New York City's grim COVID outlook is looking even more miserable because of its terrible leadership
David Dee Delgado/Getty Images
- COVID-19 had a horrific impact on New York City, with thousands of deaths and myriad shuttered businesses.
- The chaotic leadership of Andrew Cuomo and Bill de Blasio have only exacerbated these results.
- Instead of learning from the mistakes of March and April, Cuomo and de Blasio are taking a hamfisted approach to the winter wave of the pandemic.
- Without a concerted effort by the city's leaders, catastrophe lies ahead.
- Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute's City Journal.
- This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
This December, will mid-Manhattan's sparse crowds be greeted with holiday lights - or with newly shuttered stores?
As COVID cases once again rise, there have been suggestions that New York City could once again face restrictions on things like shopping, dining, and even schooling. But if restrictions are put in place again, there would be no excuse for the type of brutal lockdown that New Yorkers endured for three months starting in mid-March.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio have had nearly nine months to learn something about how COVID-19 spreads, and to learn from other cities and countries around the world. Yet they refuse to learn from their own and others' mistakes, and to act decisively but precisely. So we're seemingly hurtling toward a second all-or-nothing lockdown from which it will be far harder to recover.
The impact of all-or-nothing lockdowns is immense
Some of New York's still-closed Irish bars still bear green and rainbow tidings of St. Patrick's Day, the week that the city closed public schools and the state decreed that all "non-essential" businesses close down. Residents were also ordered to stay home except for exercise, critical work - such as at supermarkets and hospitals - and chores such as picking up prescriptions.
Retail stores stayed closed until June. Museums stayed shut until August. Restaurants, after a summer of outdoor dining, launched limited-capacity indoor dining only in late September.
The lockdown had a horrific impact on jobs. Nearly 900,000 of New York's roughly 4.1 million private-sector workers were unemployed by late April, or a full fifth of the workforce.
But it was unreasonable, back then, to blame the governor and mayor for their actions. No one yet understood how COVID-19 was spreading. The focus was on surfaces, not air transmission, and few people differentiated between indoors and outdoors, crowded and sparse.
In early March, New Yorkers also went about their business unmasked, in packed restaurants, elevators, and trains. This meant unchecked exponential spread started at a high level. The city didn't hit its seven-day average death toll peak of 1,193 until late April, a full month after the economic shutdown.
Strict measures worked. The case and death rate came down, and stayed down, as New York began reopening. Now, though, as cases around the country soar, the city is enduring a second wave. Confirmed cases have nearly doubled over two weeks, from a seven-day average of 832 in early November to more than 3,255 by December 5.
New measures are in order - but as to the what, why, and when, Cuomo and de Blasio are still stuck in mid-March.
It's as if they've learned nothing
The evidence that the governor and mayor have yet to evolve in their thinking came shortly into the uptick in new cases.
In November, de Blasio abruptly shut down in-person learning in the public schools. De Blasio took this step, he said, because the percentage of COVID tests coming back positive had stayed above 3% for more than a week, a key metric the city selected over the summer.
Yet the city's own positivity rate in schools, random testing showed, was only 0.17%. The city has presented no evidence that schools are a key point of transmission. In fact, even with limited testing, school reopenings have generally been a success story. Only 30% of students were going to classes in person, and most adhered to mask and distancing protocols. Meanwhile, under state guidelines, kids can still attend private and religious schools. If an activity is safe - or unsafe - for some teachers, staffers and students, isn't it safe - or unsafe - for all?
Indoor dining, however, is a different story. Multiple studies, using multiple methods, indicate a causal link between dining and transmission.
JPMorgan found a link between money spent in restaurants to caseload upticks, the Centers for Disease Control found adults testing positive were twice as likely to have dined in a restaurants in the two previous weeks than were people testing negative, and a University of Warwick study linked the UK's push to get people eating out again over the summer and early fall to a rise in cases.
The early data meets a common-sense standard, too: indoor dining involves people spending at least an hour in a confined space with no mask on, often talking loudly, another risk factor.
Yet Cuomo and de Blasio, armed with this information, and watching their graphs of cases and hospitalizations rise, have done nothing. Despite closing schools completely, neither de Blasio nor Cuomo have moved to shut down indoor dining or gyms for weeks but have threatened new restrictions.
Which only raises the question: why not do it now? The answer in November was that the state, which must make the ultimate decision on restaurants and gyms, but not schools, relies on slightly different data, which slowed a lower percentage of infections. Now, though, both the state and the city data have crossed key thresholds, with the city's infection rate above five percent, according to both sources. But the governor's office is waiting to see if the rate goes down.
Three-quarters of a year into the pandemic, then, New Yorkers face a grim reality about their leaders: because of a lack of coordination on a few tenths of a percentage point, Cuomo and de Blasio stood by and watched as cases started to spiral out of control - and then they'll overreact in the other direction, just as Britain and France have done in recent weeks, in closing down both indoor dining as well as retail stores and cultural institutions at the same time.
These new shutdowns could come despite the fact that that masked, distanced shopping in uncrowded stores is a lower-risk activity when it comes to COVID spread.
This path, still avoidable, is catastrophic. In-person retailers face existential competition from Amazon and other online stores. Missing a Christmas season, even a highly diminished one, will mean even more vacancies along Manhattan's retail corridors come spring. Already, Fifth Avenue is picked with boarded-up stores, from a flagship Victoria's Secret still covered in anti-looting plywood to the shell of the old Henri Bendel, closed more than a year ago.
Empty retail space, in turn, deters office workers and tourists from returning. In November, Macy's chief Jeff Gennette said he hoped to avoid a resumption of the binary "essential" or non-essential" definition that guided closures in the spring. But delaying targeted closures only makes broader ones inevitable.
As of October, New York Still was still missing more than half a million private-sector jobs, including 37,000 retail jobs. New York cannot afford more job losses - and closing indoor dining will put more people out of work.
But the city especially cannot afford unnecessary job losses, guided not by an admittedly still-imperfect understanding of the science, but by a lack of coordination between the governor and the mayor, still governing as if it were March and not November.
Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute's City Journal. Twitter: @nicolegelinas
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