Nancy Testa walked into the kitchen at Capri Cakes, her bakery in the south Bronx, and noticed her workers smiling. 

“I said: ‘what’s going on?’” Ms Testa recalled. The grins, it turned out, were spawned by the realisation that the bakery had managed to survive through three months of coronavirus-induced lockdown. “It was a big deal,” Ms Testa said.

New York City’s tentative reopening from lockdown began last Monday. It had a special resonance in the city’s poorest borough and the one hardest hit by coronavirus. In the past three months Bronx residents have suffered the highest death rates from a disease that disproportionately targets the poor. The neighbourhood, whose residents are more than 80 per cent black or Hispanic, has also become a flashpoint in the recent protests sparked by the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.