Last night I tweeted comparing NY and FL COVID positive tests. The tweet kind of blew up and I got a lot of responses, smart and less smart. I responded to some. (cont)

But one response really sends me in a fucking rage: the idea that NY in open. My kids haven't been to school since mid-Nov and when they were it was for 2 *sometimes* 3 pathetic days a week. That is not open. That is not fucking open.

Friends in NY who have businesses are straight suffering. Do people who tweeted that NY is open really not know a single business owner? Do they think everything is fine because their stupid pajama job is still paying them?

Bars are closed. Restaurants are open at some absurdly tiny capacity for NO REASON at all. A 100 person capacity restaurant in Buffalo can have 50 people, one in NYC can have 25. There is literally zero science to support this stupidity. It's just cruelty.

Gyms are at 33% capacity. Why 33%? Who knows! Open a biz, spend yrs building it, then get assigned an arbitrary capacity number. Group fitness remains closed. Why? Because! That's why. But NY is apparently "open" according to ppl who don't give a shit about these stuggling ppl.

We talk a lot about bubbles but literally no bubble is as thick as the one between people who have spent this year baking bread and getting paid and the ones who don't sleep at night because the business they put everything into can't open for no reason involving science.

But I literally repeat myself: https://nypost.com/2020/08/23/its-time-to-loosen-lockdown-rules-for-restaurants-and-others/

There are jobs we don't even talk about that support all the businesses that have closed. It's not just the businesses you see that are suffering in a closed NY. There are so many you don't see. Payroll companies, laundry, cleaning services, so many people KNOW NY remains closed.

Being a lifelong New Yorker means I know these people. You don't grow up here and only get to know the pajama class. You support every friend's new business, give them a dollar to put on their wall. To watch these businesses die for no reason, based on no science, is crushing.

Anyway, NY is not open. I'll accept any conversation except the one that erases all the people hurting in our closed NY. NY is not open, it's broken and damaged and at risk to not recover for a long time. It's closed and if you don't think so you should really check yourself.