Four years to the day since Big Apple restaurants were finally allowed to serve food outdoors again as part of COVID-19 “Phase II” reopening, we are still locked down.
Not physically but emotionally and psychologically.
The miserable three months of government-mandated “sheltering in place” that began on March 20 of 2020 not only shattered the economy that’s yet to fully recover, it indelibly altered our brain chemistry.
The Times Square “Ghost Town” is history.
But it’s the stubborn squatter in our psyches that can’t be evicted.
I’m not the only who feels that way.
A friend who books parties for several famous Manhattan restaurants compared her 2019 business with today’s, which has largely recovered in head counts and dollar volume:
“It’s the same but it isn’t the same.”
She was correct.
If there’s such a thing as Long COVID, there’s Long Lockdown.
I can’t shake memories of paying $10 for a months-old copy of French Vogue — in a language I can’t read — just to have something to stare at over dinner in April 2020, when magazines and newspapers disappeared from shelves.
I avidly tuned in to then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s daily, empathy-oozing televised briefings.
But I soon realized that his tallies of intubations and deaths, more than any actual viral threat, scared companies from encouraging employees to return to offices even after he allowed them to reopen.
Cowed by the teachers union, he and then-Mayor Bill de Blasio kept schools mostly closed for another year.
Indoor dining didn’t come back until October 2020 at unsustainable low capacity and then was shut down again in December for two more months.
Cuomo seemed intent on punishing the city — a fact voters should keep in mind should he decide to take on Mayor Adams in next year’s primary.
He imposed lockdowns on us much longer than anywhere else in the state.
Today we seem to have shrugged off the effects.
Streets and sidewalks are thronged.
Office buildings re-filled, not entirely but to rising levels.
New stores and restaurants pop up in every neighborhood.
The new Palace Theater on West 47th Street, Moynihan Station and the Manhattan West complex make it seem as if the spring of 2020 never happened.
But lockdown’s lingering effects haunt our waking and sleeping hours — not just when I see physical vestiges like a “maintain six feet of social distance” sign, a number which Dr. Anthony Fauci recently admitted was made up out of thin air.
Or decayed dining sheds in streets that long ago lost their usefulness.
Let me count the ways.
Lost revenue from subway and bus ridership when people were encouraged to stay home put the MTA in a multi-billion-dollar fiscal pickle from which it might not recover.
Keeping workers home resulted in too many choosing not to ever return to their offices.
Professionalism died as a result.
My heart sinks whenever a bank, health care, retail or government employee tells me they’re “working from home” — a sure sign they’ll do everything wrong when they’re done feeding their kids and cats.
The shutdown disproportionately harmed obsolete, older buildings that were leased to small tech and media companies whose employees refused to return to them.
The result: a permanently wounded real estate market that’s already costing the city a bundle in lost tax revenue.
Consumers embraced online shopping, which had already taken a bite out of bricks-and-mortar retailing.
The result: a record number of empty stores all over town.
Early, at-home meals that were the norm during lockdown got people in the habit of eating much earlier than they did before.
The city that never slept became the city that conks out by 10 p.m.
If you doubt it, ask any restaurant or bar owner.
Worst of all, the loss of physical school attendance cost youths their formative, socializing years among other human beings.
If many GenZ-ers seem adrift, unnaturally beholden to parents, enslaved to TikTok and porn, and ignorant of history prior to yesterday, thank two years of home entrapment.
Some will howl that temporary loss of personal liberties was a mere nuisance weighed against the loss of 45,000 New York City lives to COVID-19, including 801 on a single hellish day — April 1, 2020.
But the lockdowns, while necessary in the pandemic’s early panicked days when there were no vaccines in sight, went on for much too long and were too broadly imposed.
There’s no evidence that arbitrary capacity rules at museums, for example — which wobbled between 25, 33 and 50% at Cuomo’s whims — saved a single life.
The lockdowns were hypocritical and politically motivated as well.
Former Mayor Bill de Blasio did nothing to curb Black Lives Matter protests where thousands of un-masked demonstrators breathed and shouted in each other’s faces.
There’s no denying the year’s carnage Ambulance sirens sounded night and day for a month in my hospital-rich neighborhood.
My New York Post colleague Anthony Causi perished from COVID-19 in April 2020.
My wife had a nasty case at the plague’s height.
Seven close friends caught the bug and two nearly died of it.
And yes, lockdowns were harsher elsewhere, from Australia to China, where people couldn’t leave their homes for months on end.
They surely have worse memories than mine.
But I hope our elected leaders who profess to “follow the science,” as Cuomo loved to repeat, will follow common sense should another viral nightmare ever befall us — and heed the damage of lockdowns that almost broke New York City.
