New York City enters phase one of coronavrius lockdown reopening

New York City took its first steps to reopening on Monday after nearly three months in lockdown, with retailers finally being allowed to open their doors again to provide curbside pick up, but much of the city remains closed because workers are nervous about coming back and after an unpredictable week of riots and looting.

Dine-in service at restaurants and bars remains prohibited, gyms are closed and hair salons and offices are still not yet allowed to reopen.  Monday’s long-awaited reopening lets all retailers open up on a pick-up basis only, and allows manufacturing and construction workers back to work.

But there has not been a sudden rush back to business that might have been expected several weeks ago. After a week of riots and looting, many stores in Manhattan remain boarded up. 

Some retail workers are also scared to go back to their jobs because they fear contracting COVID-19. 

Kate Spade, Sephora and Coach – all of which had their windows smashed in at least one location by looters last weekend – will not reopen on Monday. Sources say thousands of their workers are nervous about contracting the virus.  

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De Blasio said Macy’s was among stores that will reopen and that the recent unrest had had little impact on reopening plans.

‘Because we contained it with the curfews, very minimal impact in terms of phase one,’ he said, adding that the looting had been ‘horrible’. 

He accepted that not everyone would hurry back and said many people and businesses will likely watch eagerly over the next few days and weeks for a second wave of virus infections before encouraging staff to return to work.

‘Everybody has to make their own choice. New Yorkers are very pragmatic. What they’re going to do is watch and as they see things working, more and more people will come out,’ he said. 

Monday marks 100 days since the first coronavirus case was detected in New York state. There were six deaths from the virus on Saturday, according to data released by the city, and only 61 people were hospitalized with it on Sunday. 

‘When we first started, all the experts. They all said the same thing. It’s going to depend on what people do.

‘I am so proud of how New Yorkers have responded. New Yorkers did what they had to do.

‘If you’d told me 100 day ago that we would be reopening when we didn’t even know how bad it was going to get… we had some dire predictions.

‘It was frightening. But New Yorkers did it. It’s that simple. 

‘We’re not out of the woods but we are on the other side, certainly. When things are tough, New Yorkers are tougher,’ Gov. Cuomo said on Monday at his daily briefing.  

He went on to say it had been both ’emotionally hard’ and ‘exhausting’ but added optimistically: ‘Congratulations. We are back. We are back.  

 More than 17,000 people have died in New York City since the pandemic began. At the height of the crisis, 800 people were dying every day and field hospitals were erected to help cope with the staggering body count. 

Now, they have been dismantled and temporary morgues that lined the streets have all been removed. 

On Monday, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced five new bus ways will be added to the city to ease the load on the current network. The Staten Island ferry will also run every 20 minutes during rush hour. 

Coach, Kate Spade, and Stuart Weitzman locations in the Big Apple will remain closed on Monday – this despite the fact that hundreds of their stores across North America, Europe, and Asia have reopened in recent weeks.

All three brands are properties of their parent company, Tapestry Inc. 

Around half of Tapestry’s retail locations in the United States and Canada are open for curbside service but the company is being more cautious when it comes to its New York operations, given that the city was hit hardest by COVID-19. 

‘We’ve been taking a careful, phased approach in reopening our ~700 stores across North America (NA), following the successful strategy we utilized in China, South Korea and Japan.

‘Today we have about 460 NA stores open across our three brands (Coach, Kate Spade and Stuart Weitzman), most offering curbside or store pickup, with about ¼ of these locations fully open to the public with safety measures in place. 

‘We have not, as yet, reopened our NYC stores,’ a spokeswoman told DailyMail.com.

Ulta Beauty Inc, the popular cosmetics brand, also has no plans to resume business in New York City today.

Of the company’s 51 locations in New York State, just seven will be open for curbside pickup on Monday, but none of those will be in New York City.

Retailers are taking it very slow since many of their employees do not feel safe enough to go back to work given the possibility of additional COVID-19 outbreaks.

‘Phase 1 is only going to have a minor impact on retail and retail employment,’ Stuart Applebaum, president of the 60,000-member Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, told the New York Post.

‘Most retail workers will remain unemployed.’

Applebaum said workers are ‘frightened’ to return to work, which for many requires them to take mass transit.

To offset their fears, the city is giving out free hand sanitizer and face masks on trains. 

The Bloomingdale’s location on East 60th Street will offer curbside pickup services, as will the Macy’s in Herald Square.

The Macy’s flagship store was looted on Monday just after 11pm, when dozens of people broke their way through the boarded-up entrance and ran into the store. 

One such metric is the number of new infections which dropped to 781 cases, or around 1 per cent of those tested on Saturday.  

Other metrics needed before reopening was granted include at least 30 contract tracer for every 100,00 residents and the capacity to perform 30 diagnostic tests for every 1,000 residents. 

Thirty per cent of hospital beds and ICU beds must be available and wards must have a 90-day stockpile of PPE.  

Officials said the city’s subways should be operating at around 95 per cent of their pre-pandemic service by Monday to help facilitate New Yorkers’ return to work, officials said. 

Mayor Bill de Blasio estimated that up to 400,000 people would be returning to work today under Phase One of the reopening scheme.

On Sunday he emphasized that Monday’s reopening was ‘a moment that every New Yorker should celebrated’, ABC News reported. 

It is mandatory for masks to be warn in a bid to reduce the chance of catching the virus, and the MTA has said it will test ‘real time’ air filtration systems on trains. 

A source told the NY Post: ‘It complements the disinfecting and cleaning that is happening multiple times a day in every car, and the requirement that everybody wears a mask’. 

