s studio really represented the true essence of the Clockwork Orange.

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The Lone Oak version of “Your Golden Touch” was never released, and few people other than Bill and his bandmates have ever heard it – until today, that is.

Bill had a copy of the demo on a minidisc – remember those? – that he converted to a .wav file and e-mailed to me.

A minidisc held one-third
as much music as a CD

That recording has some sonic flaws.  It was made from an acetate recording that was made more than 50 years ago from the original master tape.  (Bill has been unable to locate the original tape.)

A couple of years ago, a London company bought the acetate copy from Bill (who made the minidisc copy before shipping it off to Merry Olde).  They told him they hoped to enhance the quality of the acetate copy and eventually release the recording, but Bill hasn’t heard anything definite from them as of yet.

I’m hoping that company is able to produce a recording of the Lone Oak version “Your Golden Touch” that does it justice.  Until that happens – assuming that it does happen – all we have is the somewhat rough recording that Bill sent to me.

Click here to listen to the original Clockwork Orange recording of “Your Golden Touch.”  The Doug Kershaw-produced version was very good, but this one is even better.

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My thanks to Bill Ashley for not only answering my questions but also providing me with a copy of the original recording of “Your Golden Touch.”

Thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, Bill isn’t sure when he’ll next be appearing live.  But if you travel to Key West or anywhere on Florida’s Gulf Coast once life is back to normal, check out the local concert listings to see if Steve Hopper and the Wolf Island Band are playing in the neighborhood.  (If you do get a chance to see them, I’d suggest you request “No Shirt, No Shoes, No Problems.”)

Clockwork Orange – "Your Golden Touch" (1967)

I was a fool to cry so much

I was a victim of your golden touch

Bill Ashley taught himself to play the drums in 1965, when he was a 15-year-old living in Paducah, Kentucky.  His first group was Clockwork Orange, which released a single titled “Your Golden Touch” in 1967.

I heard “Your Golden Touch” on Steven Lorber’s “Mystic Eyes” radio show in 1980.  He’s not sure how he became acquainted with the record – which didn’t sell enough copies to make the Billboard “Hot 100” – but he did.

After a fair amount of Googling, I was able to track down Bill Ashley and interview him about Clockwork Orange and “Your Golden Touch.”

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2 or 3 lines: One of the most memorable and disturbing movies I ever saw was A Clockwork Orange.  I initially assumed that your band took its name from that movie, but you formed Clockwork Orange several years before the movie was released.

The first edition of A Clockwork Orange

Bill Ashley: Danny Powley, our singer, had read the book the movie was based on – we had no idea when we formed the band that there was going to be a movie.  Originally the band was named “The Clockwork Orange,” but we dropped the “the” at some point.

2 or 3 lines: So how did Clockwork Orange get its start?

Bill: The group was organized by Elliott Payne and Terry Frasier.  Elliott moved away and leadership of the band was taken over by Terry, a gifted guitarist who had been playing since he was five.

2 or 3 lines: Was everyone in Clockwork Orange from Paducah?

Bill:  Yes, we were.  In addition to Terry and Danny Powley, the members were Barry Yancey on bass, Steve Rudolph – who played the Hammond B3 organ and trumpet – and me.

2 or 3 lines: Did you play a lot of live gigs?

Bill: We were in high demand at colleges in the area – all the way from southern Illinois to Nashville.  We were gone every weekend playing, and we developed a great style and became very close.

2 or 3 lines:  What kind of music did Clockwork Orange play?

Bill: We were influenced by the psychedelic music of the day – groups like the Electric Prunes and Strawberry Alarm Clock, to name a couple. 

2 or 3 lines: “Your Golden Touch,” which was written by Terry Frasier, certainly has a psychedelic feel.

Bill:   Terry had begun to write his own songs and suggested that we record “Your Golden Touch” when we decided to release something original.

