I've had an unusual amount of travel during covid, so I've had occasion to be in sf (2 mos), SD (1 mo), LA (3 mos), and NYC (3 mos). Leaving compliance aside, since my skewed samples wouldn't be very helpful, policy and enforcement in NYC seem to have been way more lax than all the parts of CA I was in.
When were you in NYC? During the first 3-5 months of COVID, NYC was a complete ghost town with nothing open aside from essential stores. Once we got our numbers down to some of the lowest in the country (compared to other cities with similar populations), everything then became lax again, and now it's sort of this half-assed situation as I described above. Cases out of control, but you're still allowed to do various things that seemingly havent been very well thought out
On the policy/enforcement side, NY had indoor dining open until wayy later than CA did in early winter, despite having worse numbers and a much worse trajectory. (CA overtook NY again and now SoCal is screwed, but this was before that).
I do think that there's some non-trade-off potential here via the micro-targeting approach they started while I was there. I was living in Soho around the time that Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn were having outbreaks, and I really appreciated that neighborhoods super far from me with relatively little cross-travel (esp with the low subway ridership at the time) didn't unnecessarily fuck up my ability to go for dinner with a friend. By contrast, LA/CA tends to shut things down at a much higher level, so outbreaks in East LA affect policy in my parents' neighborhood on the Western border of LA County.
