By Ilana Siyance
Monday, July 20th will mark the beginning of Phase 4 reopening in New York City, following the Coronavirus shutdown. As part of this final phase, zoos, botanic gardens will reopen at partial capacity, and production of outdoor film and TV shows will resume. The Phase 4 reopening will also put New York’s baseball teams back out on the fields, although the stands will remain empty, while fans can only watch the televised games. Originally, city and state authorities had expected that this phase would also include the reopening of more indoor activities. However those plans have been scrapped for the time being. Indoor dining, museum, and malls remain shuttered as fear of a second wave continues, following harsh COVID-19 outbreaks in other states of the country.
“We’ve got to strike a balance and we’ve got time to look at the evidence, watch what’s happening around the country, watch what’s happening around the city and make further decisions on some of these pieces,” Mayor de Blasio said at a press conference on Friday.
“That is a hallmark for us,” Gov. Andrew Cuomo said in his own afternoon press call on Friday. “Every region of the state will now be in phase 4 there are no more phases than phase 4, so we are all in the final phase of reopening.” “So that is great,” Cuomo continued, downplaying the restrained nature of the reopening.
As reported by the NY Post, while indoor restaurants and bars remain closed, City Hall has extended its Open Restaurants outdoor pilot program until at least Oct. 31. This allows the eateries to setups outdoor seating in parking spots and on sidewalks. Over 8,600 restaurants and bars have applied for the permits, but complaints are growing saying city officials are constantly modifying the regulations without giving the establishment owners ample time to comply with the new orders.
Over the weekend, 40 new blocks of city streets were converted into dining space to allow the city’s struggling establishments to do some business over the weekends, Mayor de Blasio boasted. Most of the new street closures, or 18 out of the 26, are in Manhattan, in neighborhoods south of Central Park. Brooklyn got just four new segments closed to allow for dining, while Queens closed just three new small strips of street. The Bronx has only one new area approved for outdoor dining, but that area won’t be closed off for the dining till July 24th.
City officials admitted the disproportionate number of streets opened in Manhattan and said on Friday that the Transportation and Small Business departments are contacting eateries in the outer boroughs to encourage them to apply for the street closures and outdoor seating programs. “We’re hard at work identifying new partners across the city and we hope to extend this option to more New Yorkers and the restaurants they love soon,” said City Hall spokesman Mitch Schwartz.
The City’s insistence on keeping indoor dining closed stems from research from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention which says that just by relocating an activity to the outdoors, the chance of being infected with COVID-19 is reduced by 95 percent, compared to being indoors. “Where people are eating and drinking, even when they came in wearing a mask, it’s difficult for them to maintain it,” said Columbia University Professor Patrick Kachur, a veteran of the Centers for CDC who teaches public health. “Outdoor dining is a much lower risk than indoor dining, even though people still have to take their masks off.”
