A Look at COVID-19 in the Second Home Destinations of the Wealthy
April 11, 2020 by Bo Han
To explore more data on COVID-19, please go to covid19.topos.com
National to local news outlets have been covering the flight of the wealthy to destinations like the Hamptons and exclusive ski towns and the potential for them to bring Covid-19 with them, simmering tensions between year-round residents and part-time residents / visitors. We dove into the data to see if we can put some numbers behind the concerns of the locals by looking at 19 popular second-home locations across the country and the 30+ counties they encompass. In this post, we will (1) look at the number of confirmed cases of Covid-19 in these towns and their hospitals’ capacity to treat patients, (2) determine whether the cases per capita are nationally notable, and (3) see if we can link part-time residents to surges in Covid-19 cases in these destinations.
Covid-19 Cases & Medical Capacity
When looking at the number of cases reported (as of April 9), one clear observation is the highest number of cases are found in many of the locations closest to New York City, currently the epicenter of Covid-19 in the country. The Hamptons/Long Island, parts of the Hudson Valley, and Long Beach Island (where the population tripled according to the mayor) are within a short, 1–2 hour drive from the city.
With respect to the medical capacity to support the serious cases of Covid-19, we can use Suffolk County (the seat of the Hamptons/Long Island) as an example. According to data from October 2019, the county has nearly 3,600 hospital beds. From April 1 to April 9, there were 9,808 new cases reported. If 10 percent of those cases seek in-hospital care (conservative estimate of the percentage of cases in China requiring hospitalization), that would require 980 beds for a nine-day period, 27 percent of the beds the county has available, not factoring in patients hospitalized from March.
Of note is that destinations like Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, and the Outer Banks that have enacted a no-go zone or a no non-residents policy, have fared relatively well and have a low number of reported cases, reporting 9, 9, and 10 cases respectively.
Per Capita Cases & National Percentiles
While the Hamptons/Long Island, Hudson Valley, and Long Beach Island have a high number of cases, they also have the highest residential populations. We calculated the cases per 1k people to see if on a per capita basis, the number of Covid-19 cases is still notable.
Blaine County, which includes the exclusive ski town of Sun Valley, has one of the highest cases per capita in the entire country. The county ranks in the 100th percentile for per capita cases, surpassing the counties of New York City and New Orleans.
Suffolk County, which includes the Hamptons as well as Long Island, ranks at the top nationally for per capita cases. Nearly half of the counties (48 percent) that seat these second home destinations are above the 90th percentile nationally for per capita cases, and just over a handful of the counties rank below the 50th percentile.
Linking Covid-19 to Part-time Residents
We recognize that there is no way to associate the cases in these second-home destinations to the arrival of short-term residents and visitors. Also, these destinations do not comprise the entirety of the counties they are located in. Given those constraints, can we observe any relationship between a spike in cases in second-home counties and local events in New York City as a proxy?
Below is a time-series graph of the number of cases for four counties that have the highest number of cases in our analysis, which are in the New York metropolitan area. After March 19, the cases in Suffolk County, NY spike dramatically.
From March 6–10, the most exclusive private schools in New York City like Horace Mann, the Brearley School, and Spence closed, because of suspected cases of Covid-19 or to help contain the virus. Nearly two weeks later, the maximum incubation period of the virus, we see a spike of cases in the county home to the Hamptons/Long Island.
On Sunday, March 22, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s stay-at-home policy took effect. By the middle of the week, cases started to trend quickly in the Hudson Valley area of New York state (Orange County and Dutchess County) and in the New Jersey coastline county, Ocean County.
These trends hint at an exodus of a number of affluent city dwellers after the cancellation of school and orders to work from home for those in non-essential, white collar jobs, confirmed by anecdotal accounts from locals as well as the rising prices of short-term rentals in these destinations.
To explore more data on Covid-19, please go to covid19.topos.com
Data Sources:
- Covid-19 cases by county, The New York Times (source)
- 2018 population by county, American Community Survey, 2018 (source)
- Hospital Beds, Homeland Infrastructure Foundation-Level Data (source)
—
Read more on our COVID-19 research:
