Staten Island Is Not Fucking Around When It Comes to Social Distancing

Some folks are so insistent on maintaining the freedom to infect themselves and others with covid-19 that they’re spitting on essential workers who kindly ask them to wear masks inside stores. But you’re not getting away with that shit on Staten Island!

On Sunday night, a video circulated on Twitter showing a bunch of grocery store shoppers on Staten Island excoriating a fellow shopper who reportedly entered the establishment unmasked.

Masks are legally required in New York where social distancing isn’t possible, i.e. in grocery stores and other indoor establishments. These shoppers were, uh, very clear that breaking the rules was not OK:

Staten Island hasn’t been hit by covid-19 quite as hard as its fellow New York City boroughs, but the death toll is still somewhere around 1,000, with many thousand more confirmed cases.

Still, Staten Islanders are itching to reopen—though most of New York State’s regions have started slowly reviving their economies, New York City is still behind on Governor Andrew Cuomo’s mandated benchmarks. A number of the borough’s Republican lawmakers (Staten Island is largely Republican, unlike the rest of the city) have been trying to rally the governor to let the borough open ahead of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and The Bronx, though on Monday, Cuomo said he wasn’t having it.

“I get that sometimes every borough would like to secede and be its own place,” Cuomo said at his daily presser. “But Staten Island, just practically, is still part of New York City.”

Which, considering, as a native and lifelong New Yorker, that that video is the most New York thing I’ve ever seen, is pretty obvious.