New York City to hold ticker-tape parade for pandemic frontline workers

Former global pandemic centre has recorded 33,000 Covid deaths

New York City will hold a ticker-tape parade honouring healthcare staff, essential workers and medical responders on July 7, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced on Monday.

The largest US city was regarded as the global centre of the Covid-19 pandemic in April 2020, which led to one of the most intense lockdowns in the country as hospitals were overrun.

At the time, Mr de Blasio promised a celebratory parade when the pandemic was under control. The event will come after the city lifts social distancing rules on July 1.

“We’re going to have essential workers celebrated, groups of essential workers, floats for healthcare workers, first responders, educators, municipal workers, [transport] workers, grocery and bodega workers, delivery people, you name it,” Mr de Blasio said on Monday.

“All the essential workers who made it happen. Everyone who kept it together in New York City for all of us and brought us back.”

Ticker-tape parades are named after the ribbons of paper from stock price telegraph machines, which used to be thrown from office windows along the route, although nowadays confetti is used.

More than 33,000 people in New York City have died from Covid-19, the city's health department said.

At the peak of the pandemic, the department was recording about 750 daily deaths.

It is now seeing a seven-day average of five daily deaths, thanks largely to the US vaccination programme.

At least 53 per cent of the city's population has had at least one vaccine dose.

City businesses, after a year of limited capacity and other measures, are now able to operate with few Covid-19 restrictions.

New York is also hosting the Tribeca Festival, the first in-person film festival in the country since the start of the pandemic.

And the Foo Fighters will soon welcome the first concert crowd to Madison Square Garden in more than a year.

Broadway shows are expected to resume in the autumn.

"This one is going to have a special spirit to it, a special heart and soul, because it’s about celebrating everyday New Yorkers who did something so heroic and need our thanks," Mr de Blasio said of the parade.

"It’s time for the parade to celebrate our home-town heroes.”

The New York Times reported this month that Mr de Blasio hopes to plan a major concert in Central Park with music producer Clive Davis this August as part of a "Homecoming Week" for the city.