Conclusion
COVID-19 battered New York City’s reputation as a can-do city prepared for any emergency. Despite the city’s many renowned hospitals and respected institutions dedicated to public health, COVID-19 claimed 46,426 lives from March 2020 to June 2024 and reduced the life expectancy of New Yorkers citywide, especially among Blacks and Hispanics. Each death had its own ripple effect, and even if you were one of the fortunate New Yorkers who did not lose anyone close to you, eventually you heard of people in the distant corners of your human ecosystem who died.
As the sociologist Paul Starr has observed, “The American response to COVID-19 has encapsulated an era when a nation that has always thought of itself as a success has had to confront the possibility that its luck had run out.” His observation applies equally to the city of New York.1
Every level of government—federal, state, and local—failed to some degree. President Trump abdicated responsibility. The mayor and governor, fearful of the adverse economic impact of strong public health measures, ignored or contradicted the advice of the city’s health department—delaying the city’s response to COVID-19 while the disease raced through the population. The city’s best-funded private hospitals barely held on, while the public hospitals that served the city’s poor faced catastrophic conditions.
By the standards of the neoliberal era that preceded the pandemic, with its emphasis on for-profit medicine and market-based modes of planning, New York City had a world class medical system equipped to provide cutting-edge treatment for chronic diseases like cancer. What it needed in the pandemic was a more social democratic system prepared to treat rich and poor equally well in an epidemic driven by a communicable virus. To frame it in terms of the city’s mayors, it needed less of Giuliani and more of LaGuardia.
Across the United States, in debates over mandates, masking, and vaccination, the sense of solidarity among Americans was torn almost to the vanishing point. The pandemic left New York City and the United States with much work to do building trust and a sense of common purpose among people who will someday face again the threats of health emergencies and natural disasters. This will be difficult, especially in a world where so much work is virtual and the digital world emphasizes niche markets and narrowly tailored personal satisfactions over broadly shared experiences. As the pandemic reminded us, city life is characterized by the interdependence of people who are strangers to each other. The stories of friends, families, neighbors, and workers who pulled together in the pandemic are inspiring, but they are the stories of women and men in relatively small groups who built on existing connections. Future challenges will require us to bond on a larger scale if we are to be effective.2
Figure 27 Deaths per day and rolling averages in New York City. Chart: BetaNYC. Data: New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene
Figure 28 Death rates by race and ethnicity in New York City. Chart: BetaNYC. Data: New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.
If New Yorkers and Americans are to remember COVID-19 in a way that prepares us to do better when the next disaster hits us, we need to understand not only the city’s failures but also what New Yorkers did best in the pandemic: connect with their friends, families, neighbors, and workmates and forge bonds of solidarity that enabled them to help one another. Such solidarity sustained people in the darkest days of the pandemic and enabled New Yorkers to successfully engage in social distancing, bending the curve of infections and deaths so that casualties plummeted from some eight hundred deaths a day to a more manageable level by the end of May 2020. Solidarity among workers also sustained a growth in labor union activity in the city and nationwide that was one of the notable occurrences of the pandemic era. While it is too early to pronounce the neoliberal order finished, if the United States is ever to regain the broader level of prosperity and equality that characterized it from the 1930s to the 1970s, a reinvigorated labor movement and strong unions will be essential.
While the most public and physical manifestation of this solidarity was the 7:00 p.m. cheers, many others, unheralded, deserve recognition: Elizabeth Petrillo, the supermarket cashier who became “like a therapist to her customers”; Ralph Rolle, the entrepreneur who made his restaurant as safe as possible for his staff and customers; and Maribel Gonzalez Christianson, the bar owner who realized that her deliveries of food orders were sometimes the one episode of human contact that her customers had in a long time. Even without face-to-face contact, people found ways to reach out to one another in emails and texts, in Facebook posts and phone calls. People used Zoom for everything from cocktail parties to classes to public meetings. Creative young producers turned Zoom into a tool to produce panel discussions and interviews that recovered the best promises of the early days of public television as a forum for civic engagement.
To be sure there were divisions, such as the disagreements over the importance and efficacy of masks. Mask wearers, generally Democrats and supporters of governmental public health efforts, thought of themselves as protecting themselves and protecting others. Antimaskers—likely to be Trump supporters, Republicans, or libertarians—valued individual freedom above all and dismissed the value of masking. Maskers could look at antimaskers and see libertarianism run amok, while antimaskers saw in masked New Yorkers the coercive power of the state. Each discerned in the other arrogance and unwarranted certainty. But the brave and generous conduct of ordinary New Yorkers toward friends, neighbors, families, and even strangers helped the city survive the crisis.
If the importance of acts of solidarity among ordinary people is one insight of this book, the value of a socially conscious professionalism in public health emergencies is another. Nurses, doctors, first responders, transit workers, and EMTs all confronted the crisis with a professionalism grounded in mutual obligations to one another and to the public they serve.
Figure 29Elmhurst Strong, a mural by Luis Fernando Lechón in Elmhust Hospital Center, in Queens—the “epicenter of the epicenter.” The mural, unveiled in 2020, is one of twenty-six at public hospitals and health care facilities in New York City funded by the Community Mural Project of the Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund for the NYC Health + Hospitals Community Mural Project. Photo by Nicholas Knight, courtesy of the Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund
Luis Fernando Lechón: “In the mural, we can see a community strengthened by solidarity. The mural also expresses gratitude to all health workers, acknowledging all the effort and dedication they give every day… . Elmhurst is a diverse multicultural, multilingual neighborhood.”
It is embodied in the memories of EMT Phil Suarez, who said he couldn’t live with himself if he abandoned his work during COVID-19; in the police commander Richard Brea telling his officers who were reluctant to enter a home infected with COVID-19 that they promised to face danger when they swore an oath to become a police officer; in Patricia Tiu, going online with video reports from “the gates of hell” to steel her fellow nurses against the pandemic; and Re’gan Weal, driving a bus daily in the depths of the pandemic despite all dangers of infection.
The pandemic was a tragedy in New York City, but to fail to learn from it would be a tragedy twice over. If we are to learn anything from the COVID-19 years in New York City, the best place to begin is with the words of the people who drove ambulances, cared for patients, punched cash registers, drove buses, ran trains, and faced death daily so that others might live.
Remembering their stories and sacrifices is the way to prepare for a better future.