Popular media personality Larry Madowo on Tuesday, March 24 opened up on his decision to leave New York over the Coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic.
Madowo, a Knight-Bagehot fellow at Columbia University, revealed that he initially hurried to return to New York after a long trip that included a visit to Nairobi but realised upon arrival that he had to leave.
He revealed that while in Kenya, he had been worried that the US could potentially effect travel restrictions on countries including Kenya and therefore decided to quickly return to avoid disrupting his life.
The situation in New York, however, prompted Madowo to leave, with the state having an infection rate five times faster than the national average with 20,875 confirmed cases as of Tuesday, March 24.
"As soon as I got back to New York City, I knew I had to leave. As authorities ramped up testing for the new coronavirus, it quickly became the epicenter of the disease in North America.
"I think New York is the greatest city on earth and I say this as someone who has worked in 3 continents and traveled almost everywhere. It survived 9/11 and it will get through this as well.
"But I didn't think it wise to stay in a city with an infection rate five times higher than the rest of the country," Madowo wrote.
On Monday, March 23, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo had requested hospitals in the state to boost their capacity by 100% to help treat the overwhelming number of patients infected with Covid-19.
According to Cuomo, New York which has a hospital bed capacity of 53,000 requires at least 113,000 hospital beds along with other supplies to effectively manage the situation.
"That trajectory is going up — the wave is still going up. We have a lot of work to do to get that rate down and get the hospital capacity up," Cuomo told reporters.
Without disclosing his new location, Madowo stated that he had moved 'a few states away' where he was self-isolating in line with directives from the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
With Kenya having so far recorded 16 confirmed cases of the virus, the journalist noted that he would probably have been safer in the country compared to the United States.
"I had to go through a secondary CDC screening at JFK and declare my travel history be allowed back into these United States.
"Deportation was never on the table but maybe I would have been safer in Kenya than here?" the long read shared by Madowo read in part.
