NYC Starts Re-opening

New York City entered phase one of reopening today, but what does that actually mean?

Construction sites can open. Manufacturing and wholesale businesses can resume.

Retail stores are allowed to have curbside pickup and landscaping businesses can operate.

— Josefa Velásquez (@J__Velasquez) June 8, 2020

This matters for perhaps hundreds of thousands of people in a direct way though less so for yours truly.  It also is but "Phase 1" of a four step process.  As an article noted: "Getting here took the sacrifice of millions of New Yorkers who learned to live radically different lives. More than 205,000 have been infected, and nearly 22,000 have died." And, each one of those have so many connections as well.

As with Trump, there are two levels here, though more directly in direct ways for more people.  First, at some point, such numbers are striking. This is so even noting the state has over eight million people. Hard to quantify at some point here, but simply put just dealing with family members and friends provides a multiper effect.  Not that even 22K, full stop, is not a lot of people. Again, many more were affected directly by those deaths. These death numbers had a high ranked member of the NYPD, one of around forty employees as a whole who did, added recently as well. 

On another level, and this is important too, it's easy to accept on some level a lot.  After all, most people didn't die; even infection only goes so far though a in the Bronx alone (if a disproportionate number) over 10K had to be hospitalized.  So, people were complaining about things as soon as a month in.  Equally so, most people accepted a rather striking new normal. Wearing masks, months of children not going to school, millions out of work and so forth.  We don't need to have dystopia level results, though we had some moments that look like scenes out of such a movie, for things to be pretty damn bad.  Small scale and large.

We have a ways to go.  Got to start somewhere.