With all of the neatly-manicured PowerPoint slides populated with very official looking charts and graphs illustrating neat, tidy trendlines, it seems like the state’s reopening process is being handled with a disciplined, dispassionate focus on the data. That notion would fall apart pretty quickly, however, if the benchmarks for re-opening were recalibrated on a completely random basis.

That’s what happened this weekend.

One of the key metrics the administration marked as a major prerequisite for reopening was declining COVID-19 related hospitalizations and deaths. Regions had to show either a sustained 14-day decline or show they’d never had a spike of 15 new hospitalizations or five hospital deaths on average over any three-day period since the outbreak started. The Democrat and Chronicle reported that the Capital Region and Central New York were both more than 10 days away from reaching those benchmarks over the weekend, so the administration simply (and arbitrarily) re-set the clock to start on May 15. Both regions are reopening after hiring more contact tracers.

How can we be expected to take this approach seriously when metrics which had previously been gospel can suddenly be changed? The more you examine the details of this re-opening plan, the less comprehensive it feels and the less sense it makes.

For example, Phase One allows expanded curbside pickup for small retailers. That might seem like progress, until you realize that their big-box competitors have been allowed to have huge volumes of people crowd into their stores since the pandemic began. Why are social distancing policies, mask-wearing and aggressive cleaning practices good enough to protect hundreds of people in a Home Depot, but not the regular customers of a local mom-and-pop business?

Sending mixed messages to New Yorkers by handpicking seemingly random industries to reopen based on metrics that can be recalibrated at your administration’s whim is not a solid reopening strategy. It’s time to allow our small, family-owned businesses the opportunity to reopen across the board by enforcing occupancy limits and stringent cleaning, social distancing and personal-protection practices. It doesn’t mean that we’ll get back to normal overnight. It does mean that we can level the playing field and start our economic recovery off on the right foot.