New York’s patchwork recovery masks vast inequities laid bare by Covid

There are signs of renewal in a city that has weathered crisis after crisis, but what its future looks like remains an open question

For most of the past year, Manhattan's signature yellow cabs have been a rarity on the avenues and cross-streets. Now, as the city picks up and office workers begin to return, they too are returning - but not yet on a pre-pandemic scale. At the same time, the city is gridlocked by traffic.

A patchwork of indicators suggest the recovery from a pandemic that hit hard and early, caused close to 30,000 deaths out of a 8.4-million population and placed the metropolis in an economic deep-freeze will be similarly uneven.