I am leaving New York City, the place where my husband and I both grew up and where we had planned to raise o🎶ur own kids. The response to COVID-19 in New York, in partic🔴ular where children are concerned, has driven our family out.
Children have been an afterthought, at best, and have had their childhoods casually destroyed by our heavy-handed, an🐈d ultimately ineffective, response. I can no longer subject my own kids to it.
I loved this city so much. I could not picture a life elsewhere. I was New York’s biggest cheerleader. In 2016 I wrote in these pages that we’d nev🦩er leave. “Why would we? We know we live in the greatest city in the history of the world. That’s right, in the history of the world. Who has it better than New Yorkers? We stay because we know that no other city has the energy and endless possibility thaꩵt New York does. We’re open all night, all the time.”
Suddenly that energy was snuffed out. The pandemic hit New York early and hard. Still, I had so much faith we would recover. I imagined that my city would rise from the ashes like we did after 9/11, after the 2003 blackout, after H൩urricane Sandy. We learned from those hard times to join together, to help each other. The days after those events were some of the most beautiful and inspiring. New Yorkers were there for each other. Our huge city was as tightknit as any small town.
This time was very different. The pandemic had us at each other’s throats. Neighbors reported each other for gatherings. People screamed at each other in the street for not wearing masks. It became religious and any questioning of the doctrine was forbidden. It was impossible to discuss whether containment measures were useful (Did we need to wipe down our groceries with Clorox? What were the three-sided Plexiglas booths helping, exactly?) because any discussion of easing up on aℱny of it meant you wanted PEOPLE TO DIE. If you wanted schools to open, you wanted TEACHERS TO DIE. People became afraid to speak up. I saw it all the time.
When I announced our family was leaving New York and moving to Florida, a state with a governor who has led the way on sanely managing COVID-19, I received dozens of messages from New Yorkers considering the same move. When I asked several if I could quote them, they asked to use a fake name. They live in fear of being “canceled” for not being sufficiently terrified of COVID. Three vaccines and many new treatments do not seem 🧸to matter. We must live suspended in our fear ind꧟efinitely.
No one has ꦍit worse in New York than children. There is damage being done to the kids of this city, with masking and continued restrictions, and few in leadership seem to care at all. Masking is seen as a “low cost” safety option, but the idea that masking kids has no consequences is, of course, absurd. We’re a🐼lready seeing , in particular for “males and children in lower socioeconomic families.”
I see it in my own children. My 6-year-old son, who has been masked for the e🌳ntirety of his schooling, is shy and apt not⛎ to repeat himself when he is misunderstood. He also will not ask the teacher to repeat herself. It’s having predictable results in his education.
It’s not that I decided one day to not “believe” in masks. We visited Iceland this summer and kids under 16 don’t have to mask there and never have. I have friends in Britain, Sweden, Holland. None of their unde✨r-12 children had worn masks at all through the entire pandemic. They don’t love their kids any less than parents in super-blue parts of the United States where masking is most intense. They do not worry less about their children becoming sickened with COVID. But they understood that in the sh𓃲ort span of childhood, there are trade-offs.
The medical professionals in their countries had weighed the data that masking has a minimal benefit for children, but would be detrimental to their education and well-being, and chose not to do it. I pushed for my state to make the same choice.
Instead, in September, at a time when our COVID case rate was at its lowest, Gov. Kathy Hochul forced the return to masking even for 2-year-olds in daycare settings. No other Western country is masking children this young. As the resᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚt of the world moved toward sanity, blue cities like New York have jutted away.
Hyper-masking of the lowest-risk population is the canary in the coal mine for so many other issues, but it’s not just the mas💮king driving us away.
Now the Omicron strain is hitting New York hard. Cases are through the roof. There’s no argument to be made that any of our mitigation tacti𒉰cs worked. The masking of toddlers was pointless. People are still contracting COVID-19 and classrooms are still closing. New York City’s Public Advocate Juma☂ane Williams called closing schools a “no-brainer.” It’s always kids last.
The treatment of children in New York since the very beginning of the pandemic has been abysmal. In the spring of 2020, then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo stuck schools dead last in the plan to reopen New York. He then delayed his decision on summer camps s💫o late that many could not open once they were grante✨d permission.
School openings in New York City were delayed twice in the fall of 2020. When they finally opened, they were on a ridiculous hybrid schedule, which . No sooner did this hobbled part-time model — which was celebrated by leadership across the city as some sort of win for kids while children in much of America and the world just attended schools on a regular schedule — start than they shut down again when NYC hit a 3 percent positive testing rate in November. Everything else remained open. Only children bore the burden of a shutdown.
When💫 Mayor Bill de Blasio announced vaccine mandates in October, and kids🃏 under 11 were not eligible for vaccines yet, he failed to exempt them until media pointed out his error. It was as if kids in the city simply didn’t exist.
Now the great majority of NYC kids are shut out of indoor dining, museums, theater and much else because the vaccine mandate has been extended to young kids, the demographic leꦉast likely to have a poor COVID outcome. Kids from other countries, few of which even have an approved vaccine for those under 11 yeꦡars old, are not welcome in our anti-children city.
None of it makes any sense ♈and yet we keep subjecting our kids to 𒊎it.
Until the recent cold weather, my kids had been eating on the ground outdoors in their respective schoolyards. When they finally moved the kids inside, my sixth-grader reported that the kids were forbidden from speaking to each other or sitting with their friends. Who else is living like this? Who else eats in silence? The best part was when the school vice principal visited the cafeteria and saw the kids chattiꦯng, she yelled at them — but not before pulling down her mask so she could be better understood, of course.
We haven’t thought twice about imposing these crazy provisions on our children, who, again, are the lowest-risk population for a poor COVID outcome. If anyone, it should be 80-year-olds sitting on the ground outsi❀de and eating in silence with their friends, not 8-year-olds. A report by Public Health England in September found of any age. But 80-year-olds are free to gallivant around the city living their best lives despite being at the highest risk for COVID d🧸eaths.
We see concerts full of people, pa♚cked restaurants and, ahem, strip clubs all operaꦐting like normal. But our kids are treated like lepers who must be contained.
We also see our politicians, de Blasio, Hochul, living entirely routine lives while warning the rest of us not to. In one picture, Hochul and some other adultswhile the small children in the picture were forced to mask. It’s sick. But it also betrays what we all know: Many of these measures are just for show. Hochul goes maskless because she isn’t worried about getting COVID, no matter what she 🦋says.
It’s telling that we don’t see high-profile people on the left announcing their departures from red states without vaccine or mask mandates. If lives are actually on the line, we should see an exodus of people from states ⭕like Florida or Texas. Instead we are seeing influxes of people from states with tight restri💞ctions to states with looser ones.
It feels like we’re in the grip of mania and there’s no way out. I have fought for the children of this city the entire length of the pandemic. I fought for every child who did not have parents at home working from their laptops, every child with a disability who was not getting the help they needed over Zoom. I fought for all the children who would never regain what they had lost while the🔜ir city stepped over them, trying to ignore their existence.
But now I have to ☂think of my own children and get them to sanity. We can no longer wait for our city to return to it.