Workers will also distribute masks at kiosks as well as other locations to help keep New Yorkers safe 

Normal, pre-pandemic service levels will resume by Tuesday, Interim Transit President Sara Feinberg told 1010 WINS.

Last week the MTA called for a wave of volunteers to help hand out the masks as well as hand sanitizer. 

A letter sent to to the mayor and city leaders said: ‘The vast majority of our workforce will of course be operating and maintaining the system itself. 

‘The MTA has requested the city provide 3,000 volunteers to support this customer facing effort.’

The city’s reopening today comes after thousands of people marched through streets to protest racism and police brutality in the wake of the killing of George Floyd.  

De Blasio announced an early end to the 8pm curfew that was set to remain at least through early Monday, with officials planning to lift it at the same time the city was to begin reopening after shutdowns because of the coronavirus. 

He said he was ‘cautious’ about moving to Phase Two , which would allow a surge of workers to return to offices, restaurants and bars to offer outdoor seated services and retail shops to allow people in store. 

Hair salons will also be allowed to reopen at 50 per cent capacity in this stage. 

While state guideline say Phase Two could be implemented in two weeks’ time on 22 June under state guidelines, Blasio told New Yorkers to ‘think about the beginning of July as the target’. 

He said New York City has was ‘not like other regions’ of the state and said the reopening process could be either slowed down or sped up depending on its success.  

Bill de Blasio announces plan to expand outdoor dining in New York and says more streets will be open to pedestrians in July after he DELAYS phase 2 reopening

De Blasio announced Thursday that restaurants in New York City could begin reopening from early July with a focus on outdoor seating.

The mayor announced a later date than expected for phase two of reopening from coronavirus shutdown, pushing it back to next month.

The city was originally thought to begin phase two of reopening on June 22, two weeks after it starts in phase one this Monday.     

When phase two does begin, however, de Blasio said that new ways for restaurants to enforce social distancing while still opening up for business and bringing back employees were being explored. 

It means that the city could allow restaurants to co-opt streets and space currently reserved for parking. 

An Open Restaurant program will work alongside Open Streets to identify commercial strips with a high number of restaurants that could be closed off to traffic to allow more seating outside. 

The program would also make it easier for restaurants to set up side walk seating, and curbside restaurant seating, allowing for businesses to open and hopefully rebound while maintaining social distancing.  

‘We’ll do what it takes to help this key part of life in New York City, this key part of the economy, the wellspring, livelihood of hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers to come back,’ de Blasio said. 

‘To come back strong starting in phase two in July.

‘This is going to be another important step but again health and safety first,’ he added. 

In phase two, we will be able to move on to many other types of businesses and as we heard from the state, that can also include reopening a number of our restaurants with a focus on outdoors and that’s the way we want to go. 

‘We have a new initiative, Open Restaurants, that will focus on what it takes to make outdoor seating work. We will provide a plan to help restaurants set up that outdoor seating to help them bring their employees back.

‘We will provide a massive expansion of curb side seating, a massive expansion of open streets.’ 

The mayor warned, however, that the reopening continues to rely on safety concerns involved in doing so. 

‘Everything we’re doing, it’s to ensure that it’s done safely,’ he said.

‘To ensure that this disease does not spread, that we beat it back and as our test and tract program comes into high gear this week, that we fight back. 

‘At the same time that we help businesses stay safe, bring back people’s livelihood, bring back what people love about this place, we fight this disease back every day.’

De Blasio also announced further promising signs in the drop of hospitalizations and rates of positive testing in the city. 

The threshold for hospitalizations per day in order to continue reopening lies at under 200 a day and there were just 48 hospitalizations on Wednesday. 

ICU patients are also below the threshold. There are now 354 patients in ICU in the city.  

The rate of those testing positive for coronavirus in New York City has now dropped to three percent, well below the 15 percent threshold.

This is the lowest rate of positive tests seen in the city since the start of the pandemic, de Blasio added. 

ICU space, hospitalizations and positive test rates were three of the main factors holding back the city’s reopening. 

As of Saturday there were 203,400 confirmed cases of coronavirus in New York City. 

There were also more than 17,000 confirmed coronavirus deaths and a further 4,702 deaths that are thought probable to have been linked to the disease.  

The news of NYC’s latest time frame for phase two came after Governor Andrew Cuomo announced Wednesday that restaurants in the seven regions of the state that have already entered phase two of reopening can reopen for outdoor dining from Thursday.

Restaurants that reopen must follow social distancing guidelines, including placing outdoor tables six feet apart, all staff must wear face masks, and customers must also wear face masks when not seated.

‘We are continuously evaluating activities that can be safely reopened, and today we are adding outdoor seating at restaurants to phase two,’ said Cuomo.

The latest easing of coronavirus lockdown restrictions applies to the seven regions that have entered the second phase of the four-step reopening plan, which includes the Capital Region, Central New York, the Finger Lakes, the Mohawk Valley, the North Country, the Southern Tier and Western New York.

The areas that will have to wait longer for outdoor dining include Long Island and the mid-Hudson Valley, which entered the first phase of reopening last week, and New York City. 

As the virus epicenter of the world not long ago, New York City trails behind the other regions in the states in the reopening phases. 

Restaurants and bars were some of the first businesses shuttered in the state back on March 16 to help slow the spread of coronavirus. 

Many stayed open for takeout and delivery service but this has not been enough to limit the widespread job losses across the industry.  

Nationwide, the restaurant and bar industry has been hardest hit by the pandemic, with stark data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and collated by the National Restaurant Association revealing that a staggering six million US restaurant workers have lost their jobs during the pandemic.