Post 58 - May 8, 2020
Day 58…
New York, Massachusetts and Connecticut are the last three States that have not yet moved to start to reopen.
In New York, our case numbers have been going steadily down for the last two weeks but there are still 216 people who died from COVID-19 yesterday.
Imagine 216 people standing together as a group.
All of those people died yesterday.
We are due to continue our stay-at-home directive here in New York until May 14.
By then we will see what reopening has done to the numbers in the 47 other States and decide for ourselves whether we are going to start to reopen.
What does reopening really mean?
Here in New York, it is no longer as quiet as it was six weeks ago.
Early last week, work crews began appearing back on the streets.
A few days ago, construction resumed on a building being put up in a lot down the street from us.
The steady relentless thumping from the machines has been added back to the city’s usual landscape of sound.
Traffic, usually the main noise in the city, is still very low.
There simply isn’t anywhere to GO.
Starting to reopen doesn’t mean that anything is going to really change anytime soon.
There’s a store on Columbus that sells Italian pottery.
It’s a beautiful little shop with beautiful things to buy in it.
When we get to the point that that shop is allowed to re-open, the owners, I’m sure, will take steps to ensure their customer’s safety.
They can make sure that only one or two people, wearing masks, are allowed into the shop at a time.
They can wear masks themselves.
Great, but who is really going to shop, there?
The April unemployment numbers are in and, as expected, we are now experiencing the worst unemployment numbers since the Great Depression.
14.7%.
Stores like the shop that sells pottery rely on people with disposable income.
They rely on being in a well-trafficked area that ensures that plenty of people will walk by and look into the window.
They need a certain number of people who walk by every day to occasionally walk in and of those people who occasionally walk in, to occasionally buy something.
Until everything is reopened, will there be enough people out on the street to keep them afloat?
JERSEY BOYS is on a Norwegian Cruise Lines ship that, during the summer, cruises out of Seattle up the Inner Passage into Alaska.
The ship calls at Ketchikan, Skagway and Juneau, the state capital.
These ports are only accessible by air or by sea.
You can’t drive into any of them.
Most of the people who go there, do so via cruise ships.
Like the Italian pottery shop in Manhattan, most businesses in these towns rely on tourists coming in in huge numbers over the summer months and walking past them.
Travelers come in off of the cruise ships and take hikes, seaplane rides and buy things in the shops.
During the summer months, the residents of these towns hopefully make enough money off the occasional tourists, out of the throngs arriving every day, buying enough of their wares that they can get through the winters.
Almost nobody stops in at Alaskan ports during the winter.
The cruise ships vanish.
Everything closes down.
The NCL Bliss, the ship JERSEY BOYS is on, leaves in the fall.
It sails south, spends a couple of weeks in Mexican waters, then heads through the Panama Canal and spends the winter cruising through the Caribbean.
Whatever happens with the cruise ship industry in the future, it seems extremely unlikely that any major cruise ship company is going to sail to Alaska this summer.
They aren’t likely to go to the Caribbean either.
Those islands rely on the Cruise ships as much as the Alaskan towns do.
I noticed that a Starbucks near us on Broadway has reopened.
Only one person at a time is allowed inside and once you have your coffee, you have to drink it elsewhere.
Can that Starbucks really afford to stay open and operate under those conditions?
Will enough people be willing to spend all that money on something that they’ve now learned to make at home?
In days gone by, I would go into Starbucks when I was on my way to a rehearsal or a meeting and didn’t have time to brew coffee at home.
Which was most of the time.
I don’t think that Starbucks has ever really been a destination in and of itself.
Starbucks was a rest stop we all frequented on the way to somewhere else.
Until there is somewhere else for all of us to go, it doesn’t seem that Starbucks has a working path towards success reopening the way that they currently operate.
If they really want to reopen now, before the rest of businesses open, they are going to figure out a new business model because the old one relies on behavior that doesn’t exist now.
I don’t see how the old way they ran is going to work moving forward.
How comfortable are people really going to be getting near anybody else while this virus is still circulating?
I can’t see how we are going to be able to reopen our economy in tiny little isolated ways.
So many businesses around the entire country rely on other businesses being up and running in order to survive.
I want to see that Italian pottery shop open for business, but what good will it do if they can’t take in enough income to cover even their basic operating costs because nobody is walking by?
Today is the 75th anniversary of V.E. Day.
V.E. Day is the day that the Nazi’s unconditionally surrendered to the Allies, ending World War II in Europe.
After the war ended in Europe, it took a long time for some country’s economies to recover.
People didn’t want the same things they wanted before the war began.
Nobody had any money.
Countless millions of people had died, lost their lives in the war or had been brutally murdered.
The labor force of Europe’s young able-bodied men had been decimated.
It took a long time for all of the interdependent pieces of the cogs of the European economies to be repaired and put back in place before the machine could really be restarted.
V.E. Day marked the day that all of that began.
We have not yet had our V.E. Day with this coronavirus.
I’m not sure we are even all that close.
The COVID-19 pandemic is still waging war on multiple fronts throughout the globe.
YES, we have to figure out how to reopen.
YES, we all want to go back to work.
It’s just not that easy.
Snow flurries are possible in New York City tomorrow.
May 8 and we actually may see some snow.
At least it will keep most of us inside.
It will give us all another day to come up with workable ideas on how we really get back once this virus subsides.
We WILL get back. We just need to calmly and rationally figure out how.