More than 100 days after New York City was shuttered by the coronavirus, which decimated the once thriving metropolis with more than 21,000 deaths, the city faces a new challenging yet hopeful moment in the fight against the pandemic, phase two of reopening.
Starting Monday, New Yorkers can once again begin dining outdoors, barbershops and hair salons can tend to long overgrown hair, children kept indoors in cramped apartments can run around on playgrounds. Some 150,000 to 300,000 people will be returning to work, according to city estimates, while many others will continue to work from home or still face unemployment.
At New Generation barbershop in Sunnyside, Queens, men in masks sat outside in the nearly 90 degree heat on red chairs six feet apart for long-awaited hair cuts.
Inside, owner Steven Muratov was buzzing the sides of a customer's head on one side of the shop while on the other side of the store two empty chairs away there was another customer getting a cut. Meanwhile, three men in masks sat in socially distanced chairs in a waiting area.
“Closing was sad and very upsetting, to come to work today, thank God. It’s a breakthrough,” Muratov, 51, said while cutting the man’s hair.
Muratov said customers had been calling him throughout the pandemic but interest had been “crazy” since the reopening was announced. Two more customers called to set up appointments as he spoke.
He said he had a cousin who became very sick with the coronavirus, suffering with a month of fevers up to 104 and 105 degrees.
“It was of course very scary for us but thank God he survived,” he said. “I’m very happy to come back to work, I hope we can get to normal pretty soon and forget about that problem completely, I wish.”
Still, it was critical for people to abide by hygiene rules, social distancing protocols and wear masks in order to avoid a new spike in cases. He and his employees took an online course on safety protocols, were disinfecting chairs in between customers, requiring masks, social distancing and practicing other frequent hygiene measures, he said.
“We’ve got to keep ourselves and our customers safe,” he said. “I wouldn't want to be the one that starts a second wave.”
Queens was one of the earliest and hardest hit boroughs from the crisis, especially parts of central queens. Elmhurst Hospital was one of the earliest facilities to become overwhelmed, with doctors in March desperately trying to get more ventilators and speaking out about patients waiting 60 hours for a bed.
Overall, the city has seen nearly 18,000 known coronavirus deaths, with 4,682 probable deaths.
But now the city’s positive test rate has been at around one percent, down significantly from a peak in April of 60 percent. And there were just 10 coronavirus deaths in the state on Sunday, New York Gov. Cuomo said on Monday, a stark contrast from a tragic week in early April when nearly 800 people died per day.
New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio said Monday was a “historic day” and a “huge step forward, the biggest step forward as we fight back from the coronavirus crisis and we once again become everything that New York City is and can be.”
Phase two in New York City, once the epicenter of coronavirus, comes two weeks after the first phase of reopening, which included construction, manufacturing and curbside pickup for retail.
New York began reopening in mid-May after reaching seven metrics including data ranging from COVID-19 hospitalizations, deaths, hospital capacity, the number of contact tracers a region has available, among others.
New daily cases are on the decline in states that were hit hard in the spring, such as New York and New Jersey in the Northeast. But case counts are soaring in certain states in the southern and western United States.
In Alabama, North Carolina, and the territory of Puerto Rico, the number of new cases in the last four weeks are up more than 80 percent compared to the four weeks before. In Montana, daily cases are up more than 300 percent.
