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Early Days, Winter 2020
On March 2, 2020, the day after New York State recorded its first confirmed case of COVID-19, Governor Andrew Cuomo appeared in Manhattan with Mayor Bill de Blasio and medical and civic leaders to reassure people that even as the coronavirus was devastating China and Italy, their state and city were not in danger. “We have the best health care system in the world here,” he said. “And excuse our arrogance as New Yorkers, I speak for the Mayor also on this one, we think we have the best health care system on the planet right here in New York. So, when you’re saying what happened in other countries versus what happened here, we don’t think it’s going to be as bad as it was in other countries.”1
The following years proved his optimism wrong. More than forty-five thousand New Yorkers would die, despite the city’s excellent hospitals and its health department. The pandemic would wreck the city’s economy, disrupt its schools for years, and tear at its social fabric.2
As historians of public health, medicine, and disasters have made clear, epidemics are much more than germs and viruses set in motion. Epidemics gain force and significance in their context, in communities, cities, states, and nations. They exploit and expose inequalities that leave some people more vulnerable than others. The coronavirus may have originated in China, but the way that it wracked New York City was made in America and lived out in New York. From the federal government to local officials, the pandemic was defined by failures of leadership. And in the streets, transit system, and homes of New York City, the coronavirus spread and infected on a devastating scale.3
COVID-19 struck the United States when it was already in the depths of what the historian Daniel T. Rodgers has called the “age of fracture,” a period when the ideas about politics, identities, societies, and institutions that had once held the United States together fragmented, to be replaced by a cacophony of claims connected only by a deep faith in the market. At the top of the federal government, President Donald Trump—presiding over a country deeply polarized by regional and political identities—announced that the virus would someday vanish, speculated in public on medically preposterous cures, put money into the development of vaccines, and attacked elected officials, journalists, and public health authorities who questioned his actions. To be sure, there were strengths within federal agencies and individuals who met the pandemic with courage and high standards of professionalism, but these could not overcome a general lack of preparedness and operational capabilities in the federal government. But the confusion wrought by the Trump White House reverberated nationally, undermining the credibility of federal officials, and weakening the effectiveness of government responses to a national problem.4
The situation was little better at lower levels of government. In matters of public health, the federalist structure of government in the United States devolves considerable autonomy to fifty states and more than three thousand counties. Faced with a pandemic that could travel with the speed of a continental jet flight, this devolution made it difficult to coordinate any national strategy against COVID-19—even if there had been one. In theory, decentralization left open the possibility of crafting local responses to specific circumstances, but in practice it led to an ever-changing patchwork of city, county, and state policies on matters such as masking, business closures, and stay-at-home orders that undermined public confidence in government and may have increased the spread of the virus. Moreover, poorly funded state and local public health departments were ill-equipped to overcome the long-standing inequalities that made Black and Latino people more vulnerable to infection and less likely to receive adequate care.5
COVID-19 also struck in what has been described as the “neoliberal” era, a period from the 1970s onward when free market capitalism was acclaimed as the best way to organize societies, ensure human freedom, and deliver prosperity. In contrast to the earlier New Deal order, which stressed the power of government and regulation to shape the economy in ways that delivered a broad prosperity, neoliberalism applauded market systems and market-based outcomes. The global recession of 2008–9 shook faith in neoliberalism, but as late as 2020 it remained a strong force in the United States and in both the Democratic and Republican parties.6
Neoliberalism reshaped New York, but the city brought significant strengths to confront coronavirus—a labor movement that was stronger than in most American cities, public and private hospitals, a proud tradition of municipal public health work embodied in its Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, an activist disposition, and a sense of its own grit that was confirmed in New York’s recovery from the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Since the days of the Progressive Era and the New Deal, there was also an enduring belief—however bruised by periodic budget cuts and narrowing definitions of the public good—that public health was the birthright of all New Yorkers.7
The populous and powerful city of New York might have appeared to be well positioned to meet the challenges of COVID-19, but as the course of the pandemic would show, it was deeply vulnerable. As a global city with direct transportation links to the rest of the world, New York received COVID-19 via international airline flights—primarily from Europe.
