New York: New York City will not proceed with indoor dining from next week as planned because of a nationwide surge in coronavirus infections, Mayor Bill de Blasio said Wednesday.
The Big Apple is due to enter phase three of a four-phase reopening plan on Monday but officials have postponed plans to allow restaurants to sit customers inside with limited capacity.
“It is not the time to forge ahead with indoor dining,” de Blasio told reporters, citing the spike in virus cases in numerous American states.
New York state was previously the epicentre of the United States’s outbreak, with more than 32,000 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University.
But the spread has largely been brought under control, with officials crediting a lengthy shutdown, strict social distancing guidelines and the mandatory wearing of masks.
At the height of New York’s outbreak in early-mid April around 800 people were dying from COVID-19 a day. The daily toll dropped to as low as five last weekend.
Hospitalisations and infections continue to hit new lows but officials fear a spike in rates elsewhere could cause an uptick in New York as it slowly reopens business and other activities.
New York City moved to phase two on June 22 when restaurants were allowed to open outside areas. Hair salons also got back to business then.
Just months ago several states mandated quarantine for visiting New Yorkers, but New York now requires some travellers to quarantine, highlighting a sharp turnaround in the nature of the virus’s spread in the US.
New York state, New Jersey and Connecticut require visitors from 16 states, mainly in the south and southwest of the US, to quarantine for 14 days if they visit.
Visitors found violating self-quarantine rules are subject to a judicial order and self-funded mandatory quarantine, as well as potential fines of $2,000 for a first violation and $5,000 for a second.
Alarming spikes in new cases in southern hotspots Texas and Florida are driving the daily national total of new cases to over 40,000 per day.
Infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci warned on Tuesday that new cases could more than double to 100,000 per day if authorities and the public fail to take steps to suppress the pandemic.
EU opens borders, but not to US
The European Union reopened its borders on Wednesday to visitors from 15 countries but excluded the United States, where coronavirus deaths are spiking once again, six months after the first cluster was reported in China.
The final list of nations safe enough to allow residents to enter the EU did not include Russia, Brazil or the US, where the daily death toll passed 1,000 on Tuesday for the first time since June 10.
Several US states imposed 14-day quarantines on travellers from other states.
The EU hopes relaxing restrictions on countries from Algeria to Uruguay will breathe life into its tourism sector, which has been choked by a ban on non-essential travel since mid-March.
Travellers from China, where the virus first emerged late last year, will be allowed to enter the bloc only if Beijing reciprocates and opens the door to EU residents.
However, with over 10 million known infections worldwide and more than 500,000 deaths, the pandemic is “not even close to being over”, the World Health Organization has warned.
The WHO was first alerted to a cluster of pneumonia cases six months ago announced in a media statement by health officials in the city of Wuhan - experts only later discovering the illness was caused by a coronavirus.
‘The first tourist’
Greece, which has suffered fewer than 200 virus deaths, has seen its economy hit hard by lockdowns and travel restrictions - all but ending its lucrative tourism season before it began.
Romanian Cojan Dragos was “the first tourist” in one Corfu hotel. He drove with his wife and daughter and said: “We have the whole hotel just for us.”
“It’s empty, there’s not a single tourist, the restaurants, the shops are closed, it’s sad,” he said, hoping for some excitement when other tourists arrive.
Separately, Spain and Portugal held a ceremony as they reopened their land border, which the Portuguese had kept shut for fear of importing cases from its harder-hit neighbour.
