#Are we going back into lockdown nyc movie#

It’s hard to figure out how effective social distancing policies actually were

Sign up to receive our newsletter each Friday. Vox’s German Lopez is here to guide you through the Biden administration’s burst of policymaking.

Still, the variation has one potential upside: With the benefit of hindsight, experts told me we can begin to deduce whether certain interventions were more effective than others. And while early on, some lockdown measures - especially stay-at-home orders and closing restaurants and bars - seemed to limit Covid-19’s spread, they may have become less effective over time, in part because states abandoned them and in part because Americans’ behavior had become more politically polarized and some people stopped following those rules.įor all of these reasons and more - the unpredictable nature of the virus’s spread, the structural differences between states, and the American tradition of federalism that delegated most policy decisions to state governments - the nation’s response was a policy morass. The pandemic was constantly evolving, which adds to the difficulty in figuring out which policies worked and which didn’t. But others, namely school closures, don’t appear to have had nearly as much of an effect on case rates.

According to the available research and interviews with experts, one policy, the requirement to wear masks indoors, appears to have successfully slowed transmission. Once the US lost control of the virus, mitigation was the only realistic path forward fully eradicating Covid-19 was out of the question. “But it is hard to know and we may never know whether policies made at the state level were able to overcome all the other challenges of this pandemic.” “State policies mattered,” Jen Kates, director of global health policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation, told me. There will be more outbreaks in the future and, after the current response was marked by indecision and inconsistency, this is an opportunity to separate what policies and interventions are most effective from those that are a waste of time.īut it’s also a maddeningly difficult question to answer. Which interventions actually work is one of the most important lessons the US could learn from the Covid-19 pandemic. California fared only marginally better, sitting at 30th.Īfter a year of debates over mask mandates, lockdowns, and school closures, that mixed evidence might suggest a certain fatalism: Did none of these state policies really matter? Or was the virus going to spread no matter what states did? Was it all for nothing? Florida and Texas, despite much criticism of their laissez-faire approaches, rank right in the middle among states (26th and 24th, respectively) in the number of deaths per 100,000 people. New York, the original epicenter of the outbreak, has endured the second most deaths per capita behind New Jersey (271 per 100,000). Their state mask mandates are still at least partially in effect.Īnd yet, looking at the case and death numbers since the coronavirus pandemic began, it’s not obvious which states were cautious and which were not.

#Are we going back into lockdown nyc movie#

They didn’t let some businesses, like movie theaters and gyms, reopen until months after their more conservative counterparts had already done so. Florida never instituted a public mask mandate Texas was the first state to revoke its mask mandate this spring.Ĭalifornia and New York, on the other hand, have been more cautious. Most businesses were allowed to resume operations in May or June of last year. After a partial lockdown in the spring of 2020, Florida and Texas were among the states that most aggressively reopened their economies.