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New Yorkers brought NYC back despite hysteria over the Delta variant - New York Post

If New York City is to be saved from COVID-19, it will be no thanks to the politicians, bureaucrats and big-business leaders who once upon a time we might have turned to for leadership. 

Instead, it will be entirely due to Big Apple residents and visitors who are loving the place with their growing presence in astounding numbers. 

Weekday subway ridership has rebounded to 2.5 million people daily, not close to the pre-COVID total of over 5 million in 2019, but a lot better than 300,000 in April 2020. 

Times Square pedestrian traffic has jumped to more than half of its 355,000 pre-pandemic level. Tourism, which peaked at 70 million in 2019 but dipped to the low 20-millions last year, is on track to hit 31 million this year and is forecast to reach 56 million in 2022. 

Meanwhile, the restaurant world’s skyrocketing trajectory is obvious to anyone out for a meal. Emboldened by the numbers of diners flocking to eateries, the Oyster Bar and The Grill are reopening soon while Le Bernardin is bringing back lunch. 

But the strongest proof of life is on the streets and the sidewalks. Though still below pre-COVID levels, the crowds are everywhere — from Times Square to Downtown Brooklyn to Flushing. They’re shopping, eating, sightseeing and enjoying the human carnival, such as the unicyclist I recently saw balancing a basketball on his head. 

You ask: How can this life-affirming spectacle exist, given the daily media blare of terror over Delta’s rapid spread, especially in under-vaccinated neighborhoods like southern Staten Island? 

How can Midtown Sixth Avenue and Downtown Brooklyn be so full of people on foot, considering that office buildings remain only 21 percent physically occupied (one of the lowest urban rates in the United States)? 

Why are so many people here when Broadway, the Metropolitan Opera, Carnegie Hall and the other major cultural venues that were supposed to open have yet to actually do so? 

And how can people clamor to the city as fraidy-cat lawyers warn companies against bringing employees back to their desks over “liability” concerns, panicking companies out of fall return schedules? 

Let’s hazard a wild guess. Maybe ordinary New Yorkers and people who live near the five boroughs are, notwithstanding daily official declarations of Apocalypse Near, smart enough to regard Delta as an annoying speed bump on the way to full triumph over the virus. 

While this bump is not to be taken lightly, it’s one that hardly resembles the monstrous scourge that brought us to our knees in the spring of 2020 or even the less lethal, although still formidable, one that struck in last winter’s “second wave.” 

Leave it up New Yorkers, not politicians, to revive the Big Apple economy.
Leave it up New Yorkers, not politicians, to revive the Big Apple economy.
James Keivom

At the pandemic’s height in spring of last year, 801 New Yorkers perished in one day. The daily toll peaked at 93 in January 2021. Since Delta kicked in this summer, that number has been mostly in the single digits

Daily hospitalizations, which topped out at 1,600 in spring of 2020 and 420 in January, are currently below 100, nearly all of them among the unvaccinated. “Breakthrough” infections of vaccinated New Yorkers are a scant 0.33 percent, or less than a third of 1 percent, de Blasio said on Wednesday. 

New Yorkers are savvy enough to read such numbers and tune out the daily cacophony of Delta doom. They can use their eyes and ears, too. The air is silent of 24/7 ambulance wails. There are no images of COVID victims on gurneys in the street awaiting admission to overwhelmed hospital ICUs. 

The recovery runs deeper than last summer’s short-lived reprieve when infection rates were lower than today but before there were vaccines to blunt their impact. 

Times Square and other New York attractions have a magnetic pull — even in the age of COVID.
Times Square and other New York attractions have a magnetic pull — even in the age of COVID.
Stephen Yang

Our current state of grace is no thanks to de Blasio, who bumbled every faltering effort at “recovery.” No thanks to Cuomo, whose economy-, culture- and haircut-crushing lockdown last year gave New Yorkers who temporarily left town even less reason to return. No thanks to the CDC, the WHO, Dr. Fauci, or the brigade of “experts” who take cues from lockdown-loving, laptop-toting journalists determined to portray everything as worse than it is. No thanks to school unions that keep pushing off a full return to classrooms, including one teacher who appeared in New York magazine holding a sign that read, “No return until zero cases.” 

Our streets are teeming in the “dead” of humidity-soaked August without full offices or schools, because our streets, parks and ever-improving waterfronts exert a gravitational pull beyond easy logic or reason. There’s splendor in our broad avenues, mystery to shadowy side streets, and heart-lifting hope in the skyline that no crisis can negate for long. 

Many more people love it here than you’d know from hysterical stories about a pandemic-driven exodus. 

So don’t listen to the pundits. Listen to the sound of footsteps and the music in the street.

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