Quote:
Originally Posted by iheartthed
NYC is nowhere near pre-pandemic normal, but it feels like the city is starting to recover in a meaningful way. Rush hour vehicular traffic in Manhattan is increasing, but is still far below pre-pandemic normal. Subway rush hour ridership is gradually picking up, but is also well below pre-pandemic normal.
The city was trending recovery in the Fall too, but omicron dealt a pretty substantial setback. The recovery feels more solid now.
|
Silly for omicron to have set back anything. It’s less dangerous than flu.
Anyway, I think the comparison between London and NYC is interesting. Our lockdown was stricter and longer than yours, and then we had two more (right through spring of 2021). But Covid wasn’t weaponized politically like it was in the US - there were some attempts by Labour to mimic the Democrats in the US and blame everything on Boris Johnson’s government, but it’s not like their own voters were itching for more lockdowns, rules and restrictions. The middle class old folks that were nervous are actually mostly Tories. And you had nothing like the hospitality situation in NYC, where 20-something staff were (and are) acting like allowing indoor dining/dropping mask rules/dropping vaccine mandates is putting their lives at risk. Here everyone in hospitality just thought it was bullshit that their industry was shut down for so long.
Basically in England you had top-down, government mandated rules that most people tried to shirk as much as they possibly could (which was not much, because businesses were actually forced to close for a really long time), while in NYC it seems like you had a lot of “woke” bullshit in opposition to and stemming from Trump’s nonchalance about Covid. As a result, things here went pretty much back to normal as soon as the rules were dropped (though people still didn’t want to go to the office, so areas of London dependent on commuters have taken longer to bounce back). It doesn’t sound like that’s the case in NYC.