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The changing face of post-pandemic New York City

osc.ny.gov

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

#221

Post by dang »

Submitters: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

(Submitted title was "New York City population declined by 5.3% since 2020". )

If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

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

#222

Post by kspacewalk2 »

TimPC wrote: post #185
tharne wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 proble…

>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.

That's just a normal part of being a child in in-person school, temporarily made somewhat worse by lack of in-person schooling for 1, sometimes 2 years.

>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.

All dependent on timescales. I'd rather my child get COVID or any other respiratory virus and stay home from school without learning anything at all for a week max, than keep them home from school for months on end. Even though it wasn't too bad for me as a parent to have my kid home, I'm also part of the laptop class.

>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.

Yes, we saw a few examples. We didn't see those few examples pre-COVID when it came to bad flu complications because it wasn't click-worthy so no one bothered to write the article. This isn't to say long COVID or COVID complications in under-50s isn't a problem, just trying to put context into the equation.

>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.

It's about as simplistic and dismissive as "pfft kids will be fine without in-person school, they're so resilient". Which I've heard far too many times.

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

#223

Post by sbrother »

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #113
david38 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A large percentage of the population relies on school for childcare. No childcare = no work = no money. A large percentage of those families didn’t have elderly in the home or visiting. For them, in-person school was critical.

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

We did?

No, we didn't. Source: had young children during the pandemic and just finished paying back debt I accrued from having to quit my job.

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

#224

Post by [deleted] »

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #53
gandalfgeek wrote: post #36

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.

[deleted]

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

#225

Post by geodel »

light_hue_1 wrote: post #157
ahoy wrote: 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.

Further car can be useful in lot of ways, like hauling large amount of things, groceries, going for a out of town trip and so on. I think in case of NYC don't need a car in city vs can't afford a car in city use cases are mixed and need to be separated out.

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

#226

Post by giantg2 »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #125
starik36 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I have pondered about it for over a decade. Our societies drastically prioritize the elderly over the young. They are the ones with political power, after all. Here’s an easy example: why does the US pay doctors more via Medicare (for people over 65) than via Medicaid (for poorer people, including kids).

That's not a great example. One is a single payer system funded by workers and the other is government welfare. Plus, the elderly can be on both programs simultaneously. If anything, this is an example of money influencing politics since the people who have been paying those taxes for Medicare are more likely to donate to politicians than people who require Medicaid.

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

#228

Post by throw__away7391 »

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #53
gandalfgeek wrote: post #36

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.

My observation/experience was that we had lots of younger people in lockdown in (expensive) cramped studio apartments in big cities for two years while their boomer parents living in the suburbs more or less went about life as normal all while watching the value of their homes and investments skyrocket as trillions of dollars of additional wealth was transfer to them. At least in my circle of friends this was near universally the case.

Overall the entire situation was completely ridiculous on many levels, but it was the pro-lockdown forever crowd that made me lose my faith in humanity.

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

#229

Post by [deleted] »

busterarm wrote: post #190
eduction wrote: post #163

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 unequiv…

[deleted]

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

#230

Post by unethical_ban »

tharne wrote: post #107
wing-_-nuts wrote: post #53

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.…

>another example of how we prioritize the elderly over children in the United States, arguably because children don't vote and the elderly do.

Or arguably because death is final, death came for the elderly more than the children with this disease, and we were trying to save lives.

We can debate the philosophy of saving people near end of life vs. allowing children to continue with close-contact education. But it's revolting that the first place your mind went was "save the vote".

Hell, old people who vote lean Republican, so if you're going to play a shrewd voting population game with a pandemic, wouldn't it have been in the interests of the "pro-isolation" coalition to let it run amok?

---

One final note, moving away from your premise: The reason we needed to lock down besides saving lives from COVID directly was that our hospitals and funeral homes couldn't handle the burden. You can't treat people with heart attacks and broken bones if the ICU is filled with people dying of influenza-class viruses.

Maybe if our healthcare system can keep up with a disease's infection rate, we let society chug on - as we have each year when preventable, transmissible diseases kill tens of thousands of people per year.

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