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The changing face of post-pandemic New York City

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Re: The changing face of post-pandemic New York City

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

covid spread through kids like wildfire, often via asymptomatic infections which then spread to, and killed, elderly who just wanted to see their grandkids. The amount of pushback these measures got, when we were literally just trying to save lives and prevent disability through long covid absolutely staggers the mind and erodes my faith in humanity.

I have no problem with sacrificing the elderly for the benefit of the kids. A few months of shutdown was reasonable, but shutting schools down for a couple years is too big of a price to pay. Also, my kids were in daycare the whole time outside of Mar to May 2020, and they were spreading all sorts of viruses just like they were before COVID. How the government chose to allow the most prolific spreaders to congregate…

My child's school was online-only instruction from March to June, and reopened in September 2020 for in-person instruction. They did not miss one day of instruction. No idea what you're talking about.

Re: The changing face of post-pandemic New York City

#182
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I moved here about 10 years ago in my mid 20s. It's certainly more expensive and annoying to find housing here than other places I've lived, but it's more than balanced out by needing to own an automobile. The average cost of car ownership in the US is in the $10k-12k range. I certainly don't spent an extra thousand dollars on rent here vs say, any other place I might reasonably move. So I figure I'm still coming out…

Owning a car is far cheaper than living in NYC! You definitely spend more than $10-12k/year once you have a family for even a modest amount of space. And that's the average cost of car ownership, it's easy to find a cheap car.

Yes, $10-12k is like the monthly mortgage on a family sized apartment in NYC.

Many NYers need to construct elaborate fantasies to delude themselves that actually living in NYC is totally economical/convenient/rational, and not just their personal preference. Something about a river in Egypt.

In reality while it's fun, its also often inconvenient, expensive, or both.

Re: The changing face of post-pandemic New York City

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no problem with sacrificing the elderly for the benefit of the kids. A few months of shutdown was reasonable, but shutting schools down for a couple years is too big of a price to pay. Also, my kids were in daycare the whole time outside of Mar to May 2020, and they were spreading all sorts of viruses just like they were before COVID. How the government chose to allow the most prolific spreaders to congregate…

> I have no problem with sacrificing the elderly for the benefit of the kids. Read what you just wrote and ponder on it for a bit.

If you're at increased risk of contracting a deadly disease, you should take steps not to contract said disease, up to and including isolation, quarantine, testing, etc. What you shouldn't do is use political pressure to permanently stunt the education and growth of an entire generation of kids by insisting that elementary school children can just go to class on Zoom. 40% of 8th graders are deficient in math[0]. That didn't happen in a vacuum, it happened because schools were shut down. It happened because we expected 7 year olds to sit at a desk and watch a computer screen all day instead of allowing them to go to school.

[0] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/test-scores-show-how-...

Re: The changing face of post-pandemic New York City

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "resilience" argument was misused and misapplied during the pandemic. You also saw it used for school closures -- "kids are resilient". It seems to justify inflicting known harms by having faith in "resilience".

covid spread through kids like wildfire, often via asymptomatic infections which then spread to, and killed, elderly who just wanted to see their grandkids. The amount of pushback these measures got, when we were literally just trying to save lives and prevent disability through long covid absolutely staggers the mind and erodes my faith in humanity.

> covid spread through kids like wildfire, often via asymptomatic infections which then spread to, and killed, elderly who just wanted to see their grandkids.

Was someone forcing the grandparents to visit their infected grandchildren? In my own case, I didn't see my own grandmother for two years during COVID other than via Zoom/FaceTime. She has a history of bad lung infections, so none of us wanted to get her sick. This was despite her having four great-grandchildren and being a widow. When she finally got COVID this year for the first time, she developed some blood clots, but was able to pull through and now is back to great health.

I think the damage to children who were isolated from one another was much worse, and unlike the elderly, they couldn't really understand why we lived so unnaturally. If elderly people wanted to "just see their grandkids," they knew the risks and made a choice. Every death is sad, but I have a hard time thinking we should adopt harsh and even draconian measures just to protect those who ought to know better.

Re: The changing face of post-pandemic New York City

#185
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

covid spread through kids like wildfire, often via asymptomatic infections which then spread to, and killed, elderly who just wanted to see their grandkids. The amount of pushback these measures got, when we were literally just trying to save lives and prevent disability through long covid absolutely staggers the mind and erodes my faith in humanity.

> The amount of pushback these measures got, when we were literally just trying to save lives and prevent disability through long covid absolutely staggers the mind and erodes my faith in humanity. Or you could reasonably conclude that the policies enacted during COVID are yet another example of how we prioritize the elderly over children in the United States, arguably because children don't vote and the elderly do.…

I feel like anyone who feels the way the above poster does hasn't experienced having a kid in school and the way infections spread through those populations. Especially with young kids who still do things like thumb sucking. My child has been home sick from school four separate times since September, the amount of colds children get from being exposed to each other's germs is absolutely staggering.

For all the problems of kids staying home, I'd much rather stay home from school and learn online by being healthy than get COVID and stay home from school without learning anything at all. Especially when you consider the 10% of cases that have long term consequences. We saw a few examples of university age athletes giving up their athletic careers because of potentially permanently reduced lung capacity caused by long COVID so it's not just the older generation that has consequences.

I don't feel it's a fair characterization of these methods to say that the main benefit was getting 90 year olds to live to 91. I think the main benefit was slowing down the spread enough that hospitals weren't badly over capacity so that people who needed emergency care mostly could get it. Letting COVID spread like wildfire through the population would result in more people needing emergency care than we had resources for.

Re: The changing face of post-pandemic New York City

#186
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dirty and poor compared to what?

If you haven’t, I’d suggest you visit a large or mid size city in a prosperous north Midwest state like Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, South Dakota, etc. People I know from the East Coast that have visited are typically floored by the quality of life in flyover country. Everything we have is new, life is affordable, top performing schools and communities are growing. The local governments are generally growth oriented w…

> a large or mid size city in a prosperous north Midwest state

Which city?

Re: The changing face of post-pandemic New York City

#187
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...and hence why we helped those people who were unemployed and had children.

"Helped" as in the $600 stimulus checks people got that was supposed to cover groceries for 6 months while they couldn't pay rent?

more the unemployment benefits and the massive child care tax credits, yes.

Re: The changing face of post-pandemic New York City

#188
moved out in 2018 after 18 years because i worked remotely and my mental health was frazzled. for much less rent, i ended up in a Catskills cabin in the woods by a stream, a short drive from any number of beautiful trails. bonus points for the luck of already being out of the city when the pandemic happened.

Re: The changing face of post-pandemic New York City

#190

The comments here are funny. You have a bunch of people saying folks are fleeing NYC due to crime. Then other people saying folks are fleeing due to housing shortage and rents going up. It's like the old restaurant line, "no one goes there anymore, it's too crowded." Keep in mind, crime has risen for each of three years through 2022, and while that trend is worrisome, the actual number of crimes is only back up to 20…

Reported crimes.

Keep in mind NYPD had its budget cut by billions of dollars and lost record numbers of officers over the same period. Part of accurate crime statistics is actually finding an officer to report a crime to and then them giving you the time of day. And that's if you haven't given up on the city already and aren't "mindin' yo own business".

I lived in NYC from 1984 through 2021 and I can tell you unequivocally that in 2021 it seemed more like 1988 than 2006.

If anything, the mid-2000s felt like the safest period of time that I lived in the city -- at the height of where a good party would be held in the same kind of places dead bodies would be dumped a decade or two earlier.

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