New York Governor Andrew Cuomo unilaterally declared a ban on indoor dining in New York City that went into effect yesterday, claiming a spike in hospitalizations has forced his hand on the issue.
Cuomo’s move to ban indoor dining comes just over ten weeks after restaurants and pubs were given the green light to operate indoor service at 25 percent capacity. The latest ban will span for at least two weeks.
Cuomo said the lockdown would cause “economic hardship… but we have compensated in other ways,” as he explained how outdoor dining in the City has been “aggressively expanded.”
“The restaurants have adapted and New Yorkers have really adapted,” he said.
Bullshit!
The move was criticized by restaurant and pub owners who say the scientific data does not support such a move.
Melissa Fleischut, the CEO of the New York State Restaurant Association, said in a statement, “Shutting down indoor dining in New York City makes little sense based on the state’s own numbers.”
“We’re pissed off,” Marco Chirico, the owner of Brooklyn’s Marco Polo Ristorante and Enoteca, told the New York Post.
“We’ve been following everything that they gave us – the guidelines, we changed our air filter systems, we do the protocols of taking temperatures, getting people to sign the [contact tracing] papers, everything from A to Z,” he said.
“It’s just not right – you have small businesses that are day to day surviving, and day to day they’re trying to pay the bills and day to day trying to feed their staff who are trying to feed their kids,” said Chirico.
He added, “No one understands how it’s going to feel to look inside your employees’ eyes and say, ‘I have to let you go because there’s not enough business’ – that’s the most heartbreaking thing for a restaurant owner to do.”
The Post also quoted Hakan Swahn, the owner of Manhattan’s Aquavit, who said, “This is going to be hurting all our employees in a terrible, terrible way… The government is shutting us down without actually justifying it with hardcore facts… We didn’t do anything to deserve the complete destruction of our business.”
TREND FORECAST: The Director of the New York City Hospitality Alliance said Cuomo’s new rules were “at odds with the State’s own data that been presented as driving these decisions.”
Indeed, according to the State’s data, of the 46,000 cases between September and November, only 1.43 percent were linked to restaurants and bars.
Yet, whether New York or Berlin, Paris or Montreal, despite the hard data and scientific facts of who is dying where and why, those least affected by the virus are suffering most from the draconian actions decreed by politicians and enforced by COVID Cops, which are destroying businesses, lives, and livelihoods.
Thus, we forecast a sizable segment of society who have been financially and emotionally devastated by lockdown rules will unite to form major political/religious movements in opposition to ruling establishment political parties.