2 or 3 lines:  I had no idea until recently that “Your Golden Touch” was produced by Doug Kershaw, who was a fiddle player from Louisiana who sold a lot of record in the seventies – I guess “Louisiana Man” is his most famous song.  I understand that he wrote the flip side to “Your Golden Touch,” which was a song titled “Do Me Right Now.”

Doug Kershaw (circa 1969)

Bill: Doug Kershaw wrote that song on the way to the studio because we had no other material to record.  

2 or 3 lines: I take it that “Your Golden Touch” didn’t sell very well.  

Bill: We sold very few recordings, so we went back to doing live performances.  But the band just wasn’t the same without Steve.  He eventually did recover, but it took a long time. 

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2 or 3 lines: Do you keep in touch with the other members of Clockwork Orange?  Are any of them still involved with music?

Bill: All of the original members of Clockwork Orange are alive and well, but none of them are still performing today except myself.  Terry Frasier still lives in Paducah, where I saw him several years ago – but quit playing guitar decades ago for some reason and never returned to it.  Danny Powley

went to Vietnam and never returned to performing. He lives in Paducah, too. Barry Yancey moved to Texas and never returned to performing.  Steve Rudolph eventually recovered from his motorcycle accident and lives in New Orleans.  I look him up whenever I play in New Orleans.  I last saw him this past January.

The Clockwork Orange (circa 1968)

2 or 3 lines: So you are still drumming?

Bill: Yes, I’m the only original member of Clockwork Orange still performing – 55 years after we formed the band.  I’m 70, and still perform regularly, mostly in Florida and along the Gulf Coast.  I often play with Steve Hopper, who is a very popular tropical rock, or “trop rock” performer, and have been on some of his albums – including Anywhere There’s a Beach, which was recorded in Muscle Shoals in 2017, and went to #1 on the trop rock charts.  

[NOTE: Click here to listen to the title track of Steve Hopper’s Anywhere There’s a Beach album.]

2 or 3 lines: So you’ve left Paducah for warmer climes?

Bill: I left Paducah in the early seventies and moved to Florida. I lived on Anna Maria Island, which is near Bradenton, for many years. The music scene on the west coast of Florida in those days was great. I usually played six nights a week with many excellent musicians.  I’m very glad I was able to keep performing music, and I’m sorry the others in Clockwork Orange decided to quit. I really miss the great times we had and the music we created.  I will never forget those times. 

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The next 2 or 3 lines will feature a never-released demo of “Your Golden Touch” that Clockwork Orange recorded before they met Doug Kershaw.

Bill Ashley thinks that recording is superior to the Doug Kershaw-produced recording that I heard on the “Mystic Eyes,” and I tend to agree.

But I’ll let you and your fellow 2 or 3 lines readers decide that for yourselves.

Click here to listen to the Doug Kershaw-produced recording of “Your Golden Touch.”

Dr. John – "Right Place, Wrong Time" (1973)

Refried confusion is making itself clear

Wonder which way do I go to get on out of here

The previous 2 or 3 lines presented several theories that have been put forward to explain why New York City has a COVID-19 death rate that is 50 times greater than the COVID-19 death rate in San Francisco.

Most experts believe that the difference in death rates in the two cities resulted from the fact that San Francisco (and its neighboring jurisdictions) ordered residents to “shelter in place” before New York City.

Residents of the San Francisco Bay area were directed to stay the f*ck at home on March 16.  The governor of California followed that up with a statewide order on March 19.

The next day, the New York governor issued a similar stay-at-home order that had an effective date of March 22.

New York City nurses

So San Francisco (and its suburbs) only shut things down a few days before New York City did.  But many experts seem to believe that a difference of even a few days in issuing stay-at-home orders could have made a big difference in slowing the outbreak, as infections spread exponentially in the population.

From Vox.com:

The difference of a few weeks or days on public action and orders telling people to stay home may not seem like a huge deal.  But it really is significant with the coronavirus, because the number of cases and deaths, especially early on in an outbreak, can double every few days if protective measures aren’t in place. . . .

