Good morning. It’s Tuesday, the second day that masks will be optional in New York City public schools. We’ll look at how things went on the first day. We’ll also see how Russian restaurants are faring as the war continues against Ukraine.
Credit…Brendan Mcdermid/Reuters
From East New York in Brooklyn to East Tremont in the Bronx, schoolchildren could go to class on Monday without something that had become as essential as their backpacks: masks. But not everyone was ready to leave them at home.
It was another moment in the city’s struggle to emerge from the pandemic — a moment that Mayor Eric Adams said proved that “Covid is no longer in control of our lives.” It came on the same day that the city suspended its proof of vaccination requirement for restaurants, gyms and entertainment venues.
Ella Chan, 17, a junior at Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, did not see the day the way Adams did. She said she would keep her mask on. “There really is no cure for Covid at this point,” she said. “There’s just too much uncertainty for me.”
In dropping a school mask mandate that had been in effect since the fall of 2020, Adams continued his push to return the city to something approaching normalcy and resuscitate its pandemic-stricken economy. The mayor’s efforts have been applauded by many business leaders and by the teachers’ union, but some health experts have questioned the mayor’s timing, saying it was too soon to drop mask rules.
[New York’s Students Shed Their Masks, Warily, in Pandemic Milestone]
Adams said the city had taken a “very conservative approach” to removing restrictions. He said cases were now low enough to lift them. But there was uncertainty: Could New York return to its prepandemic ways? What if another crushing setback — another variant-driven spike in cases — is lurking?
Lorraine Harrigan, 36, told her daughter, Londyn Carroway, a first grader at P.S. 284 in Brownsville, Brooklyn, to keep her mask on.
“I feel like they’re rushing too fast to remove the mask,” Harrigan said.
The city’s health commissioner, Dr. Dave Chokshi, said the decision on school masks had been driven by data. “We’re at a lower level of transmission than we’ve been in the past,” he said, “and almost equally importantly, the levels of vaccination are significantly higher than they have been previously.”
The seven-day average of new cases was 691 on Sunday, down from more than 40,000 a day at the height of the Omicron surge in early January. The seven-day average of deaths, which peaked at 251 in mid-January, had dropped to 17 on Sunday.
But only 52 percent of K-12 public school students citywide are fully vaccinated, according to city data, while 59 percent of students have received at least one dose. The city’s count also shows that the doses have not been distributed equally.
At Stuyvesant, 93 percent of students are vaccinated, one of the highest rates in the city. At P.S. 1 in Tottenville, Staten Island, only 10 percent are. At the Cynthia Jenkins Elementary School in the Springfield Gardens neighborhood of Queens, only about 11 percent of thestudents are fully vaccinated.
Natalie Charles, the mother of a second grader, Ethan Scarlett, said that she was not entirely comfortable with dropping masks. “This is what I told him, you have to keep the mask on,” she said, adding that her entire family was vaccinated.
Some rules remain. Students, school staff members and visitors must complete a health screening form before entering a school building. Students returning to school after battling infections will have to wear masks for several days. Masks are recommended for students and staff who have been exposed to the virus.
And children under 5 must still wear them in day care and preschool settings, which has angered some parents. Adams said he intended to lift that mandate once he is confident that cases among older students — those for whom the mask mandate ended on Monday — had not risen.
Weather
It will be an increasingly sunny but windy and cooler day as high pressure builds. The temperatures will be in the high 40s, dropping to the mid-30s at night.
alternate-side parking
In effect until March 17 (Purim).
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Russian restaurants feel the winds of war
It is a consequence of a war 4,600 miles away: Our writer Alyson Krueger says that Russian restaurants in New York City are feeling a chill. Many of the owners are openly against the war — some emigrated from Ukraine — but they are coping with canceled reservations, angry social media posts and bad Yelp reviews. Some restaurants have been vandalized.
“People have kicked in our door at night,” said Vlada Von Shats, the matron of Russian Samovar, a Russian piano bar in Midtown Manhattan known for its flavored vodkas, caviar and red chandeliers. Reservations are down by 60 percent.
“There is a lot of stigma out there,” she said. “These people don’t realize that we have nothing to do with Putin.” The restaurant is hosting a fund-raiser for Ukraine this week. It put a blue-and-yellow flag on the door and a sign that said, “Stand by Ukraine. No War.”
Sveta, a small restaurant in the West Village known for Instagram-ready cocktails, has been barraged with negative emails. One said simply, “Go home.”
The restaurant’s eponymous founder, Sveta Savchitz, moved to New York from Ukraine in 1993. She and her son Alan Aguichev, who opened the restaurant with her shortly before the pandemic began, decided to market it as Russian, figuring that would draw more attention.
Now they do not want the attention they are getting. Last week they changed all the references online from “Russian” to “Eastern European.”
Restaurants, from the budget-friendly to the ultraexpensive, felt the pain of pandemic shutdowns and restrictions. With the city dropping the requirement that they check customers’ vaccination status, many restaurant owners expected crowds to return. But for restaurants with ties to Russia, the war has added another complication.
Russia-Ukraine War: Key Things to Know
A humanitarian crisis. Increasingly indiscriminate Russian shelling has trapped and traumatized Ukrainian civilians, leaving tens of thousands without food, water, power or heat in besieged cities of southern Ukraine and elsewhere.
A third round of talks. Ukrainian and Russian delegations met for another negotiating session and agreed to try again to open humanitarian corridors for civilians leaving Ukrainian cities under attack, but made no progress on ending the war.
The key cities. Russian artillery struck residential areas in Mykolaiv but Ukrainian forces said they maintained control after another day of fierce fighting. In Kyiv, a Ukrainian commander claimed that two Russian planes were shot down. Here’s where the fighting stands in other cities.
Economic fallout. Global stocks slid and energy prices jumped as U.S. officials in Congress and the Biden administration weighed a ban on Russian oil imports that could further punish President Vladimir V. Putin but exacerbate already-high gas prices.
Von Shats is Russian. Her husband is Ukrainian. Two of their three adult children are involved at Samovar, and they identify as both nationalities. Most of Samovar’s staff is Ukrainian. One of the musicians had a niece who died in the violence last weekend.
Like Samovar, Tzarevna — a Russian restaurant on the Lower East Side — has a sign expressing support for Ukraine. Still people call, demanding to know which side of the war the owners are on.
“I am Russian,” said Mariia Dolinsky, an owner, who moved to New York City from Russia nine years ago. The other owner is her husband, Ricky Dolinsky, who she said was “half Taiwanese, half from New Jersey, and has Ukrainian grandparents.” The Dolinskys said reservations have dropped by half, and few people just walk in anymore.
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METROPOLITAN diary
Open lid
Dear Diary:
It was a fall morning, and I was on the B going up Central Park West to 86th Street.
A teenage boy with a shoe box in his lap caught my eye. As we traveled north, I noticed that the box had holes in it and that the boy kept nervously opening the lid a crack to check on whatever was inside.
Just after the train left 72nd Street, he opened the lid a tad too far and a bird was suddenly flying around the car.
The boy looked around, bewildered. The bird tried to land on the hand railings, but they were too slippery for a perch.
When we pulled into 81st Street, the doors opened and the bird flew out.
A man in a deerstalker cap spoke up.
“Don’t worry about him,” he said to the boy. “There’s a warbler migration coming through that he’ll meet up with.”
And off we went.
— Katy Rosati
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Melissa Guerrero, Jeff Boda and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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