New York State Governor Cuomo has ordered all non-essential business to close completely, and while saying that he is not enforcing a “quarantine in place” regulation, he is ordering people to keep away from each other in a veritable self-quaranting according to CNBC.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo ordered non-essential businesses to keep 100% of their workforce at home and put in place stringent new restrictions on New Yorkers as coronavirus the state grapples with the worst outbreak in the U.S.
“When I talk about the most drastic action we can take, this is the most drastic action we can take,” Cuomo said at a press conference in Albany on Friday. Cases across the state surged by 2,950 overnight to 7,102, he said.
“This is not life as usual. Accept it. Realize it and deal with it,” he said.
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has been pushing Cuomo to issue a shelter-in-place order for New York City, where cases skyrocketed by more than 1,000 over a matter of hours on Thursday and the state has the worst outbreak in the U.S. — more than half of which are concentrated in New York City.
“These actions will cause disruption, they will cause businesses to close … I understand that,” Cuomo said. “We’re all in quarantine now. We’re all in various levels of quarantine and it’s hard.”
Cuomo didn’t call the new restrictions a “shelter-in-place” order, although many of them mirror what’s in place in other parts of the country where officials have put such an order in place.
“It is not a shelter in place order,” Cuomo said, adding that he doesn’t want to scare residents. “Shelter in place is used currently for an active shooter or a school shooter. (source
At this point, New York State is for all purposes fully shut down. It is not “officially” shut down, but as a matter of fact it is.
If this is what something such as this virus can cause, can one imagine what would happen if there was a more serious crisis that happened? It would virtually shut down the whole nation and place her into lockdown.
Perhaps this is not about a virus, but about conditioning people to accept the previously unthinkable or unacceptable, so that it is no longer considered to be abnormal, but a new way of life completely obliterating that which came before.
Maybe revolutions do not start with a shout or with weapons, but with a sneeze.