[O]nce a community confirmed a coronavirus case, and especially after it saw a death, there was a good chance it already had a much more widespread outbreak — since most cases are mild (though still potentially very unpleasant) and even the worst cases can take days or weeks to show major symptoms.

“Your chance of the first case being the one that comes to your attention is very, very, very, very small,” George Rutherford, an epidemiologist at the UCSF, said.  “By the time you have the first death, you have to figure that there’s been three full weeks of transmission, and there are at least several hundred cases in the population.”

So once a city, state, or country is reporting a few Covid-19 cases and especially deaths, it’s typically safe to assume there is a much bigger outbreak going on — just one that’s not fully visible, at least yet, to the public. . . .

It’s in this context that a six- or three-day lag in issuing a stay-at-home order could really matter.

“I’m loath to criticize, and hindsight is 20/20,” Rutherford said. “But you’ve got to start early. You’ve got to do it before deaths start to accumulate.”

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New York City may be a COVID-19 horror show, but no one seems to be holding New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, responsible.  

The late Ronald Reagan was sometimes called the “Teflon President” because criticism and blame never seemed to stick to him.  Maybe we should start calling Cuomo the “Teflon Governor.”

The Teflon Governor

As Variety magazine noted last month, the coronavirus crisis has turned Cuomo into a TV star:

High on the list of things that nobody could have predicted just a few weeks ago is the emergence of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo as a buzzy daytime TV draw. . . .

“The Andrew Cuomo Show,” as it were, is a strangely compelling mix that is part ‘West Wing’ revival, part therapy session and most important, a credible source of important information about the contagion that has abruptly upended every aspect of life in the U.S. and around the world.

But both Cuomo and New York City’s mayor, Bill de Blasio, have some ‘splaining to do for the pickle the city has found itself in.

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De Blasio has taken his share of heat for not taking the coronavirus seriously enough – especially compared to San Francisco mayor London Breed.

On February 25, Breed declared a local state of emergency.  On March 2, she warned local residents to prepare for possible school closures and other disruptions.

That same day, de Blasio poo-poohed coronavirus, tweeting that he was “encouraging New Yorkers to go on with your lives [and] get out on the town despite Coronavirus,” and recommending that they go out and see the movie The Traitor.

But Cuomo was just as overconfident, telling the press on March 2 that “We have been ahead of this since day one.”

“Excuse our arrogance as New Yorkers [but] we think we have the best health care system on the planet right here in New York,” Cuomo continued.  “So, when you’re saying, what happened in other countries versus what happened here, we don’t even think it’s going to be as bad as it was in other countries.”

Not exactly.

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New York City may have been under a stay-at-home order several days earlier if de Blasio had his way.  The day after the San Francisco stay-at-home order was issued, he warned New Yorkers to be prepared for a similar order.

De Blasio and Cuomo

But Cuomo pulled rank on de Blasio.

“That is not going to happen, shelter in place, for New York City,” Cuomo told the New York Times. “For any city or county to take an emergency action, the state has to approve it.  And I wouldn’t approve shelter in place.”

Cuomo said that such a drastic policy would create unnecessary fear and panic.

“Quarantine in place, you can’t leave your home,” Cuomo said. “The fear, the panic is a bigger problem than the virus.”

Not exactly.

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Cuomo and de Blasio have been engaged in an ongoing political food fight for several years.

From CNN:

In 2015, the two differed over topless women in Times Square, with the governor looking to swiftly squash the practice, while the mayor aimed to take a more deliberative approach by creating a task force on the issue.

Squabbling over Times Square toplessness is one thing.  Allowing the rivalry to get in the way of a prompt response to a life-threatening pandemic is quite another.

Topless Times Square entertainers

More from CNN:

The seriousness of the situation was clear when some local leaders rebuked the mayor and the governor for continuing their fight amid the pandemic. 

