New York City restaurants can now open indoor dining at 50% capacity. On Monday, public high schoolers will be back in class, while yoga and spin classes get up and running again. Shakespeare is returning to Central Park. And after a year where athletes played to empty stadium stands filled out with cardboard cutouts and digitally-inserted fans, New Yorkers will be allowed to attend sporting events in time for the opening day of baseball season.
The push to reopen these and other parts of the state’s economy comes at a surreal moment: just a year ago, New York slammed shut amid skyrocketing deaths, packed hospitals, and refrigerated trucks-turned-mobile-morgues—all in an attempt to stem the spread of the coronavirus. But now more than 7 million doses of three effective coronavirus vaccines have been deposited in the arms of people across the state. Tens of thousands of COVID-19 tests are run every day, while the infection rate, hospitalizations, and deaths are declining. All of which Governor Andrew Cuomo says is an indicator that it’s time to start the After Times.
“COVID's coming down, vaccine rates are going up. Start to look to the future aggressively and let's get back to life and living and get that economy running because it is safe,” said Governor Cuomo, at a press conference Thursday announcing that stadiums and arenas will soon be able to let fans back in the door.
Not everyone shares the governor’s optimism. Mayor Bill de Blasio said the state did not consult with City Hall in deciding to allow indoor fitness classes to reopen, and Cuomo’s recent announcements come amid multiple investigations and sexual harassment scandals involving his administration.
Epidemiologists say the truth likely lies somewhere in between. Rachael Piltch-Loeb, an associate research scientist at the NYU School of Global Public Health, thinks the question of what’s safe to do and what’s not is nuanced.
“If I was making a decision about which stadiums to be opening, it makes sense to focus on Yankee Stadium rather than Madison Square Garden, because we can feel a little bit more confident in people gathering in an outdoor setting,” she said.
Pitch-Loeb said it’s also important to consider the knock-on effects of aggressively reopening swathes of the economy. Reopening Yankee Stadium and Citi Field for ball games will mean reducing the hours that those venues can be used as mass vaccination sites. And while ticket holders are required to present proof of vaccination or a recent negative COVID-19 test, that could also lead to longer wait times for results as testing labs take on the increased demand.
CUNY School of Public Health epidemiologist Denis Nash agrees that things are much safer than they were at this time last year. He says reopening quickly is precarious, given that stadium gates and fitness center doors don’t stop the virus from spreading.
“We also need to keep in mind things that happened on the way to and from these events,” Nash said, “as well as the employees, the ticket takers, the people that are working in food vending areas that are coming into contact with a lot of people over the course of the event that we need to be very concerned about.”
The “gray area” of the moment comes through in the data, as well. While hospitalizations and deaths are declining, positivity rates across the five boroughs have more or less flattened to an average of just more than 6 percent.
“I still would encourage us to be incredibly cautious as we go about reopening,” said Piltch-Loeb. “But I also think that we need to have some perspective that we're not a hundred percent in a space of doom and gloom.”
