Conservative columnist Karol Markowicz and her family are leaving New York City, changing plans to stay in the city for life over its heavy-handed response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Markowicz wrote of her and her husband’s decision in a column in the New York Post on Monday. The final nudge that prompted her family to ditch New York City for Florida was the Democratic stronghold’s COVID policies regarding children and teens.
“Children have been an afterthought, at best, and have had their childhoods casually destroyed by our heavy-handed, and ultimately ineffective, response. I can no longer subject my own kids to it,” she wrote.
Markowicz and her husband were diehard New Yorkers. In 2016, despite living in a deep blue area of a deep blue state, Markowicz declared in a column for the Post: “We know we live in the greatest city in the history of the world. That’s right, in the history of the world. Who has it better than New Yorkers? We stay because we know that no other city has the energy and endless possibility that New York does. We’re open all night, all the time.”
She said that that optimism was crushed by the pandemic, however. Early in the onset of COVID-19, Markowicz had remained hopeful that her city would overcome the virus and come together like in the aftermath of 9-11 and Hurricane Sandy. Over time, the city fractured as paranoia about the virus spread. Markowicz wrote:
This time was very different. The pandemic had us at each other’s throats. Neighbors reported each other for gatherings. People screamed at each other in the street for not wearing masks. It became religious and any questioning of the doctrine was forbidden. It was impossible to discuss whether containment measures were useful (Did we need to wipe down our groceries with Clorox? What were the three-sided Plexiglas booths helping, exactly?) because any discussion of easing up on any of it meant you wanted PEOPLE TO DIE. If you wanted schools to open, you wanted TEACHERS TO DIE. People became afraid to speak up. I saw it all the time.
Children in the city have fared the worst, she said. Between lockdowns and mask mandates, the city’s response to the virus has been far more damaging to children than the virus itself. Markowicz wrote:
No one has it worse in New York than children. There is damage being done to the kids of this city, with masking and continued restrictions, and few in leadership seem to care at all. Masking is seen as a “low cost” safety option, but the idea that masking kids has no consequences is, of course, absurd. We’re already seeing studies about a decrease in cognitive abilities, in particular for “males and children in lower socioeconomic families.”
I see it in my own children. My 6-year-old son, who has been masked for the entirety of his schooling, is shy and apt not to repeat himself when he is misunderstood. He also will not ask the teacher to repeat herself. It’s having predictable results in his education.
Markowicz’s column comes a day after CBS reporter Jan Crawford made similar points about the response to COVID-19 in the United States. Crawford said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that the reaction’s “tremendous negative impact on kids” is “the greatest underreported story of the past year.”
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Source: Dailywire