New York in 2020 was also, however, a city with significant inequalities. Middle-class and affluent New Yorkers with good health insurance could rely on some of the best hospitals in the world, almost all of them run by health corporations. Poor and low-income New Yorkers, who often lacked health insurance, were prone to relying on municipally owned hospitals that were not as well funded as their corporate counterparts.8
Black, Brown, and lower-income New Yorkers lived and worked in circumstances that made them more vulnerable to disease and chronic health problems. At work, they were more likely to labor in settings that put them in direct contact with the public—as transit workers, cashiers, retail store staff, service workers, or hospital staff.9
And their city was an increasingly expensive place to live in, setting off a chain of consequences that made them more vulnerable to the virus. Population growth outpaced the construction of affordable housing, and poor, working-class, and middle-class New Yorkers found it ever harder to cover housing costs. In Brooklyn and Queens, the two boroughs with the largest immigrant populations, multiple generations often lived together in crowded housing.
Perhaps most important, the disease spread asymptomatically and faster than anyone imagined. In early March, when Governor Cuomo announced that New Yorkers would do better than other places afflicted with the virus, the absence of adequate testing muddied full knowledge of the extent of COVID-19’s presence in the New York metropolitan area. Indeed, subsequent research shows that COVID-19 was in New York City as early as January and was circulating rapidly by early March.10
In the days and weeks after Cuomo’s announcement, COVID-19 spread through the city. The governor and mayor—in one more episode of their dangerously cantankerous fight for dominance—disagreed over what to do. On March 5, the mayor rode the subway to reassure New Yorkers that it was safe. Privately health department officials were alarmed. When the mayor on March 17 said New Yorkers should be ready to “shelter in place” to protect themselves from the virus, Governor Cuomo said the mayor was overstepping his authority.11
On March 20, with Broadway closed, schools closed, and refrigerator trucks set up outside hospitals to handle an anticipated overflow of dead bodies, the governor announced his “New York on Pause” plan, which would take effect March 22. Under it, all nonessential workers were required to stay at home, nonessential businesses were required to close, and New Yorkers over seventy were required to stay at home. New York was now a city under lockdown at the epicenter of a global pandemic.12
Fear, Hygiene, and Teaching
Damien LaRock
Damien LaRock lives in Douglaston, Queens, and works as a special education teacher at P.S. 148 in East Elmhurst, Queens. When he first heard about COVID-19 in January 2020, he was in a taxi; the driver had the radio tuned to 1010 WINS, and a story came on about a new virus spreading in China.13
Late January or early to mid-February I took a field trip with my class to the Queens Botanical Garden. We were riding the school bus and one of my students, Reinaldo, asked me what the coronavirus was. So we started to talk about it, and he started to express some fear that he heard that this virus was going to come here. And I remember trying to think really carefully about how to respond to him because, you know, he’s a nine-year-old child, and I certainly didn’t want to make him feel worried about it, but I also didn’t want to give him a false sense of comfort. So I just tried to explain what I knew about the virus.
But after that it definitely became more and more present in our daily consciousness every single day. The kids were talking about it more in school. I remember my coteacher and I, and several friends who were teachers, started having more and more conversations about what was going to happen if the virus were to come to New York City.
I had a conversation with my coteacher about needing to do some lessons with our kids about washing their hands and covering their coughs. And these are third graders. So we knew that this was going to be a struggle. We had lots of conversations about finding this tricky balance between teaching hygiene, making sure that we were talking about the virus, but also not instilling too much fear in our kids.
The Angel of Death over Italy
Fabio Girelli-Carasi
In the New York metropolitan area, an ethnically diverse region in a global media system, it was possible to watch COVID-19 wreak devastation overseas and anticipate its eventual impact on New York. One who watched the progress of COVID-19 in Italy closely was Fabio Girelli-Carasi, a professor of Modern Languages and Literatures at Brooklyn College.14
My immediate family, sister and mother, live in the city of Albino, in the province of Bergamo, the hardest hit area in Italy. The rest of my family lives in Cremona, the second hardest hit area in Italy.
