New york

After weeks of state-mandated lockdown, thousands of preventable nursing home deaths and days of angry protests and looting, New York officially reopened today, all thanks to the so-called leadership of its Mayor and Governor. With the economy in tatters, store-fronts boarded up or broken and citizens in the street demanding justice, Bill de Blasio and Andrew Cuomo speak with one voice as they say to New Yorkers: you're welcome. 'New York City’s restart begins today,' tweeted Mayor de Blasio. 'It’s been a long road to get here. New Yorkers have earned it day by day.' 'New Yorkers bent the curve by being smart,' said Gov. Cuomo at his daily press briefing. 'We’re celebrating. We’re back. We’re reopening. We’re excited. Our mojo’s back.

New York City is crumbling into shambolic lawlessness and its citizens are growing more afraid and frustrated by the day.Why?Because Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio have once again proven to be categorically incompetent leaders incapable of working effectively together in a time of crisis.On Tuesday, the Governor was forced to confront the glaring issue that the state’s top concern had shifted from COVID prevention to the demolition of its biggest metropolis by unruly riots. During his daily press conference, Cuomo took the opportunity to chastise the Mayor and the NYPD for the turmoil, calling Mayor de Blasio’s handling of it a ‘disgrace’.

It’s important — and easy — to tell the difference between protesters and looters. Just as New York should have been opening up after the peak of the coronavirus lockdown, the city is instead retreating further indoors, hunkering down behind increasingly thick barriers of plywood as the evenings become free-for-alls for window-smashing rioters.New York City, America's cultural and economic engine, is rapidly degenerating into a scenario inspired by The Ωmega Man (1971), a post-apocalyptic movie in which Charlton Heston, seemingly the last unaffected survivor of a chemical-weapons attacks, wanders a deserted Los Angeles by day and fends off increasingly brazen bands of mutant hippies who torch the city every night.

Andrew Cuomo is having the time of his life. His approval ratings are through the roof and he’s being talked about as a replacement for Joe Biden should Joe wander off somewhere without his Visiting Angel, never to be found again. Hipster merchandise featuring his face is exploding on Etsy and he’s getting a nightly hour with his own brother on CNN to chat about oh, this and that, and whatever is happening in his day at the given moment. It’s quite the arrangement!

The coronavirus shutdown is over by public demand. There are crowds of sunbathers in the parks of New York City and mobs on the steps of the statehouses. Pedestrian and road traffic are rising and businesses are defying orders by informally reopening. The people are speaking — the people who used to work on a hand-to-mouth economy, the people who cannot afford to stay indoors indefinitely, the people who cannot be bothered to stay in when the sun comes out.These people are not all the people. They are not the doctors, who counsel caution. They are not the state governors, who are terrified of votes being washed away by a post-reopening second wave of casualties. They are not state employees, who can trust that their jobs will be waiting for them.

Bumbling Bill de Blasio is all thumbs, and not just on Twitter. Slow to respond when Orthodox Jews suffered an unprecedented wave of violence on his streets, the mayor of New York City quickly ejaculated a blanket warning of mass arrests to ‘the Jewish community’ after several hundred members of a Hasidic sect attended a funeral — a funeral, de Blasio now admits, that his office and the NYPD’s commissioned knew of in advance. https://twitter.com/nycmayor/status/1255309615883063297?s=21 COVID-19 is full of nasty surprises. But who would have put ‘mayor of New York City rounds up the Jews’ on their pandemic bingo card? The mayor now threatens to ‘summons or even arrest’ Jews if they gather in ‘large groups’.

If the coronavirus were as deadly as the bubonic plague, which killed about a third of the population of Europe in the 1340s, there would be no doubt about the need for extreme measures. But this virus spares far more people than it kills, and is sometimes mild to the point of invisibility, even as it proves lethal to others. It’s almost as though nature had calibrated the virus exactly to the point where risk-avoiders saw the lockdown as vital for survival while risk-accepters saw it as so economically destructive as to be worse than the disease itself. America is polarized not just politically but in its attitude to risk.

It was just a matter of time before the coronavirus was leveraged as a tool of race politics. With the US presidential campaign in suspension, Democratic broadsides against America’s white supremacy have lost a valuable outlet. Now, however, the media, politicians, and race activists have found a new theme: 'Black Americans Bear The Brunt' of COVID-19 deaths, as the New York Times put it.America’s medical personnel have gone overnight from being heroes to being bigots. Three failed presidential contenders — Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, and Cory Booker, joined by Reps. Ayanna Pressley and Robin Kelly — have asked the CDC and the FDA to investigate doctors’ 'implicit biases'.

No matter where in the apartment I am, if I sit very still, I hear a siren. Over the 18 days I’ve spent in quarantine here, they’ve grown more frequent. I worked late yesterday and finished up at about 1:30 this morning. I pulled my headphones out and listened. There was the briefest moment of calm, before I heard the familiar squall. From what I could make out, it sounded like a convoy of ambulances, careering towards the hospital about a mile from me. Woodhull Medical Center is a block of brutalist concrete planted imposingly at the junction of Broadway and Marcus Garvey Boulevard. A tent outside is my closest COVID-19 testing site.