“I don't have the time,” tweeted Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president. “I don't have patience for petty back-and-forths in the middle of a deadly pandemic.” 

Adams then directed a message to both men: “Cut the crap.”

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A few days after kneecapping de Blasio, Cuomo did an about-face and issued a statewide stay-at-home order.  But experts believe that his foot-dragging was costly.

No less an authority than Dr. Thomas R. Frieden – the former head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and former commissioner of the New York City Health Department – said that if the state and city had adopted widespread social-distancing measures a week or two earlier, including closing schools, stores and restaurants, then the estimated death toll from the outbreak might have been reduced by 50 to 80 percent.

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Cuomo and de Blasio continued to bicker as COVID-19 raged.

From Vox.com:

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said [on April 11] that the city’s public schools would remain shut for the rest of the academic year, a decision that was widely expected given the scale of the coronavirus crisis in New York City. . . .

But this is New York, so before anything happens, the mayor and the governor must squabble about it first.  Barely hours after de Blasio said the nation’s largest school system would rely on remote learning through June, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo described the mayor’s decision as an “opinion.”

De Blasio lands a left!

“You can’t make a decision just within New York City, without coordinating that decision with the whole metropolitan region because it all works together,” the governor said Saturday at his own separate news conference following de Blasio’s.  “That's his opinion, but he didn't close them and he can't open them.” 

The city would normally have the jurisdiction to close its schools. But Cuomo issued an executive order on March 18 which required state approval for any local ordinances.  Cuomo also issued an order that said schools would be closed statewide until April 29, at which point the closures would be reevaluated.

A spokesperson for Cuomo’s office said the governor is continuing to look at the question of schools with the facts and information available, but that he is looking at the issue with the entire state — and with what the governors of New Jersey and Connecticut choose to do — in mind.

Cuomo lands a right!

A de Blasio spokesman wasted no time in reminding people about Cuomo’s ill-advised decision to drag his feet on a stay-at-home order:

Freddi Goldstein, de Blasio’s press secretary, pushed back after Cuomo’s press conference. “The Governor’s reaction to us keeping schools closed is reminiscent of how he reacted when the Mayor called for a shelter in place.  We were right then and we’re right now,” Goldstein wrote on Twitter.

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There’s one other possible explanation for the New York City coronavirus sh*t show: bad luck in the form of a “superspreader.”

From LiveScience.com:

In addition, a man in New Rochelle just north of the city happened to be what is called a superspreader.  For whatever reason, whether immunological, social or biological, a superspreader can infect many more people than expected for a particular pathogen. 

In fact, the virus was passed from this New Rochelle man to more than 100 others, said George Rutherford, professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).

"New York had multiple, multiple, multiple introductions from Europe and also had the misfortune to have a superspreader at the beginning," said Rutherford. 

If the New Rochelle super spreader had been a resident of Palo Alto or Berkeley, San Francisco might have been the city with the highest COVID-19 death rate in the country.

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Luck certainly plays a HUGE role in our lives – both for good and for ill.

But we don’t like to admit that.  We prefer to view events with 20/20 hindsight and blame someone else when something bad happens to us.

It don’t make no never mind to me if you want to say Andrew Cuomo screwed the pooch on this one, or whether he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.  But if you hold him responsible in part for the fix New York City finds itself in, it’s only fair that you also hold President Trump responsible.

And vice versa, of course.

(I just lost a lot of you, didn’t, I?  But you can’t have it both ways – although most of the people in this country have tried to do so.)

Click here to read the very thorough New York Times account of New York City’s response to the pandemic.

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New Orleans native Dr. John – who was born Malcolm John Rebennack, Jr. – died of a heart attack a little less than a year ago.

“Right Place, Wrong Time,” which was released on the In the Right Place album in 1973, peaked at #9 on the Billboard “Hot 100” that summer.

Click here to listen to “Right Place, Wrong Time.”

