New York will reopen museums in August

In New York museums can reopen under certain conditions from August 24th. Mask requirements and mandatory sidewalks apply, as New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo said yesterday. The museums are also only allowed to let in a maximum of a quarter of the normally allowed number of visitors and have to sell time-bound tickets, it said.

The coronavirus crisis has hit the city’s cultural industry hard. Museums in New York have been closed since March. Broadway theaters and the Metropolitan Opera also canceled all events until the end of the year. The New York Metropolitan Museum had already announced in mid-July that it would reopen on August 29th.

Badly hit by the pandemic in spring

The city was one of the global centers of the pandemic in March and April, with around 226,000 confirmed infected people. Around 19,000 people are confirmed coronavirus deaths, and the city has more than 4,600 possible additional victims.

After often more than 6,000 new infections per day in the peak phase, no more than 500 new infections have been confirmed on any day since the beginning of June. While the number of cases has risen sharply nationwide since then, they have remained low in New York so far. The rate of positive tests is less than two percent, so experts assume that there is a realistic picture of the current outbreak.

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