Seattle and the Puget Sound is a beautiful place but horrible place to live. They have an absolutely useless government that has no idea how to solve any of their problems. So they end up with stuff like this.
City population: 8.3M/750k -> one order of magnitude
City density: 28k/8400 -> less than one order of magnitude
This is not what one imagines when one encounters the sentence fragment "Like many orders of magnitude difference."
[EDIT:] Normally technical correctness is appreciated? If anyone here really thinks that New York has done a better job dealing with the pandemic than Washington State, I would love to see the reasoning. ISTM this argument from population proves too much; why can't it be invoked anytime New York's performance lags other states?
Beyond an order of magnitude in population, you have the cultural differences: Low usage of public transportation (compared to NYC), strict observation of social norms, comparatively high number of folks who can work from home, etc.