New York’s bill per resident is twice as high as that facing the rest of America west of the Hudson River. Fortune estimates the stoppage’s total hit to the New York economy for 2020 is $63 billion, or $173 million a day. But here’s a look at the size of that burden––you may want to take two deep breaths and a swig of scotch before reading on. We’ll get to detailed numbers in a moment. But it’s still not insignificant, because the overall burden is so gigantic. Clearly, that amount is a relatively small addition to what a shorter lockdown would have exacted.
WILL NYC LOCKDOWN FULL
But unemployment, and economic pain and anxiety have a cost too, and it’s worth running the numbers showing how the deadweight from the lockdown is crushing the size of New York’s economy and punishing employment.Īs we’ll see, it’s impossible to put a number on the extra load caused by stretching out the initial full lockdown, and requiring a long schedule for reopening that could ban restaurants from seating customers indoors until July or even later, although the State will allow outdoor dining as early as June 22. There is certainly no way to put a price on saving a human life. We don’t know how much tragedy the city avoided in fewer hospitalizations and deaths in the past few weeks as the metrics showed only incremental gains, or how much the slow easing will safeguard the health of its 8.4 million residents. The authorities are also keeping the most expensive restrictions in place for at least another five weeks, and probably a lot longer, although the city has hit all the targets, and is on course to ace most of them. The city and state maintained a strict shutdown as the city closed in on all the metrics for reopening, so the economy has already shouldered significant extra costs to reach small improvements. It’s worth asking: How much of a bite is the lockdown taking from the previously thriving New York economy? And how much “bang for the buck” is the city getting measured in the commerce it’s sacrificing for what look like relatively small improvements in health metrics? That ultracautious approach may well be the right choice for saving lives and preventing another spike in infections. The state and city are sticking to the latest-starting, most extended reopening schedule in the nation even though New York began making astounding gains in the reduction of COVID-19 cases in mid-April, and came extremely close to satisfying nearly all the high hurdles for a reboot weeks ago.
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