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People Were Leaving New York City Before the Coronavirus. Now What?

Exodus would shrink tax revenue, which would hurt vital services

Ross Sapir’s customers are clear when they call to hire a moving van: They are leaving New York City because of the coronavirus crisis and they aren’t sure when, or if, they are returning.

Mr. Sapir, president of Roadway Moving, said his storage business is booming as people with the motivation and means flee the epicenter of the pandemic, which had killed nearly 11,000 in New York City as of Saturday. Many clients are leaving before figuring out where they are going and want movers to go into their now-uninhabited apartments, pack everything up and put it in storage.

“It’s a great opportunity for us,” said Mr. Sapir, adding that his company’s 110,000-square-feet of storage space is nearly full. “But I’m not sure how it’s going to affect the city, economy-wise.”

New York City’s economy depends on people—millions of people—wanting to live here, crammed together in small apartments, crowded sidewalks and packed subway cars. But after decades of growth, the city’s population has declined for the past three years, which the pandemic threatens to accelerate. An exodus could leave the city without the workforce it needs to attract businesses and the tax revenue it relies on to provide vital services.

New York City’s population has plummeted before. The city lost more than 10% of its residents between 1970 and 1980, when deindustrialization decimated urban manufacturing industries, said William Frey, senior fellow at the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution. The accompanying fiscal crisis brought the city to the verge of bankruptcy and took years to recover from.

By 2016, the city’s population had grown from over 7 million in 1980 to nearly 8.4 million, according to the U.S. census. Now, with the coronavirus spread through close contact, that critical mass has become a liability.

“If a large number of people start to leave now, it could spiral,” said Jonathan Bowles, executive director of the nonpartisan think tank Center for an Urban Future. “It would be a huge blow to the city’s finances and leave the city struggling to pay for the things that make New York great, like the subway system, like parks, like schools.”

However, Mr. Bowles and others stressed that New York City’s obituary has been written prematurely several times, including after Sept. 11, when many feared people would be too worried about another terrorist attack to live in or visit the city. In fact, New York City’s population and tourism industry have boomed since 2001.

Seth Pinsky, the former president of the New York City Economic Development Corporation who helped lead the city’s economic-development effort after the 2007-09 recession, said New York officials have to ensure people feel safe and that New York City is still worth it.

“New York has always been a difficult place to live,” he said. “The city is dirty, it’s crowded and it’s expensive. But the reason people have consistently made that trade off is the benefits outweigh the cost.”

Mr. Pinsky, who is now chief executive of the 92 Street Y, said those benefits include the city’s arts and culture scene, including Broadway, museums and art galleries. He said city officials will face hard budget choices after the pandemic, which the city’s Independent Budget Office estimates will deliver a $9.7 billion tax-revenue hit over the next two fiscal years. Mr. Pinsky urged them not to make too many cuts to cultural institutions.

A spokesman for Mayor Bill de Blasio said the mayor wants to rebuild the city to be stronger than it was before the pandemic, making it more hospitable for businesses, workers and families.

Seth Pinsky, the former president of the New York City Economic Development Corporation who helped lead the city’s economic-development effort after the 2007-09 recession, said New York officials have to ensure people feel safe and that New York City is still worth it.

“New York has always been a difficult place to live,” he said. “The city is dirty, it’s crowded and it’s expensive. But the reason people have consistently made that trade off is the benefits outweigh the cost.”

Mr. Pinsky, who is now chief executive of the 92 Street Y, said those benefits include the city’s arts and culture scene, including Broadway, museums and art galleries. He said city officials will face hard budget choices after the pandemic, which the city’s Independent Budget Office estimates will deliver a $9.7 billion tax-revenue hit over the next two fiscal years. Mr. Pinsky urged them not to make too many cuts to cultural institutions.

A spokesman for Mayor Bill de Blasio said the mayor wants to rebuild the city to be stronger than it was before the pandemic, making it more hospitable for businesses, workers and families.

The labor market’s dramatic shift, from record-low unemployment to a surge in job losses, means some businesses will have an easier time finding talent in lower-cost areas or persuading people to relocate outside New York, Mr. Boyd said.

For Jaime Hochhauser, the coronavirus pandemic feels like the beginning of her leaving New York story. Ms. Hochhauser, who owns the household-staffing business HomeFront Lifestyle Staffing and lives in Forest Hills Gardens, Queens, fled with her husband and children to live with her in-laws in the Hamptons.

Ms. Hochhauser said she doesn’t see her family going back to New York City for at least a year. She spent an afternoon researching moving and storage companies.

“I don’t feel it’s a healthy environment to raise children in right now,” she said. “I don’t know if I’ll ever feel comfortable getting on the subway again.”

Mortality statistics show 122,000 deaths in excess of normal levels across 14 countries analysed by the FT

The death toll from coronavirus may be almost 60 per cent higher than reported in official counts, according to an FT analysis of overall fatalities during the pandemic in 14 countries.

Mortality statistics show 122,000 deaths in excess of normal levels across these locations, considerably higher than the 77,000 official Covid-19 deaths reported for the same places and time periods.

If the same level of underreporting observed in these countries was happening worldwide, the global Covid-19 death toll would rise from the current official total of 201,000 to as high as 318,000

To calculate excess deaths, the FT has compared deaths from all causes in the weeks of a location’s outbreak in March and April 2020 to the average for the same period between 2015 and 2019. The total of 122,000 amounts to a 50 per cent rise in overall mortality relative to the historical average for the locations studied.

