Forget about the vaccines vs. the variant — New York City’s survival depends on the outcome of Gov. Kathy Hochul vs. hysteria.
With daily positivity rates soaring even in the Big Apple, Hochul — untested in high-stakes economic and social governance — will soon come under enormous pressure to lock us down once again.
She’s easily cowed to catastrophic effect: Her absurd mask mandate for offices that are largely empty only prolonged their empty state by giving employees more reason to stay home.
So far, Hochul has wisely emphasized accelerated vaccination and testing efforts. But she’s more than left the door open to locking down. “I am not an alarmist. I’m not considering shutting down schools or the economy at this time,” Hochul said Oct. 2.
At this time.
Governor, we hear you — and tremble.
Make no mistake: A second total 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 destruction of New York City that Cuomo’s jackboot only narrowly avoided.
Simply put, the city’s real estate, media, retail and hospitality industries won’t survive even a brief second lockdown. Every landlord and business owner I know tells me the same things: The city’s irrepressible, beating heart will be stilled — institutionally and among millions of us who were ready to brave an uncertain, sometimes interrupted future that no one was ready to give up on.
Commercial real estate, although strong on paper, lives on borrowed time until leases expire at buildings barely 25 percent occupied. Brick-and-mortar retail is on its last legs. Restaurants are struggling even after massive government aid.
Another lockdown will also nip in the bud, if not in the throat, the city’s residential rebound, which would not have happened without a widespread belief that we were again “open for business.” We would never again suffer through months when almost everything was closed and even sidewalk news boxes stood empty — would we?
As for schools: What parents in their right minds will keep kids enrolled here when organized learning largely goes on without interruption in many other states?
Great cultural institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Carnegie Hall face similar ruin. They barely made it through Cuomo’s total closure and after, when for many months capacity was capriciously limited to 33 percent while their operating costs remained the same as before. Administrators and curators might as well board up the masterpieces for good and read about them on the beach.
It isn’t only the private sector. The MTA was so staggered by the loss of ninety percent of subway riders during the 2020 lockdown that it needed $14 billion in new federal funding to stay afloat. Will anyone ride the trains again if there are no jobs, stores or theaters?
A lockdown encore in the city will doom the entire state, where unelected Hochul hopes to win election in 2022. More than 40 percent of state income tax revenue 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, but it applies in a much larger context: that fear of uncontrolled disease spread empowered government at every level to seize control of workplaces, the overall economy and the social order.
Most of the media feed the fear, with 24/7 loops of scare talk from publicity-craving doomsayers and photos of near-death COVID victims suffering alone in lonely, dark rooms.
The whiff of power that came with shutting down an entire state of 20 million people intoxicated privileged-at-birth Cuomo and threatens to consume Hochul as well.
Although from a working-class family, she has little if any experience in the business of private enterprise, having spent most of her life in politics in service of liberal causes.
Cuomo didn’t know a damn about the hard school of business and commerce, and Hochul is barely more attuned.
Lockdowns appeal to left-wing economists, educators and media outlets quietly (or not quietly) sympathetic to iron-fisted, socialist-style government control.
The alarmingly swift spread of the Omicron variant has enabled their agenda as nothing has since the pandemic’s horrific first months in the city. It is not a phenomenon to take lightly.
But it requires perspective, which is available to all on the city Department of Health website under 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 city saw well under a single death per every 100,000 people for the week ending Dec. 5.
Yet 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’s your job — not to wreck the World’s Greatest City that’s heroically struggled to live up to the name.