My sister contracted the virus at the very beginning of the pandemic, sometime in February 2020, before the lockdown began. She locked herself up in her room for six weeks and eventually recovered. Six months later she still suffers from fatigue and on-and-off muscle pain. Two older relatives of mine died from the virus. One was in a hospital for minor surgery he had postponed for a few months. When he finally decided to get it done, it was right at the beginning of the storm. He was infected and died in a matter of days. The second one was in assisted living. The angel of death glided over the facility and took more than two dozen residents with it.
The most painful was the death of a high school friend, a family doctor in Como. He started seeing patients with strange symptoms. With no guidance and no information from the Ministry of Health, he kept doing his job. When he came down with the infection, the viral load was so high he only lasted a few days.
My mother escaped the infection. She lives in the same building as my sister, but they didn’t see each other for months. She lived alone like a recluse. Friends or relatives would drop off food by her door, she would put out the garbage and that was it. In the meantime, she kept hearing stories of people she had known for a lifetime who were passing away: “They are dropping like flies” she told me one day. She mentioned a famous poem by Italian poet Giuseppe Ungaretti, which he wrote while he was fighting in the trenches of World War I: “We are like leaves on a branch in autumn.”
I spent hours every day, sometimes several times a day for weeks, trying to console and give her courage. At a certain point I thought she was about to give up. She wasn’t eating anymore, she was getting weaker and weaker, half asleep the whole day, awake in terror and sorrow at night.
As to my life, it is similar to that of most of you. I live outside New York City, my wife, two daughters and I managed with some adjustments in our routines. I avoided social networks like the plague (sorry for the metaphor,) stayed away from the news and commentaries, focused on my teaching as much as possible, even took care of the backyard.
Over the months, it became discouraging to the point of banging my head on my desk as I was watching Europe slowly getting control over the pandemic, while in the United States we were and still are stumbling like blind morons, clueless and bamboozled by borderline criminal propaganda.
Of course, not everybody fits this profile, but frankly, it is horrifying and terrifying to know that every other person I see in the streets lives in a state of willful derangement, posing a danger to themselves (even if I could care less about them) but most of all to the rest of us.
Looming Threats to Transit Workers
Re’gan Weal
Re’gan Weal grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in an African American family of transit workers. Her grandfather was a dispatcher, and in 2006 she followed in her mother’s footsteps to become a bus operator. She is a member of Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union. When COVID-19 hit, she was on the M20 route from Lincoln Center at 63rd Street and Broadway to South Ferry.15
It’s not the easiest job. I have a love–hate relationship with it, let’s just put it that way. I love driving. But it has its moments, the people make it hard at times. The traffic, depending on what route you’re on, can be a little rough—especially during rush hour. But other than that, it’s a pretty great job.
Around December 2019 you heard little things here and there. You didn’t really hear more about it until January. And then in February things started getting a little weird in the city. Then when March came around, everything just shut down.
The MTA wasn’t on board with people wearing masks. They said it wasn’t part of the uniform. So they weren’t allowing us to wear a mask at the time.
It was when it was reported on the news that people were dying that they said okay. But they didn’t have a supply of masks for us. We had to supply ourselves. Eventually, they provided us with masks and then made it mandatory. But it wasn’t right away.
Our union, TWU Local 100, fought for us to have PPE, to have some sort of protection, even though transit was against it. They were able to win the battle and get us what we needed to work in a safe environment.
At some point transit decided to put COVID-19 cleaners on the bus. And they would have people come clean the buses at our layovers or when we’re switching operators. They did put some protection in place after they realized it was really bad, but you kind of wonder, was it too late?
We usually wipe our buses down anyway because you just never know. But at that time we were very diligent about it. We would all try to have Lysol or Lysol wipes, or Bleach Wipes, to wipe down the bus.
We wiped everything that someone could possibly touch because we didn’t know at that time how you could contract COVID-19.
Figure 2 Early in the pandemic, the Metropolitan Transit Authority set workers to scrubbing subway stations. It turned out that airborne transmissions were much more dangerous than infected surfaces. Photograph by Patrick Cashin, MTA.