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon:

Supertramp – "Take the Long Way Home" (1979)

You took the long way home

You took the long way home

You took the long way home

(If you think Supertramp took the long way home, just wait until you read this 2 or 3 lines and the one that follows it.)

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I’ve violated the First Law of Holes – “If you find yourself in a hole, you need to stop digging” – many times in my life.

2 or 3 lines has fallen into this trap more than once.  When I start reading a book or watching a TV series, I will nearly always keep going until I finish it – no matter how much of a struggle it is.

I do the same thing when I decide to write about something on this blog.  Even if what seemed like a good idea for a post turns out to be not such a good idea, I find myself compelled to keep digging until I find something I can publish.  

But most of the time, I have to dig really deep to find that something – which is rarely is worth all the digging.

So I’m giving you fair warning.  That’s what happened with this post, and with the one that follows.  (When I spend so much time on a post like this one, I try to get my money’s worth by dividing it into two posts.)

I should have just stopped and deleted the damn thing after the first 10,000 words.  But once I invest that much time and effort in a post, I am loath to admit defeat.  So I just kept going, and kept going, and kept going . . . 

You may decide not to stick with me until the end.  But if you do, never fear: I may be taking the long way home, but I promise you that we’ll get there eventually.

Whether the destination is worth the journey is another matter altogether

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New York City is clearly the hottest of the COVID-19 hot spots.  

As of April 25, the coronavirus had caused 11,419 deaths in New York City.  That’s 135.2 deaths per 100,000 residents.  (Many believe that count understates the true number by several thousand, but let’s stick with the official number for the time being.) 

Things aren’t nearly as bad in the San Francisco Bay area – where the first coronavirus death in the United States occured.

San Francisco has just over one-tenth as many residents as New York City – 883,000 compared to 8,400,000.  So you might expect San Francisco to have about one-tenth as many COVID-19 deaths at New York City – something in the range of 1150 deaths.

But San Francisco has had only 22 COVID-19 deaths to date – or 2.5 deaths per 100,000 residents.

In other words, a New York City resident is OVER 50 TIMES more likely to die from coronavirus than a San Francisco resident.

There are a lot of different theories about why New York City has had so many more deaths than San Francisco.  Let’s discuss a few of the more popular ones.

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The most popular explanation for why New York City has had more COVID-19 deaths by far than San Francisco or other cities is that it is the most very densely populated big city in the United States, with 27,000 souls per square mile.  It also has a notoriously crowded subway system that most New Yorkers use to get to work.  The coronavirus thrives on close contact between humans, and you simply can’t live in the Big Apple and avoid such contact.

But San Francisco is also a very crowded city.  In fact, it’s the second-most densely populated city in the U.S., with over 19,000 residents per square mile.  

So New York City has one and a half times as many people per square mile as San Francisco – a significant difference – but its COVID-19 death rate is over 50 times greater.

And while New Yorkers have the highest rate of public transit usage in the country, a lot of San Franciscans use mass transit as well.

If New York City’s COVID-19 death rate was twice as high, three times as high, or five times as high as San Francisco’s, it wouldn’t be a stretch to explain that by pointing to New York City’s greater population density and more popular mass-transit system.

But New York City has a COVID-19 death rate that is over 50 times greater.

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A lot of people think that demographic differences between the two cities may explain the death rate discrepancies.

It’s true that New York City has more African-American and Hispanic residents than San Francisco, and that African-Americans and Hispanics are more likely to die from the coronavirus than whites or Asians.  (San Francisco is only slightly whiter than New York City, but it does have quite a few more Asian-Americans.)

San Francisco is only slightly whiter than New York City, but a much larger percentage of its population is Asian (34% to 14%) – and Asian-Americans seem to die less frequently from COVID-19.

New York City’s population is 22% African-American and 29% Hispanic.  Of the New Yorkers who have died from COVID-19, 28% were black and 34% were Hispanic.  