In all the countries analysed except Denmark, excess deaths far outnumbered the official coronavirus death tolls. The accuracy of official death statistics from the virus is limited by how effectively a country is testing people to confirm cases. Some countries, including China, have retrospectively revised up their death tolls from the disease.

According to the FT analysis, overall deaths rose 60 per cent in Belgium, 51 per cent in Spain, 42 per cent in the Netherlands and 34 per cent in France during the pandemic compared with the same period in previous years.

Some of these deaths may be the result of causes other than Covid-19, as people avoid hospitals for other ailments. But excess mortality has risen most steeply in places suffering the worst Covid-19 outbreaks, suggesting most of these deaths are directly related to the virus rather than simply side-effects of lockdowns.

David Spiegelhalter, professor of the public understanding of risk at Cambridge university, said the daily counts in the UK, for instance, were “far too low” because they only accounted for hospital deaths.

“The only unbiased comparison you can make between different countries is by looking at all cause mortality . . . There are so many questions about the rise we’ve seen in death that have not got Covid on the death certificate, yet you feel are inevitably linked in some way to this epidemic.”

The extra deaths are most pronounced in urban areas with the worst virus outbreaks, and have completely overwhelmed reporting mechanisms in some. This is especially worrying for many emerging economies, where total excess mortality is orders of magnitude higher than official coronavirus fatalities.

In Ecuador’s Guayas province, just 245 official Covid-related deaths were reported between March 1 and April 15, but data on total deaths show that about 10,200 more people died during this period than in a typical year — an increase of 350 per cent.

In the northern Italian region of Lombardy, the heart of Europe’s worst outbreak, there are more than 13,000 excess deaths in the official statistics for the nearly 1,700 municipalities for which data is available. This is an uptick of 155 per cent on the historical average and far higher than the 4,348 reported Covid deaths in the region.

The region surrounding the Italian city of Bergamo registered the worst increase internationally with a 464 per cent rise in deaths above normal levels, followed by New York City with a 200 per cent increase, and Madrid, Spain, with a 161 per cent increase.

In the Indonesian capital Jakarta, data on burials shows an increase of 1,400 relative to the historical average during the same period — 15 times the official figure of 90 Covid deaths for the same period.

The challenge is not confined to the developing world. In England and Wales, the number of fatalities in the week ending April 10 was the highest this century. The figure was 76 per cent higher than the average for the same week in the past 5 years, and the number of excess deaths was 58 per cent higher than the total number of reported Covid-deaths for the same period.

“If we want to . . . [understand] the ways different countries have responded to the surging pandemic and how [it] has affected the health of the population, the best way is to count excess deaths,” said David Leon, professor of epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.

Experts have warned of serious under-reporting of Covid-19 cases in residential facilities for the elderly, who are particularly vulnerable to the virus. “Very few countries appear to be testing people in care homes, staff and residents, systematically,” said Adelina Comas-Herrera, Research Fellow at the Care Policy and Evaluation Centre of the London School of Economics.

Even the much higher numbers of deaths in the pandemic suggested by excess mortality statistics are likely to be conservative, as lockdowns mean that “mortality from numerous conditions such as traffic accidents and occupational injuries possibly went down,” said Markéta Pechholdová, assistant professor of demography at the University of Economics, Prague.

Health agency says there is no proof recovered patients are shielded from the virus

The World Health Organization has warned governments against issuing “immunity passports” to allow people who show antibodies for coronavirus to return to work. 

As leaders across the world turn their focus to reopening their economies after weeks of social restrictions designed to contain the pandemic, many have been hoping to deploy some form of certificate system allowing people deemed immune to travel and work. 

But in a scientific brief published on Friday evening, the WHO cautioned against such plans, citing a lack of proof that anyone could be definitively labelled immune from the deadly virus. 

“There is currently no evidence that people who have recovered from Covid-19 and have antibodies are protected from a second infection,” the WHO said. 

Chile last week became the first country to announce plans to give “health passports” to recovered Covid-19 patients, allowing them to go back to work, Reuters reported.

Germany and the UK have also considered taking a similar approach to help ease the strains on economies suffering their sharpest contractions in decades. 

However, the WHO said there was not yet enough evidence to guarantee that such measures would work, and that there were no studies on whether the presence of antibodies indicated immunity in humans. It said giving people who have antibodies special rights to travel or work “may therefore increase the risks of continued transmission”. 

Reports of 51 patients in South Korea who tested positive after apparently recovering from the virus, as well as similar cases in Japan and China, have raised concerns over scientists' understanding of Covid-19 immunity.

On Saturday, the WHO issued a further statement on the matter, via Twitter.

"Earlier today we tweeted about a new WHO scientific brief on ‘immunity passports’. The thread caused some concern & we would like to clarify: We expect that most people who are infected with #COVID19 will develop an antibody response that will provide some level of protection," the WHO said.

The WHO also cautioned on the accuracy of antibody tests used to determine immunity and the risk of confusing Covid-19 antibodies with those for other coronaviruses, including four viruses that cause the common cold.

More than 90 commercial antibody tests have been marketed to meet international demand, but many have proved unreliable. Nine different tests evaluated by the UK were all far from meeting the required standards, meaning that none of the 17m ordered by the health department were fit for purpose. 

The US Food and Drug Administration has been criticised for granting emergency authorisation for some antibody tests.

Nonetheless, the UK said this week it planned to test 300,000 people for Covid-19 antibodies over the coming year, while similar schemes are under way in Germany, Finland and New York state. 

Developing a reliable antibody test has become a key area of research for some of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies.

Roche and Abbott Laboratories are among those hoping to produce millions of accurate test kits in the next couple of months.