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Reflections, 2023
On May 11, 2023, the Biden administration ended the COVID-19 emergency declarations that had enabled measures like the distribution of free COVID-19 tests. Although subvariants of the coronavirus remained in circulation, with vaccines and evolving medical knowledge these were far more manageable than earlier forms of the virus. But this did not mean the end of thinking about the pandemic.1
From the earliest days of the pandemic, New Yorkers tried to make sense of what they were going through. Some turned to religion, some relied on family and friends, and some worked for political change. Many simply wanted to forget COVID-19 and get back to what they called “the before times.”
In the oral histories and first-person narratives that I read, people spoke memorably about the future. They yearned not just for a world without COVID-19, but for a world reborn where the hard knowledge gained during COVID-19 would be applied to building a better city and country, with strong support for public health, so that no one would ever again have to face anything like the pandemic.
Whether those high hopes are realized will depend on how we remember the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City. One possibility is that people will simply forget about it—much as they forgot about the flu pandemic of 1918, which took an estimated 50 million or more lives worldwide, killed some thirty thousand in New York City alone, and left no imprint in public memorials or collective memory in New York or the United States. Even though scientists studied the flu epidemic and historians wrote about it, most memories of the 1918 flu were banished to private realms of grieving and loss, sorely limiting the chance of any public and collective effort to learn lessons that would help us avoid repeating past mistakes.2
As unfathomable as it seemed in the spring of 2020, forgetting COVID-19 now seems much more plausible, much more human even—the understandable reaction to a traumatic event that most people would like to put behind them. But maybe we can do better. If New Yorkers look squarely at how people suffered from crippling inequalities, remember with empathy all who worked to help the city through its ordeal, and recognize that the health of each of us is inseparable from the health of all of us, then New York City’s passage through the pandemic will not have been in vain.
Figure 26 May 2, 2021: A mass burial on Hart Island, the final resting place in New York City for the indigent, the unclaimed, the unidentified, and the stillborn. The island has been the site of mass burials since 1872, but images of coffins and trenches there during the pandemic left many New Yorkers feeling that their city was in a deep crisis. Photograph by Alon Sicherman and Sean Vegezzi for The Hart Island Project.
Learning How to Talk to People
Dave Crenshaw
In May 2023 Dave Crenshaw reflected on what he had learned working to help his neighbors in Washington Heights survive the pandemic.3
Everything is about confidence. You have to learn how to talk to people. And the way you talk to them is like they’re all your neighbors. What they think is important. What they think matters.
When you’re talking with seniors you’re gonna listen to all their stories. They want someone to talk to. Isolation is damaging. They need someone to hear their stories.
People should not be treated like patients. We should be treated like neighbors.
Whenever something went wrong, we were brainstorming how not to let that happen again. We didn’t want to see people walk away frustrated, that very rarely happened. But anyone who tells you it never happened is a liar.
We built up a network of people we could count on, people you could trust, people you could work with.
The whole key to surviving this was who had correct information. And could you deliver it to people.
It was never just me. It was always a team effort. The Mailman interns and the Black Health interns and my alumni from Team Dreamers and PS 128, we just worked together.
Strength in the Long Run
Richard Brea
Richard Brea, commander of the 46th Precinct in the West Bronx during the early months of the pandemic, retired from the NYPD in June 2020 and went to work in the security industry. In April 2023, he assessed the long-term impact of the pandemic on New York City.4
I do know that if, God forbid, there is another pandemic, the world is more prepared to handle it. I think that there’s been a lot of lessons learned from COVID-19. We can say that some things worked well, and perhaps other things didn’t. This was a trial run.
I think we did okay. There were some unfortunate losses. But I think in the end, it will make us all stronger.
“We Were Here”
Re’gan Weal
Re’gan Weal, a bus operator, reflects on the pandemic.5
It was rough. It was a sad time. We lost a lot of people here. A lot of people feared for their lives. You had some people who were crying, you had people who were depressed. It was a rough time, you had to make the best of it.
Transit has their rules, but sometimes I feel they don’t consider us. I just think they should recognize us more, they should consider us a little more, as well because sometimes it seems like they care more about the public and the public doesn’t care about us either.
