[josephorjoe]

Entirely depends upon whether or not people feel safe in crowds.

More effective treatments, a vaccine, herd immunity, better testing and tracing, or some combination thereof could make people feel safe in crowds again.

But I do think there will be a large shift toward more "work from home" for office workers with fewer open office cube farms and more contained offices for individuals/small teams, so I would expect the lunch and afterwork crowds in Manhattan to thin out. It's not going to be fun going out to happy hour when you might get sick with a dangerous virus that could kill your parents if you visit them that weekend.

And 1-2 years is more than enough time for all of those bars in Times Square to go out of business. Someone will open new ones when a vaccine comes out, of course, but that could be a long time.

And if the schools do not reopen in the fall in the city but they do in the suburbs, a lot of families will leave. I might :(. Remote schooling has been a disaster.