The Start of a Pandemic
Ali Mazinov
Ali Mazinov, a health sciences major at Brooklyn College, immigrated to the United States from Russia with his family at the age of four and has since then lived in Brooklyn, first in Sunset Park and later in Midwood.16
I worked as a New York City paramedic for several years before the COVID-19 pandemic hit the world. As paramedics, we were trained to deal with situations as simple as a cut on the arm or as complex as directing a team to care for a cardiac arrest patient.
When COVID-19 hit New York City, I was unaware of how bad it was going to get. At first, we thought it was a virus that was weaker than influenza, which is something we deal with on a regular basis. At this time, we would get one call a day that was related to COVID-19. I thought that everyone was exaggerating.
Over time, COVID-19 patients became more frequent, and in the matter of a month it was the only type of call we would get. It was as if every other medical problem that people had went away. But this was because everyone that wasn’t infected with COVID-19 was too afraid to go to the hospital.
When things started to take a turn for the worse, people were starting to go into life-threatening conditions on each call. My partner and I would need to resort to extreme measures like putting a tube down a person’s windpipe and into their lungs to help them breathe. Sometimes this wouldn’t be enough, and the patient would go into cardiac arrest from the lack of oxygen in the body.
It was a very difficult time for me because I felt powerless to stop people from dying from this terrible disease. It got so bad that the hospitals did not have the capacity to accept any more patients that came in. People were put in hallways, next to nursing stations, and hospitals had to dedicate entire floors to COVID-19 patients.
Then another problem started to rear its head. My co-workers and friends started to get sick. Those of us with families had to make a choice, either quit their job to protect their families or live apart from them until this was all over.
We did not have enough EMT’s and paramedics to staff the ambulances we had running on any given day. Those of us who were not sick picked up anywhere from sixty to ninety hours a week.
This struggle continues now as well. All over the world, there are not enough emergency services personnel to cope with the call volume that we are given each day.
A Weird State
Keerthan Thiyagarajah
Keerthan Thiyagarajah was born and raised in Queens in a Sri Lankan family. He was living in Jackson Heights, studying culinary management at LaGuardia Community College, and commuting to Manhattan to work as a cook when the pandemic began.17
It was a weird state in New York and everywhere in general. Nobody knew what to do. There was toilet paper flying off the shelves, water bottles, people price gouging. It was impossible to get anything you needed. People were selling hand sanitizer on Amazon for like six hundred dollars a bottle. When people were at their weakest, people thought they could just make a profit off people’s weaknesses and the general public’s health.
Luckily for me, my parents, for some reason, loved to store tons and tons of toilet paper in our pantry. So that was nothing to be worried about. But when it comes to gloves, KN95 masks, and stuff like that, that’s where I think a lot of people lacked because it’s something we don’t prepare for.
Some of the lasting memories I had during those months, early February going into March: I remember governments telling us, “Hey, stay indoors, wear a mask, do everything you can to just stay home. We’re going to close down schools, we’re going to do this and we’re going to try to remediate.”
Davidson Garrett
Davidson Garrett, a poet, writer, and actor who lives in the NoMad section of Manhattan on East 28th Street, drove a taxi in New York City from 1978 to 2018.18
early morning fog
covers the town like a shroud
death floats in the air
Worrying for the City
Jessica B. Martinez
Jessica B. Martinez, a global health expert with a background in virology and infectious diseases, lives in the Hamilton Heights section of Manhattan with her husband. She first heard rumblings about COVID-19 in December 2019, and as February 2020 gave way to March, the situation around her grew more dire.19
I was just worried for the city.
The last part of March and the early part of April were just awful. Just—wow. [crying] Sorry. Constant sirens. You know, just that constant—it’s either deathly quiet or it is a hundred percent sirens.
I lost a couple of former colleagues from my old company, and a couple of neighbors who were older and weren’t really able to fight the virus.
Cuomo did a great job, I think, in terms of getting everybody on the same page very quickly, and the “Keep calm and carry on” discussion. Maybe he could have done a few things differently with the nursing homes and things like that. But in the grand scheme of things, it was terrible and it was awful.
The first week of April was when we peaked here and my birthday’s April 8 so I just remember thinking, awesome, this is going to be a great way to think about your birthday for the rest of your life.