It’s not over, but I’m glad we’re not where we were in 2020. I’m glad we’re not seeing people drop like flies anymore. Because that’s what it felt like, every time we turned around someone was dead. And it could have been you at any time.
We were here. We got you from point A to point B. It was a ghost town here. But we were still up and down the streets. The trains were still running. We were here. We were risking our lives, our families, while everyone else was home. I just really would like people to remember that we were here.
Remembering Sacrifices and Losses
Veronica E. Fletcher
In February 2023, Veronica E. Fletcher reflected on her late husband Joseph Trevor Fletcher, a transit worker who died of COVID-19, and all the workers whose labor kept things functioning in New York, the United States, and the world.6
One of the things that I hope that we can’t forget in our country, and throughout the world, are the sacrifices of people who lost their lives to help us get through this time. There are doctors, there are nurses. There are truck drivers that sacrificed their lives to deliver goods and services. There are grocery stores employees and pharmacists who sacrificed to serve others. There are police officers, firefighters, MTA workers, there are essential workers throughout this country who lost their lives, sacrificed their lives, to keep our country moving, to keep the world moving.
As we celebrate getting through it’s imperative that we also acknowledge the sacrifices that were made by people to get us through. And that we also remember that there are people who are living with loss.
I know that my late husband hasn’t been forgotten by the lives that he touched. He sacrificed his life for people that will never know his name. People that will never know what the sacrifice entailed. He went and did his job and made sure that people could continue living their lives, could continue saving lives. And that was in essence who he was, a generous, generous, selfless, giving individual who died as he lived as a hero.
The Momentum and Tumult of Discovery
Steven Palmer
Steven Palmer, a physician assistant at Columbia Medical Center, considers how his understanding of COVID-19 has evolved since the spring of 2020.7
When HIV happened in the early 1980s with people not knowing what it was and how it worked, there was a whole evolution of scientific and medical understanding that ultimately pushed the world of medicine and science forward. Necessity is the mother of invention. And I think that is happening as a result of COVID as well. And also because of long COVID.
We’re not at the absolute beginning stages of the momentum of discovery, but we’re still in the infancy or toddler moment.
When something like this hits, you can have all the best scientists and clinicians and virologists in the world and there’s no way to get it right immediately. It takes time to try and figure out the trajectory of these viruses and what they’re going to cause, and how to deal with them.
Everybody is involved in the tumult of discovery. I look back at the whole thing, and I just recognize that there’s no way to take the smartest of everything and have it go smoothly. It’s always going to be a rocky ride.
Facing the future
Long COVID is a real thing. This whole thing of brain fog is real. And POTS, which is Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome; Dysautonomia, which is the autonomic nervous system having been affected, all of these things are real. The worsening of irritable bowel syndrome in people who have irritable bowel syndrome.
Long COVID is real, and we’re gonna need money for that. We’re learning more and more and we have a number of people who have come out of long COVID, but there’s a lot of people who are still suffering. We have a ways to go with studies and research to figure this out.
These folks want their lives back. They want this over. Right now we’re able to help people who haven’t come out of it completely, but may feel stuck in their recovery. The relief of being better than you had been is still met with the natural impatience of wanting to be back to your pre-COVID life. That’s our task now—to figure out how to get there.
“Look Out for Each Other”
Keerthan Thiyagarajah
Keerthan Thiyagarajah from Jackson Heights, Queens, looks back on the pandemic and what can be learned from it.8
Reflecting back on the pandemic, I think my biggest takeaway is to just love each other, no matter who you are, Asian, Black, White, it doesn’t matter what you are. Just learn to love and care about one another. At the end of the day, we’re all humans. We all need to care for each other. Look out for each other. The biggest takeaway for me especially was to just help people, especially people that can’t help themselves.
New York, it’s one of those cities where people kind of mind their own business, and they kind of just don’t look out for each other, but at the end of the day New Yorkers will band together.
We’re all New Yorkers. We all have that New York tough style, it’s bred in us whether we grew up here or we moved here. It’s ingrained in you to be New York tough, New York strong.
We should be our own leaders. We should set that standard. New Yorkers are leaders in their own way. That’s why when we don’t have that leader, we embody it within ourselves to be the leaders that we need in our communities to help each other.