[standardUser]

If you look at the numbers throughout the Northeast, you see a remarkable consistency. New cases are at a trickle, despite lots of reopening (more in some places than others) and weeks of mass protests throughout the larger cities.

I am in NYC and mask compliance here is... OK. But people are generally going out a lot, eating out a lot, shopping, etc, with very little concern. Weeks keep passing without even a tiny uptick in the rate of new cases. Clearly, there is something suppressing the transmission rate in this region. The exact same holds true for Europe.

[mjmahone17]

If you haven’t left NYC, it may also be true that our perception of “going out a lot” is about equivalent to much of the nation’s “lockdown” perception.

In other parts of the country, like Florida and Arizona, it doesn’t seem like the transmission rate ever really went below 1: it just hovered around 1.

So now NY, Boston, etc are “opening up” to a roughly equivalent position that those states were in when they were under “total lockdown”: in NYC, we still don’t have indoor dining, for example, whereas Arizona still allows 50% capacity indoor dining despite nearly running out of ICU beds in most hospitals.

When you’re in the center of the epidemic, merely getting to an infection rate of 1 is not good enough. NYC got well below that. I don’t think everywhere else did, and even the places “shutting down again” may not be doing enough.

[kevin_thibedeau]

The rest of New York has been in phase three with indoor dining for a few weeks now.

[perl4ever]

That doesn't tell you whether people actually are, the way they may be in some other places. Is actual behavior at all the same in, say, NY vs FL?

I'm fatalistic about avoiding the virus in the long run, and I go out whenever I have something to do, but my food has all come from the grocery store or mail order since March. I'm still asking myself "do I need to do this" every time I consider going somewhere.

[standardUser]

I can tell you that in Manhattan, what I see are throngs of people with and without masks, enjoying parks and food and drink all day every day, often in crowded patios. Not to mention the hundreds of protests that have occurred.