Her professional view
In a lot of ways, I feel like I’ve been kind of anticipating a pandemic for most of my life. I don’t know how many twelve-year-olds know what an epidemiologist is, but I did, and I wanted to be one.
From a virologist’s perspective, and this is going to sound so sick, it is one of the most fascinating viruses I think I’ve ever seen and heard of. It’s just so weird, it does such weird things. It doesn’t behave the way that we expect most viruses to work, and we still don’t even know what it does.
So I also feel like I probably have a front-row seat to all the horror that the virus can cause—you know, all the different ways it can cause your body to go haywire—and that also made it really difficult to just think about all these people. And I’ve got to say, seeing Hart Island and all those morgue trucks—I never thought I’d see mass graves.
The Sirens
Led Black
Led Black, a New York–born writer, grew up in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan with close ties to the Dominican Republic. When COVID-19 struck New York City, his blog at www.uptowncollective.com turned to local and national dimensions of the pandemic. On April 2, he addressed the noise that defined the city’s darkest days: the sound of sirens.20
I fall asleep to sirens. I wake up to sirens. The sirens are incessant. The sirens, at least in New York City, are the soundtrack to this pandemic. The sirens are constant and what you start to realize after spending every waking moment dealing with the nerve-racking sirens is that what you are hearing is not a single siren at a time but multiple, different sirens simultaneously. The lament of the ambulance fighting with the cop car and the fire truck for dominance and winning. The sirens are the city wailing out in despair. The night is upon us like never before, but this too shall pass.
Well, you have to keep telling yourself that at least. This is really, really scary. This thing is heavy like “is this the end times?” heavy. It is hard to not succumb to despair, gloom and doom when you realize that the absolutely feckless and moronic Trump, who is in way over his head in this situation, is the current occupant of the Oval Office and the most powerful man on the planet. You can’t tweet diss the pandemic away. Trump bet the farm that this would be a mild illness that would be gone by April, and we are now paying the price for his madness and colossal ineptitude. In short order, Donald Trump has turned the United States into a s-hole country.
This is America. We should not be where we are right now. For such a great country to be brought down so low because of a lack of foresight, vision, and planning is inexcusable. This is what happens when a failed, racist in decline, reality TV personality becomes the president. Leadership matters. Intelligence matters. Judgment matters. Empathy matters. Donald Trump fails on all counts.
The world has changed overnight, and the very notion of certainty has become a cruel joke. Our FB feeds speak of folks losing loved ones quickly and unexpectedly. My wife is keeping a running list of friends and family that have contracted the virus that is up to twenty-three and growing fast. One death in that twenty-three. Our prayers, condolences, and love go out to all who are feeling the impact of the novel coronavirus.
Miss Rona [COVID], like my eldest daughter likes to call her, is exposing the holes in a society that has for far too long put profit before people. New York City is hurting and about to be at a breaking point.
But we will not break. We shall overcome but things can never be the same again. The status quo is not going to cut it anymore. A better world is possible. Let’s work together to build it.
Pa’Lante Siempre Pa’Lante!
Lamb’s Blood
Steve Zeitlin
The folklorist Steve Zeitlin recalls that when he wrote “Lamb’s Blood” in May 2020, “fear was a way of life.” He was in his early seventies, immunocompromised, and—though rarely given to thoughts of religion—faced with a pandemic of biblical proportions. “The last verse has the quality of a prayer,” he wrote later. “Prayers, as a rabbi once put it, open us up to the healing powers that God has already placed in the universe. Prayers aplenty can ground us as we confront a situation in which we have limited control.”21
The Jews have seen it all –
waters of the Nile turned blood red
frogs
lice
flies
pestilence
boils
hail
locusts
darkness
and the killing of the firstborn child.
But now
the world is quarantined
as if an X in lamb’s blood
were drawn upon all our doors.
May this plague spare us all –
the good people of the planet –
Christian, Hindu, Muslim, Jew.
May the Angel of Death pass over our houses
May the Red Sea part.
May cities and towns reopen.
May we all pass through.
Figure 3 May 2020: When Governor Andrew Cuomo put New York on pause in March 2020, busy neighborhoods like Times Square became ghost towns until late May. Photograph by Arlene Schulman.