When Delta comes, are New Yorkers finally going to live up to our reputation for toughness, or are we going to curl into a fetal position again?
When Delta comes, are New Yorkers finally going to live up to our reputation for toughness, or are we going to curl into a fetal position again?
M onday, September 13, was a landmark day for New York City: The city schools reopened, with mandatory in-person instruction, and the subways and sidewalks were the busiest they’ve been since the Before Times. Meanwhile, four of Broadway’s tentpole shows were to reopen the following day, giving fans of Hamilton, The Lion King, Wicked, and Chicago their first chance to see these offerings since March of 2020.
Restaurants and bars, which by city mandate are now required to ensure that all adult patrons are vaccinated, are going strong. Real-estate salesmen tell me that, though there was a mass exodus last spring, especially among renters, the former homes of the fleeing have been eagerly snapped up by incomers, and sales prices are off only by 10 percent or so. The crime wave of last year appears to have peaked, and this summer violent crime fell. Overall crime rates are roughly flat from 2020 to 2021, but still well below the levels of the first decade of this century and far below 1990s levels. (New York City is on track for about 450 murders this year, much worse than 2019’s 311, but well below the first ten years of Mike Bloomberg’s twelve-year mayoralty.)
So: back to normal and all systems go? Not quite. In the eighth and final year of the sorry administration of Bill de Blasio, street life remains visibly blighted. There are one or more homeless people sprawled out on virtually every block of Broadway. De Blasio’s brilliant idea of placing phone-recharging kiosks on street corners, where I suppose he imagined busy moms would stop for a quick voltage top-up on their way to yoga class, has added to the street squalor. Homeless men camp out at the kiosks with shopping trolleys full of their filthy belongings. Shouting lunatics and beggars are everywhere. The streets are a mess, the garbage cans are overflowing, and the “emergency” proviso of halving the frequency of street-cleaning operations, instituted more than a year ago, remains in place indefinitely. New York City’s budget, at $99 billion, $14 billion of which was a gift from the federal government, has increased $23 billion since 2014. (In famously thrifty and well-managed Chicago, which is roughly one-third New York’s population, the budget is $12.8 billion.) Touted as a “luxury product” by Mike Bloomberg, New York City carries a high price tag, but it looks a bit more like Kmart than Cartier these days.
The looming problem is the one no one talks about: the Delta variant. It’s coming. New Yorkers have spent the summer sneering at those dumb horse-paste-eating hicks in the South who got sick and died en masse. But take a peek at the curve from last year: Cases were flat (below 1,000 a day) in New York City all summer but then started rising dramatically in early October. We had a full-on second wave by December, peaking at 16,000 new cases a day in January.
Delta is a crisis of the unvaccinated, but every New York Times commenter who jokes about the desirability of “thinning the herd” in the Bible Belt should think about the fact that there are roughly 3 million entirely unvaccinated people living in New York City right now, and we’re a bit more tightly packed than those folks out in the heartland. If you ride the trains, you’re going to be riding Delta. There are roughly as many unvaccinated New York City dwellers as there are people (of any vaccination status) in Mississippi. And that’s not counting the throngs of visitors who come to New York, especially around the holidays. Maybe that little cloth mask that has become a sort of religious garment will stop Delta from spreading, but the Bangladesh mask survey suggests it actually won’t. Delta is incredibly contagious. Non-surgical masks are incredibly porous.
What are we going to do when the wave moves north? Will we close the schools again? Will we bar indoor dining? Will we close up the theaters, nix gatherings, cancel Christmas parties? Again? Will we have a third winter of fear? How much more punishment can New York City inflict on itself?
New Yorkers famously fancy ourselves to be made of stronger stuff than the average burgher. A too-close encounter with a rat or a near-death experience with a taxi becomes fodder for a funny dinner-party anecdote. Yet New Yorkers also go jogging and bicycling with masks on. When Delta comes, are we finally going to live up to our reputation for toughness and live through it, or are we going to freak out, torture our children by depriving them of one another’s company, and stomp on everything that is good about this city in a futile quest for COVID zero?
As has been evident throughout the summer, unvaccinated people will be stubborn in the face of serious risk, but even so, vaccinated people will have little cause for fear. Will many of them choose to be terrified anyway? If so, how much damage to city life will we allow them to do?