An ordinance in New York allows gatherings of up to 50 people. In defiance of that ordinance, thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews packed into Yetev Lev D’Satmar synagogue in Brooklyn for a secret wedding. The building has a maximum capacity of 7,000 people and this event was packed shouder to shoulder with standing room only in the aisles.
Authorities learned about the secret wedding over the weekend and fined its organizers $15,000. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo condemned the event on Sunday as a “blatant disregard of the law” and called it “disrespectful to the people of New York.” Officials have issued strict limits on public gatherings in New York City’s boroughs and across the rest of the state. However, large parties have been cropping up on a near-daily basis, according to the New York City Sheriff’s Office.
A much smaller wedding in Maine had 55 guests. Guests reportedly did not wear masks, nor observe physical distancing rules. That wedding resulted in half the guests contracting COVID-19 with that then spreading to 177 people and killing 7. One guest who became sick visited a parent who worked at a retirement home. That resulted in an outbreak of 38 cases among staff and residents at the long-term care facility, over 100 miles away from the wedding. Six residents died at that facility.
In NYC the club scene went underground after the start of the pandemic. Those in the know can find crowded gatherings at warehouses, lofts, basements, boats, parks and rooftops. It is like the return of the prohibition ere only today people want to get drunk and deathly sick. Over Halloween weekend two parties were shit down by police, one with 400 people in Brooklyn and the other with 550 in the Bronx. Event organizers fail to understand or simply ignore the dangers of large indoor gatherings. Two bit event organizers see this as an opportunity to profit off the pandemic.