Could We Go Into Lockdown Again
Forget well-nigh the vaccines vs. the variant — New York Urban center's survival depends on the outcome of Gov. Kathy Hochul vs. hysteria.
With daily positivity rates soaring even in the Big Apple tree, Hochul — untested in high-stakes economic and social governance — will before long come under enormous pressure to lock us down one time once again.
She'southward easily cowed to catastrophic outcome: Her absurd mask mandate for offices that are largely empty only prolonged their empty country past giving employees more reason to stay home.
Then far, Hochul has wisely emphasized accelerated vaccination and testing efforts. Only she'due south more than left the door open to locking downwards. "I am non an alarmist. I'thou not considering shutting downwards schools or the economy at this fourth dimension," Hochul said Oct. 2.
At this time.
Governor, nosotros hear you — and tremble.
Make no mistake: A 2nd full lockdown like the one then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo imposed on the state from March to June 2020, and only mildly eased in the months that followed, would guarantee the utter devastation of New York City that Cuomo's jackboot but narrowly avoided.
Just put, the city'due south real manor, media, retail and hospitality industries won't survive even a brief 2d lockdown. Every landlord and business owner I know tells me the aforementioned things: The city's irrepressible, beating center will be stilled — institutionally and among millions of us who were ready to brave an uncertain, sometimes interrupted futurity that no one was prepare to give up on.
Commercial real estate, although strong on paper, lives on borrowed time until leases elapse at buildings barely 25 percent occupied. Brick-and-mortar retail is on its final legs. Restaurants are struggling even later on massive government help.
Another lockdown will also nip in the bud, if not in the throat, the metropolis's residential rebound, which would not have happened without a widespread belief that we were over again "open up for business organization." We would never again suffer through months when virtually everything was closed and even sidewalk news boxes stood empty — would nosotros?
As for schools: What parents in their correct minds volition go on kids enrolled here when organized learning largely goes on without interruption in many other states?
Slap-up cultural institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Carnegie Hall face like ruin. They barely made it through Cuomo'due south full closure and after, when for many months capacity was capriciously express to 33 percent while their operating costs remained the same as before. Administrators and curators might besides lath up the masterpieces for good and read most them on the beach.
It isn't only the individual sector. The MTA was and so staggered by the loss of xc per centum of subway riders during the 2020 lockdown that it needed $xiv billion in new federal funding to stay afloat. Volition anyone ride the trains once again if there are no jobs, stores or theaters?
A lockdown encore in the metropolis will doom the entire country, where unelected Hochul hopes to win election in 2022. More 40 percent of country income taxation acquirement alone comes from New York City.
You'd think that such fiscal truths would deter Hochul from repeating Cuomo's blunder.
But Jane Fonda was onto something when she said in October 2020 that the pandemic was "God's gift to the left." She meant that the viral toll would focus hatred on then-President Donald Trump, simply it applies in a much larger context: that fear of uncontrolled illness spread empowered government at every level to seize command of workplaces, the overall economic system and the social guild.
Virtually of the media feed the fright, with 24/seven loops of scare talk from publicity-craving doomsayers and photos of about-decease COVID victims suffering lone in lonely, dark rooms.
The whiff of power that came with shutting downwards an unabridged state of 20 one thousand thousand people intoxicated privileged-at-birth Cuomo and threatens to consume Hochul too.
Although from a working-grade family, she has little if any experience in the business organisation of private enterprise, having spent about of her life in politics in service of liberal causes.
Cuomo didn't know a damn almost the hard school of business and commerce, and Hochul is barely more attuned.
Lockdowns appeal to left-fly economists, educators and media outlets quietly (or not quietly) sympathetic to iron-fisted, socialist-style regime control.
The alarmingly swift spread of the Omicron variant has enabled their agenda as nothing has since the pandemic'due south horrific first months in the city. It is not a phenomenon to accept lightly.
But it requires perspective, which is bachelor to all on the city Section of Health website nether the "Recent Trends" button.
COVID-19-related hospitalizations and deaths among the 80-plus percent of the population that's vaccinated remain at minuscule levels despite an uptick in cases. Among the vaccinated, the urban center saw well under a single death per every 100,000 people for the week catastrophe Dec. five.
Still Hochul might well yield to the doom school that warns of "overwhelmed hospitals."
If the hospitals are overwhelmed, Governor, figure out a way to underwhelm them. That'due south your job — not to wreck the World's Greatest City that's heroically struggled to live upward to the name.
Source: https://nypost.com/2021/12/16/nyc-lockdown-in-question-amid-rising-covid-19-cases/
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