Report from the USA
Lockdown forever? Not in New York: How nice normality feels
Thursday, April 29th, 2021 | 21:09
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In 2020, New York was one of the cities that suffered particularly badly from the first corona wave. Some things will probably never be the same as before, but the metropolis is fighting its way back to life. Report from a world that is currently strange to Germans: A world without lockdown.
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It was only a few weeks ago that I was able to experience in Serbia how a perfectly organized vaccination campaign works in Europe. Now I have arrived in New York, which was hit by the pandemic in spring 2020 like no other US metropolis. Now New York is opening up – driven by an extremely successful vaccination campaign, with which more than 50 percent of adult New Yorkers have now received a vaccine.
New York opens up – thanks to vaccination successes
I was here for the last time at the end of February 2020, Corona announced itself as a dark cloud on the horizon. A little later, the city was brought down to zero. No nightlife, no restaurants – and “ambulance sirens all night long,” as Mark Schienberg, President of the New York Auto Show, recalls. The Javits Center, the great convention hall on the Hudson River, mutated into a hospital. The auto show was canceled.
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The year 2020 became an unprecedented test for the pulsating metropolis. Tina Chan, who lives in Brooklyn and works in a Manhattan hospital, recalls a year with no nightlife: “The clubs and restaurants my partner Neil and I went to were closed and many, unfortunately, will no longer open. “
“Many bars will not open anymore”
These days, the couple begins to enjoy life again for the first time. The restaurants that were able to save themselves from the pandemic have now reopened, and you can not only sit outside, but also inside, with appropriate security concepts.
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I look around Brooklyn and Manhattan: life is back. Perhaps half of the people voluntarily wear masks, but this is no longer mandatory. The bands make music on the streets and in the parks, the parks are full of strollers, joggers and cyclists.
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Pilot project started: In these Fulda companies vaccinations are carried out on site
Bands are making music again and parks are full
How can New York afford to grant such generous freedoms while Germany is handling brutal curfews and bans and pouring the whole thing into questionable laws? The answer is simple: even at the beginning of the pandemic, while still under the Trump presidency, the United States invested enormous sums of money in order to accelerate the development of vaccines – and at the same time prepared a general staff vaccination campaign, which Joe Biden has now accelerated. The Javits Center mentioned at the beginning is no longer used for the emergency care of the seriously ill, but has advanced to become the largest vaccination center in the city.
Biden has further accelerated Trump’s vaccination turbo
The prioritization has long been suspended, since mid-April every New Yorker over 16 can be vaccinated – with the Moderna or Pfizer vaccines, which are considered effective. Often a phone call is enough or you can drop in unannounced: vaccinations are not only given in the large centers, but also in the drugstore chains. And what it takes: More than 50 percent of adult New Yorkers have had their first vaccination behind them. The second dose is after three weeks, not three months.
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The vaccination process takes a few minutes and the necessary form can be filled out online in advance. No trace of German paperwork and junk. There is no mention of discarded vaccination doses here, and the Americans no longer dwell on discussions about “vaccine envy” and “jostling”. If you want, you have a turn.
“Inoculation” and “inoculation” are not known in the USA
And so there is no noticeable third wave taking place in New York despite the openings. “The fear seems to have disappeared,” says Jeff Jablansky, a PR specialist from Newport in the US state of Rhode Island, which borders New York: “Normality is returning.” The lifting of the restrictions would have come anyway, he believes, because the suffering has become too great: “It is a fortunate coincidence that the vaccination campaign is taking effect at the same time.”
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The auto show will also be back in August
And so the Javits Center is likely to undergo yet another change: the New York auto show will take place there again in August, postponed by a few months. The year 2021, it seems, is saved for New Yorkers. A tremendous burden is beginning to fall off.
Tina Chan still has to get over one small downer: she misses the free streets of the past year. Now she has to sort herself into the stop-and-go traffic with her black Mercedes-AMG GLE again: “Today it was bumper to bumper again on the Manhattan Bridge,” she laughs.
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Olaf Scholz warns of “vaccine distribution battle”
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