That wasn't really the point I was making.
Aside from very small states, cities will constitute most of the population of most states.
E.g. Texas has 4 of the 11 cities in the US with one million+ population. It's true that even in Texas, the cities will be more Democratic and rural areas overwhelmingly Republican.
Miami has more international visitors than Milan.
Paris more than NY. The diabolically bad performance of NE US and NE Italy may have required the international flights, but it wasn't inevitable simply because of that.
I imagine mass transit systems in cities such as NY and London have made things worse than on say Miami, but they are not unique to these cities.
It's not really a specific point, more that there is no right answer to this, but people will largely seek to reinforce their pre-existing beliefs using whichever facts they choose.
E.g. Trump supporters will blame the Democratic government of their states, and vice versa. And people who were already sympathetic to Jacinda Arden will praise her, even where the deaths are essentially identical to Australia (an insignificant number)
Of course as you say, we have learned things and can respond better than before to such a pandemic, but the politics is just the same old point scoring, my team Vs your team playground stuff.
And your opinion might be that protests are important, whereas in the US some people believe they have an absolute right to continue trading. And if the government doesn't pay them to close that's an understandable position. There aren't really any correct answers...
I don't think it's true btw that the Democrats are basically Tories. There are lots of positions that are fairly mainstream there on things such as immigration, transgender rights , etc. That wouldn't fly in UK Labour let alone the Tories.
Economically the US is much more laissez-faire and perhaps that reflects in the NE US covid-19 disaster, but it's not really a universal truth.
I don't agree that protests are more important than, say, walking your dog, which is something that the police were restricting. Unless you are going to make *everything" just guidelines and no law, then mass protests fail any purposive construction of law, and the law does not seem to have been calculated to stop protests as a goal, but are a necessary part of the legitimate purpose of stopping the viral spread.
That might be different in say HK where covid-19 is a good excuse to stop existing protests. Even in India, where the majority are Hindu, the mass spread of covid-19 by Muslim proselytizers can either be seen as 'bad Muslims spreading virus' or 'Islamophobic India persecuting Muslims'.
However when you have a global economic catastrophe laying waste to everything, and know that covid-19 WILL end, so it's not a permanent restriction, it's hard to say that restrictions on mass gatherings, which are more catastrophic in spread terms, the larger they get, could be unjustifiable.