Many clap, some cheer, others hit pots, pans or tambourines: The every evening applause for hospital employees and other systemically important workers has long become a beloved routine for New Yorkers in the corona pandemic – but now new ones are mixing more and more frequently Tones below. “Black Lives Matter,” echoes from the windows and the calls reverberate through the skyscraper canyons along with applause – “the lives of blacks matter”.
For around 100 days, New York, which has been particularly hard hit by the corona pandemic, has been firmly in the grip of the crisis. The hospitals were just beginning to show the first signs of hope, when the death of the African American George Floyd after a brutal police operation in Minneapolis brought about the second crisis in the metropolis – primarily with peaceful mass protests, but also with riots, looting and curfews at night. In addition to suffering, there is more suffering – and anger. In addition to a crisis in the health system, there is also a crisis that affects society as a whole – the former requires people to stay at home and keep their distance, the latter pulls them out into the streets en masse.
Long way
Despite everything, the first easing of the corona restrictions should begin in the metropolis on Monday. In a completely changed New York day, however, almost no one expects an early return to a kind of pre-crisis state.
Almost 400,000 people have contracted the coronavirus in New York State, which is home to around 19 million people, and more than 30,000 of them died after being infected. Around two thirds of these come from the densely populated metropolis of New York, where around half of the state’s residents live – it became the epicenter of the pandemic in the USA.
“I have never seen such a dangerous time,” says Governor Andrew Cuomo. “I think it can also be a positive moment for this country – but it has to be done intelligently.” At his daily press conferences, Cuomo sets the pace for this and recently had a lot of good news: Fewer and fewer new infections, the number of deaths per day fell from around 800 a few weeks ago to less than 50.
Seven conditions for easing
The metropolis of New York now also fulfills all seven conditions for the start of a relaxation process – for example, sufficient free hospital beds and sufficient tests – and can be the last of the ten regions in the state to start, says Cuomo. Four two-week easing phases are now pending. In the first, for example, construction work can start again, in the fourth, cultural institutions, among other things, are allowed to reopen – even if many of them, such as the Metropolitan Opera, have already announced that they will not want to start again before 2021. Hygiene and distance rules continue to apply. If the numbers worsen, the process can be stopped or rolled back at any time.
The enthusiasm in the city is limited. “I don’t have the feeling that this opening process will change anything for me for the time being,” says the owner of a café on the Upper West Side in Manhattan, who is laboriously keeping things going with reduced opening hours and pure “to go” business. He has completely different worries anyway: To the left and right of one of his other cafes in the Soho district, window panes were smashed and graffiti was sprayed, and with luck, his shop has not received anything so far.
Soho and Midtwon unrecognizable
Districts like Soho or Midtown, where there are many elegant boutiques, are hardly recognizable these days. Usually people crowd there on their way to work, tourists go shopping, traffic jams through the streets honking their horns. Now it is mostly quiet, few people and cars are on the road, and homeless people are littered in many entrance areas of closed shops. A woman is sitting on a bench crying.
Many shops have barricaded their window fronts with plywood after the first looting. Some posh department stores on Fifth Avenue have also stretched barbed wire over it and hired entire teams of guards with dogs. At other shops, the “temporarily closed” signs have been replaced by those that read “for rent”. “I can’t believe how much New York has changed,” one woman says aloud to herself as she walks down Fifth Avenue. “It’s not the same city anymore.”
The silence is mainly broken by the protests, in which every day thousands of people walk largely peacefully through the avenues, loudly demanding justice and an end to police brutality and racism and singing.
Sometimes these noises mix with the evening applause. On the stairs in front of a house on the Upper West Side, two kindergarten children, one black and one white, are clapping, who previously – from a distance of one and a half meters – had laughed and told each other jokes. “Why can’t it just be like this all the time?” Sighs the mother of the black child – and claps even louder. “But maybe something good will emerge from everything we are currently experiencing.”
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