New York City begins reopening after 3 months of COVID19 outbreak and hardship
NEW YORK — Exactly 100 days since its first case of the coronavirus was confirmed, New York City, which weathered extensive hardship as an epicenter of the worldwide outbreak, is set to take the first tentative steps toward reopening its doors Monday.
State and city officials said they were optimistic that the city would begin to spring back to life. Testing is robust and growing, reaching 33,000 people on a recent day. And new infections are now down to around 500 a day — half as many as there were just a few weeks ago. The road back will undoubtedly be challenging. More than 885,000 jobs vanished during the outbreak, and strong gains are not expected for the city until 2022. The city budget hemorrhaged tax revenue and now faces a $9 billion shortfall over the next year.
In areas hit hard by looters in high-end retail neighborhoods of Manhattan, some stores were not planning to open Monday. The executive director of the business improvement group in SoHo declined to even discuss reopening in the neighborhood. One person briefed on the authority’s planning said officials there expected the trains to be at well below 50 percent capacity at least through Labor Day — a calculation based on the idea that many office workers would continue to work remotely into the fall.
As many as 32,000 construction sites could open as of Monday, according to the city, the biggest part of the initial phase of reopening. The protests were not altering preparations, said Gary LaBarbera, president of the Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New York. Some construction work was deemed essential early on and continued through the state’s pause. Many manufacturers, particularly those that made protective gear and medical equipment, have also been operating.
“Once they’re in the shop — my shop is big — they have plenty of space to work,” he said, referring to distancing measures. “Businesses can be ready, but are the consumers ready?” asked Thomas Grech, president of the Queens Chamber of Commerce. “I want to demonstrate to the buying public, to the consumers out there, that the businesses are making it safe.”
The city’s contact tracing efforts are far less high-tech. But for the past week, newly infected New Yorkers have been receiving calls from the new corps of tracers. City Hall did not provide figures for how many people they were able to reach. The work of contact tracing has taken on new urgency because of the public outpouring of anger at the death of George Floyd, a black man killed in Minneapolis on May 25 in a confrontation with four police officers.
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