That’s disproportionately high compared to the overall population numbers, but the differences aren’t that dramatic – they certainly wouldn’t suggest a 50-times-greater death rate.  

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And other demographic differences cut the other way.

For example, young people are far less likely than seniors to succumb to COVID-19.  (Only 1% of coronavirus victims were 24 or younger, while almost 80% were 65 or older.)

San Francisco’s high-tech industry attracts young people like sh*t attracts flies, but New York City’s population is actually younger than San Francisco’s.

For example, a slightly higher percentage of San Franciscans are over 65 – 15.1% compared to 14.1% of New York City’s residents.  More significantly, New York City has a considerably higher proportion of children – 27.4% of New Yorkers are 18 and under, while only 17.9% of San Franciscans are that young.  

Also, about 60 percent of the people who die from coronavirus are men.  (At least that’s what’s happening in New York City.  Believe it or not, the CDC doesn’t have death figures broken down by gender.)  San Francisco has a slightly higher percentage of male residents than New York City (51% to 48%), which would tend to skew the COVID-19 death rate slightly higher in San Francisco.

In other words, some of the demographic differences between the two cities seem to favor San Francisco, while others favor New York City.  There’s nothing there that explains a death rate that’s 50 times greater.

*     *     *     *     *

Governor Cuomo of New York – who has to be feeling some heat over the fact that his state has by far the worst coronavirus situation in the country – came up with another theory recently.  He says it’s the Italians’ fault:

Last November, December, we knew that China had a virus outbreak.  You could read about it in the newspapers, right?  Everybody knew.  January 26, we know we had the first confirmed case in Seattle, Washington, and California. February 2nd, the president ordered a travel ban from China. March 1st we have the first confirmed case in the state of New York. . . .

March 16th, [President Trump issues] a full travel ban from Europe.  Researchers now find and they report in some newspapers, the virus was spreading wildly in Italy in February and there was an outbreak, massive outbreak in Italy in February. . . . [T]he coronavirus flu virus that came to New York, did not come from China. It came from Europe. . . .

A researcher now says knowing the number of flights coming into New York from Italy, it was like watching a horrible train wreck in slow motion.  Those are the flights that were coming from Italy and from Europe, January and February.  We closed the front door with the China travel ban, which was right.  Even in retrospect, it was right, but we left the back door open because the virus had left China by the time we did the China travel ban. 

That’s an interesting theory, but I haven’t been able to find much evidence in support of it.

New York governor Andrew Cuomo

Not surprisingly, there is a lot more air traffic between Italy and New York City than there is between Italy and San Francisco.  So to the extent travelers from Italy carried the disease to the United States, New York City would have received a lot more of them than San Francisco.

But there are a lot more visitors from China to this country than there are visitors from Italy.  And it appears that more of those visitors flew to San Francisco than to New York City.

It’s possible that Cuomo is correct, but I don’t think he’s come anywhere near proving that Italian travelers for New York City’s much greater COVID-19 death rate.

*     *     *     *     *

The final theory about why New Yorkers are 50 times more likely to die from the coronavirus than San Franciscans is that San Francisco and its neighboring jurisdictions ordered residents to “shelter in place” before New York City.

Residents of the San Francisco Bay area were directed to shelter in place on March 16.  The governor of California followed that up with a statewide order on March 19.

The next day, the New York governor issued a similar stay-at-home order that had an effective date of March 22.

So San Francisco (and its suburbs) only shut things down a few days before New York City did.  Could that short delay be sufficient to explain New York City’s 50-times-greater COVID-19 death rate?

*     *     *     *     *

I think I’ve dug a big enough hole for one day.  

But never fear.  I promise that I’ll pick up my shovel in the next 2 or 3 lines and keep digging until I answer that question.

Click here to listen to today’s featured song, which was released on Supertramp’s sixth studio album, Breakfast in America, in 1979.

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon: