News Room

On June 8, a crowd of maskless college students gathered outside Harper’s Restaurant and Brewpub in East Lansing, Michigan. Like other bars and restaurants in the United States, Harper’s had closed when the state imposed a shelter-at-home order in March. When the bar was allowed to reopen in June, at 50 percent capacity, fewer people could enter, and more had to wait. So the inevitable happened. The Brits call it a queue. Americans call it a line.

Once again, it’s election season, and once again, the New York City Board of Elections is under fire. This disaster is as predictable as the phases of the moon. To be fair, the long lines for early voting at sites across the city, which stretch down and around blocks and in some cases take hours to get through, are the result of many factors, some of which can’t be predicted precisely. The biggest variable is the number of people who will show up to vote. Small changes in demand can result in large changes in waiting time.

In early 2020, as the spread of COVID-19 took off at a dangerous speed, the dominant reaction was characterized by fear, panic, and anxiety. Now, seven months in, much of that acute and paralyzing stress that led people to stay home and social distance has been replaced by "pandemic fatigue."

As the COVID-19 pandemic took hold in regions across the United States in the spring, governors, mayors and local leaders hoping to quell the spread of the virus turned to the only actionable defenses available at the time: They closed schools and businesses, banned mass gatherings, issued stay-at-home orders and enforced other social distancing measures.

Even a one-week delay in the implementation of social distancing measures would have had a major effect on the total number of Covid-19 infections over time in several regions of the United States, especially New York City, a modeling study of 3 regions in the U.S. has shown.