Was New York’s COVID-19 Response More Destructive Than NYC’s Historic Fires?

New York City has been the stage for some of the most devastating fires in US history. But how does their damage measure up against the devastation government officials wrought in 2020?

By Lawrence W. Reed & Jon Miltimore of FEE. Excerpt:

"From the Big Apple to Albany, New York has had one of the most aggressive (and clumsy) responses to COVID-19 in America. The results are not pretty.

In August, the New York Times reported that one-third of New York’s small businesses may be gone forever. The state is suffering from an unemployment rate of 9.8 percent, nearly three times its rate prior to the pandemic and the third-highest rate in the US. New government statistics say minority communities have been hit particularly hard by the job losses.

“Unemployment rates in communities of color skyrocketed during this period, with roughly one in four Black, Hispanic, and Asian workers out of work,” New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer noted in a recently released report.

With a lack of jobs and many of New York City’s most attractive draws—top-notch dining, ubiquitous theaters, dazzling museums, fashion, and networking—neutralized, thousands of New Yorkers have simply moved on.

“Roughly a net of 70,000 New York City residents have left the area since COVID-19 first hit the country earlier this year, resulting in approximately $34 billion in lost income, according to a study released Tuesday by location analytics company Unacast,” Celine Castronuovo reports at The Hill.

One could reasonably ask, But what positive results were realized by these government restrictions?

Tragically, probably very little.

Despite its aggressive lockdown, New York currently has the second-highest mortality rate in America. In most cases, it’s unfair to blame high mortality rates on government officials, since evidence suggests there is little to no correlation between lockdown stringency and COVID-19 mortality. But that’s not the case in New York.

In a devastatingly callous order in March, Governor Cuomo sent COVID-19 patients into nursing homes where those most vulnerable to the virus live. Officially, some 6,500 nursing home residents statewide died from COVID-19 but that doesn’t count those who died from the virus after being transferred out and into a hospital. That would likely bring the total to at least 10,000. New York City comprises 43 percent of the population of New York State, translating into about 4,300 nursing home deaths. If only 10 percent of that figure died directly due to the Governor’s order, that works out to 430 deaths in the city.

So while the data is far from precise, and isn’t entirely apples-to-apples, we are nonetheless driven to a seat-of-the-pants conclusion: The deaths and damage from government COVID policy in New York City in 2020 exceed (perhaps by a wide margin) that of the city’s Great Fires. That’s quite a feat when you think about it.

Without striking a single match, government this year likely harmed New Yorkers more than did the conflagrations of 1776, 1835, and 1845—combined.

We can certainly understand why New Yorkers right about now might appreciate something Henry David Thoreau once said: “If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.”"