NYC has decided vaccines matter more than tourism
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- NYC requiring proof of vaccination for most indoor activities says a lot about the pandemic economy.
- Bill de Blasio isn't just prioritizing health - he's preserving mask-free indoors and staving off lockdown.
- His decision implies the US could turn into a two-track economy of vaccinated and unvaccinated areas.
- See more stories on Insider's business page.
New York City just made a gamechanging move for its economy - and maybe the country's.
Mayor Bill de Blasio announced on Tuesday that workers and people in the city will need to provide COVID-19 vaccination proof for indoor activities at restaurants, gyms, and performance venues. The mandate, known as the "Key to NYC Pass," will begin on August 16 and will be enforced starting September 13, when students are back at school and workers return to offices, de Blasio said.
The mandate comes at a time when the highly contagious Delta variant of the coronavirus is surging across the US. As of July 20, the variant accounted for 83% of all new sequenced COVID-19 cases in the US, the CDC announced.
The surge led the CDC to reinstate its guidance on masking indoors in high-risk areas - including NYC - and revived fears of the kinds of lockdowns seen in 2020. De Blasio did not insist on a mask mandate for the city, and now he's gone one step further to preserving a mask-free, not-locked-down economy - even if it means sacrificing some much-needed dollars from unvaccinated tourists.
"Masks have value, unquestionably," de Blasio said. "But masks are not going at the root of the problem. Vaccination is."
The Key to NYC Pass is de Blasio's latest attempt to increase the vaccination rate in the city, hoping that it would convince New Yorkers that they can't enjoy all of the city's offerings and activities without being vaccinated.
"This will encourage a lot more vaccination - we've seen it already," de Blasio said when unveiling the mandate. "If you want to participate in our society fully, you've got to get vaccinated." That means tourists from states like Florida or Texas, which have lower vaccination rates and are among those seeing the most new infections, will have to vax up or skip that trip to Broadway.
Living in a two-track economy
NYC will be the first US city to introduce an indoors vaccine mandate.
By doing so, de Blasio is banking on the idea that a healthier population will result in a stronger economy. Formerly the epicenter of the coronavirus during the spring of 2020, NYC has since made a big comeback. But it hasn't yet fully recovered.
Central business districts like midtown still aren't quite as bustling as they used to be, plenty of the wealthy have permanently moved out, and tourism may not fully recover until 2025. An indoor mask mandate could deter unvaccinated out-of-state visitors at a time when the city's economy badly needs revenue from tourism. In 2019, NYC welcomed 66 million visitors, The New York Times reported, but just 22 million in 2020.
But if the mandate succeeds in pushing more people to get vaccinated, NYC may return to something closer to a pre-pandemic normal more quickly. Highly vaccinated metro areas have seen a slight acceleration in job postings over the past four weeks, compared to less vaccinated ones, Jeff Kolko, Indeed's chief economist, recently Tweeted.
If successful, NYC could also set the stage for more big cities in the US to follow suit with their own vaccine mandates. The US may then take on the shape of a two-track economy, marked by highly vaccinated areas, including mandates, and poorly vaccinated regions without. This divide has already begun to form among states more vaccinated than others, but vaccine mandates in certain places could further sharpen the difference.
To be sure, all 50 states have reported rising vaccination rates as the Delta variant surges. That's good news, as it signals a path toward a more cohesively vaccinated country, bringing closer the light at the end of the tunnel.
But, given the already stark geographical divides in vaccination rates, it's likely that unification may come later rather than sooner. Until then, in the absence of President Joe Biden mandating coronavirus vaccination on a federal level, the country is increasingly sorting into a patchwork of vaxed and unvaxed economies.
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