The restrictions, Cuomo said last week, are in response to a failure to curb mass gatherings-especially those related to Jewish holidays. Say you’re a red zoner who wants to dine inside again? By all means! Just take the subway a few stops.Īnd while the restrictions are geographic, public officials have made clear that they primarily address a particular group of people who live within those zones: the Orthodox Jewish community. It means that in Queens, three shopping malls sitting within a mile of each other straddle three zones. It’s tough to imagine neighborhoods divided block by block, with each area following different instructions to close businesses or schools. There is the fact that New York City is a large and fluid territory. “They have the opportunity to write the playbook,” says Sam Scarpino, an applied mathematician at Northeastern University who studies how outbreaks move.īut can a color-coded, micro-targeted approach meant to place restrictions on places with the most spread actually contain a borderless virus? New Yorkers were quick to point out some problems. But once again, New York City is just the first to deal with it. The city is confronting outbreaks-and a possible second wave-that are inevitable in places where the virus has been mostly quelled, particularly as the weather cools, schools reopen, and people gather indoors. The restrictions would last two weeks, starting October 8, assuming the situation improves by then. In red zones, nonessential businesses were again required to close. Outdoor and indoor dining, depending on the zone, would be pulled back, and mass gatherings restricted. Across large swaths of Queens and Brooklyn, dozens of schools that had reopened last week would be shuttered. The zones, issued last week by state health officials, are splashed across the map: red, orange, and yellow, corresponding to just how far hard-won gains towards normalcy are rolling back. So, the state would “attack each area in the cluster with the appropriate restrictions,” as Governor Andrew Cuomo wrote last week on Twitter.

They were skewed by certain neighborhoods and groups that were not playing by the rules. “If delta is as contagious as we now know it is, and we want to try to put an end to a very significant uptick right now, wearing masks if you’re under 12 and can’t be vaccinated when you’re in school is a really smart thing to do,” Collins said.Īs authorities have struggled to respond to changes in the outbreak, federal employees were required last week to either get vaccinated or get tested for COVID at least once per week.But the worrisome numbers were not uniformly distributed, state officials argued. Deaths and severe illness are rare in that age range. He recommended that kids under age 12 - who are not currently eligible for vaccines - wear masks when they go back to school in the fall to prevent them from spreading the virus. “This is really a different virus than last year, and everything we learned about COVID a year ago, you got to sort of hit the reset button on now how we need to react to it,” Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, told “Fox News Sunday.” The change in policy has sparked furious debate all over the country.

That covers all of New York City, according to the federal guidance. Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention switched gears on mask guidance, stating that even vaccinated people should wear masks indoors in parts of the country with significant levels of COVID spread.

Are we going back into lockdown nyc