AFP•October 6, 2020
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo -- pictured here in May 2020 -- announced new coronavirus restrictions in areas recording a spike in infectionsMore
New York's governor announced Tuesday tough new restrictions in several areas recording high infection rates to try to ward off a second coronavirus wave.
Andrew Cuomo ordered non-essential businesses, including gyms and restaurants, closed in parts of Brooklyn and Queens in New York City.
The governor also banned mass gatherings and capped at ten the number of people allowed in places of worship in the so-called red zones witnessing "clusters" of infections.
The restrictions will come into effect from Wednesday and will be reviewed after 14 days.
They represent a depressing setback in the reopening of New York, which was the epicenter of America's COVID-19 outbreak several months back.
Cuomo blamed the infection spike on a let-up in enforcement of social distancing measures and reminded residents to keep wearing masks.
"It's no time to be fatigued. The virus isn't tired," he told reporters.
The areas also include a few outside of New York City.,
On Monday, Cuomo announced that schools in nine New York City neighborhoods would temporarily close.
They are in areas where the rate of positive cases has been above the three percent threshold for more than seven days.
Two of the neighborhoods have recorded positive rates above eight percent.
The areas include large Orthodox Jewish communities, where residents recently marked the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur holidays.
Across New York state, the rate of positive cases remains low at 1.20 percent.
The virus has killed more than 33,000 people across the state.
Ultra-Orthodox Rage Over Fresh COVID-19 Clampdown in New York
William Bredderman,
The Daily Beast•October 6, 2020
Hours before a new coronavirus crackdown began in New York, Borough Park was fuming.
On Monday, Gov. Andrew Cuomo ordered public and private schools to close in 20 New York City ZIP Codes where positivity rates had spiked in recent weeks, most of them home to substantial ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities. Anger was already palpable that afternoon on the streets of one of the hottest hotspots citywide, a traditional home of New York’s Hasidic population.
“It’s just political theater,” raged Mike Weber, whose teenage sons attend the Nesivos Hatalmud yeshiva, standing maskless outside the facility on the neighborhood’s north end. “I’m not concerned about corona, I’m concerned about the kids.”
By Tuesday evening, tensions were at a boiling point as hundreds of ultra-Orthodox community members took to the streets in protest over the crackdown. The New York Post reports protesters lit garbage on fire and refused orders to disperse, and “chased away two city sheriff’s deputies who responded.” A report from the scene said the crowd was chanting “Jewish Lives Matter!”
Religious learning institutions, which the broad majority of students in the affected precincts attend, were actually closed already for the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, which ends Friday. But nearly every yeshiva in Borough Park featured an attached sukkah—a temporary enclosure, somewhere between a tent and a hut—from which largely maskless men and boys streamed in and out all afternoon.
The governor’s order Monday left such places of worship untouched—only for him to decree Tuesday that they could only accommodate up to 10 people at a time.
Even community leaders who agreed with the decision to shut down yeshivas and take other pandemic containment measures in the world’s former coronavirus epicenter decried the incessant mixed and conflicting messages from Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio. The latest announcement was light on details, but included plenty of complaints from the governor about how the city’s failure to clamp down on social distancing and mask-flouting scofflaws made the new crackdown necessary. “If the plan I passed into law was actually enforced, we wouldn’t be here,” Cuomo said at a press conference in Albany.
The jockeying fits a pattern dating to the earliest days of the pandemic, when Cuomo undercut de Blasio’s efforts to impose a stay-at-home order and switch students to remote learning in the five boroughs—before issuing such orders himself.
Several of the parents The Daily Beast spoke with this week asserted—without evidence—that any second wave of the coronavirus was less severe than the first, and that the high proportion of infections in religious Jewish communities was a consequence of only ill people taking the test. Gothamist, meanwhile, reported last week that some local leaders appeared to be taking steps to deflate COVID-19 testing numbers in embattled Orthodox areas.
Rabbi Chaim David Zwiebel, vice president of the nonprofit Agudath Israel, noted that many ultra-Orthodox practitioners lack an Internet connection and other technologies that permit children to study remotely and for parents to obtain reliable information about current affairs—including the pandemic. The yeshivas, in the view of many, are the only way to ensure the continuation of ultra-Orthodox traditions.
“As a community, there’s nothing more precious and important to us than transmitting the Jewish heritage to our children and next generation,” Zwiebel said. “This is the central religious obligation that parents have to their children in the Jewish faith. And that is to make sure the next generation will be part of the link that goes all the way back to Sinai. You need Jewish schools.”
But the mayor’s office does not have the power to reopen the schools now that Cuomo has closed them. And a coordination roadmap for on-site lessons to begin again is missing.
“We have an opportunity to do widespread testing this week, to demonstrate what the real infection rate is, to see what the real hospitalization rates are, and determine when the schools can be allowed to open,” said Kadish. “If we don’t take that opportunity, then the decision is a bad decision, because this time will be wasted.”