COVID Scared Off 2% Of NYC Taxpayers During Pandemic's Height: Study

NEW YORK CITY — The coronavirus really did scare off scores of New Yorkers in 2020, a new study found.

More than 2 percent of New York City taxpayers moved away that year, according to an analysis released Tuesday by state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli.

"The pandemic upended everyone's life and caused a big shift in the movement of New York taxpayers in 2020," DiNapoli said in a statement.

"While patterns shifted closer to pre-pandemic trends in 2021, net out-migration rates remained higher, particularly for families."

The study provides hard data on what New Yorkers already knew: that many people left the city as the coronavirus pandemic first hit.

The exodus from the city amounted to a net loss of nearly 88,000 people, and represented roughly 72 percent of all residents who fled the state that year, the study found.

"With the pandemic impacting the City earlier and more severely, City taxpayers moving out of the State in 2020 were nearly double those of the year before and three times the number of taxpayers moving in," the study states.

The scale of moving during the pandemic's first year was ultimately an aberration, but New York hasn't quite recovered, according to the study.

New York has steadily experienced an increase in part-time resident tax filers and see more people exit the state than moving in, the study found.