7
Vaccines and After, 2021
Americans like tragedies with happy endings, as novelist William Dean Howells once observed, and New Yorkers during the pandemic were no different.1 Through long days of lockdowns, fear of a debilitating illness, and mounting death tolls, they longed for an end of their woes. Most of all, they pegged their hopes to the arrival of vaccines that would protect them from the virus that had robbed them of normal life. The vaccines, a triumph of science, arrived in December 2020. New Yorkers hoped that in 2021 they would break the back of the pandemic. But COVID-19 was not entirely overcome. It dragged on, vastly less deadly than it had been in 2020 but still casting a shadow over the city. Even with vaccines, more surges—driven by the Delta variant in 2021 and the Omicron variant in 2022—lay in the future. When they arrived, their presence mocked the highest hopes for the vaccines, even though shots did reduce your likelihood of getting infected and reduced the severity of infections.
The spirit of solidarity that marked the spring of 2020 endured, but it was marred by notes of division and denial that had been in the background since the earliest days of COVID-19. Some of this echoed the political divisions in the nation as a whole, but the city harbored its own hostilities that were illuminated or accelerated by the pandemic.
The first COVID-19 vaccine was administered on December 14, 2020, to Sandra Lindsay, a Jamaican-born citizen of the United States who was educated at the City University of New York and director of critical care nursing at Long Island Jewish Medical Center in Queens.2 But widespread hopes of a quick and decisive rollout of the vaccine were dashed.
In New York City, a computerized system for making an appointment to get a vaccine was glitchy and inefficient.3 Websites for registration were difficult to navigate even for experienced computer users. People eager to get their shot were sent to vaccine facilities far from their homes, and suburbanites were directed to facilities in the city where the need for vaccines for local residents was pressing. Worst of all, the internet-based system marginalized the very New Yorkers who were most in need of vaccines: old people and poor people with little access to the internet.
New Yorkers met the inefficiencies of the registration with resolution and ingenuity. They created apps and websites to help people beat the system, telephoned each other to let them know when appointments were becoming available at specific locations, and even volunteered to make appointments for people who needed help with computers. Gradually, the system responded. By the middle of April, at the peak of the vaccination effort, close to 100,000 doses of the vaccine were being administered daily. Cases, hospitalizations and deaths plummeted by summer.
Yet New Yorkers could never summon up a collective celebration anything like the joyful crowds that filled Times Square at the end of World War II. On July 7, 2021, the city mounted a ticker tape parade for essential workers. Spectators in the Canyon of Heroes on lower Broadway cheered nurses, doctors, first responders, health care professionals and other frontline workers. But reporters noted that the crowds were smaller than at other parades, in part because many downtown stores were still closed and because several municipal unions didn’t participate because they were in contract disputes with the city.4
Indeed, the celebration was premature. For all the high hopes that surrounded the July 2021 ticker tape parade, there was another surge of COVID-19 yet to come. Equally troubling, the relief at being safer (but not permanently immune) from the virus was accompanied by debates over masking, vaccine mandates, school reopenings, and even the safety of the vaccines themselves.
Skepticism about vaccines was brewing for years before COVID-19 hit, drawing on everything from religious beliefs to a hostility to scientific expertise in general. By 2020, in a development that could make vaccine debates confounding, some antivaccine sentiment was drawing on ideas associated with Democrats and leftists: environmentalism (with its wariness on what we put in our bodies), feminism (my body my choice), and hostility to corporations (why trust Big Pharma?) Antivaccine sentiment was even more powerfully nourished by a libertarian strain in American conservative thought, a hostility to government-sponsored projects that had become central to the ideology of the Republican Party since the 1980s, and conspiratorial thinking among White nationalists and other Trump supporters about deep state plots in the federal government to subjugate true Americans.5
New York City was not a hotbed of antivaccine sentiment, but antivaxxers were a presence online and in demonstrations at Manhattan’s Civic Center.6 The slowness of some New Yorkers to get vaccinated—owing more to skepticism about vaccines than outright hostility—was rooted in the distrust bred in unequal access to medical care that has harmed poor people and people of color. For some African Americans, a long history of unequal medical care, and a long memory of unjust treatment at the hands of medical researchers—who withheld syphilis treatments in the Tuskegee Experiment and studied Henrietta Lacks’ cells without asking her permission—created a deep distrust of American medicine. (Nevertheless, in the pandemic they eventually overcame that distrust. By 2022 in New York State, the Kaiser Foundation reported, Blacks had been vaccinated at the same rate as Whites [71 percent], while 84 percent of Hispanics and 99 percent of Asians had been vaccinated.)7
This mistrust occurred against the background of a frayed safety net that left New Yorkers with uneven access to medical care. The recovery from the fiscal crisis of the 1970s had produced a city with significant social and economic inequalities. During the same period, a conservative ascendancy in national politics had attacked and undermined the universal social welfare programs of the New Deal and Great Society. New York in 2020 remained a socially liberal city, but the urban social democracy that had characterized it since the Depression was a diminishing presence. New Yorkers with low incomes, and people of color, fell through the holes in the city’s safety net and had little access to doctors or caregivers they could trust. The city’s institutional public health apparatus was strong, but its emphasis on chronic diseases—the lung cancer caused by smoking, the diabetes caused by sugary drinks—could make public health seem like a hectoring enterprise that criticized people for making bad lifestyle choices. All these trends undermined the idea of public health as a common good, grounded in a shared responsibility to protect each other. Instead, for many New Yorkers, health was a matter of personal choice and individual behavior.
Although more than 84 percent of New York City adults were vaccinated by November 2021, there was still resistance to the shots—especially among municipal workers. At the Department of Corrections, the vaccination rate was 51 percent; in the Police Department 70 percent; and in the Fire Department and Sanitation Department about 60 percent. Mayor de Blasio issued a mandate requiring city workers to get vaccinated to keep their jobs and offered $500 bonuses as an incentive. Legal challenges and demonstrations followed. In the end, 96 percent of municipal workers were vaccinated. But the slowness of the vaccine process, and the resentment sparked in some quarters, revealed a city at odds with itself. (Transit workers, whose work for the Metropolitan Transit Authority makes them state employees not covered by the municipal vaccination mandate, were reluctant to be get vaccinated: by November 2021 some 68 percent had received a shot.)8
Especially troubling were signs that New Yorkers were not only at odds over the vaccine, but hostile and even predatory toward one another. Scapegoating immigrants during epidemics has a long history in New York City, beginning in the nineteenth century with the false claim that it was the moral turpitude of Irish immigrants (and not dirty drinking water) that caused cholera. During COVID-19, some New Yorkers blamed Asian Americans for the pandemic. Verbal abuse, physical assaults, and even killings (which were difficult to designate as hate crimes because of legal definitions) left Asian New Yorkers feeling like a community under siege. Violence against Jews also surged to high levels, driven by a broader rise in White nationalism and anti-Semitism. At the same time, Jews clashed with each other over the value of masking.9
Ethnic tensions were accompanied by a rise in crime during the pandemic. New York City entered COVID-19 with historically low levels of crime, and the percentage increases that stoked headlines made things look worse than they were. Nevertheless, there was an undeniable rise in the level of fear in the city. Notorious but statistically unrepresentative crimes frightened subway riders. Shootings in which New Yorkers wounded or killed each other with firearms were a bigger and more revealing problem: from 2019 to 2020, the number of shooting victims in New York City, killed and wounded, jumped from 923 to 1,868.10
In 2021, the city experienced a political sea change. Governor Cuomo, who had already lost political support over his handling of COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes, was hit with multiple allegations of sexual harassment. His political standing collapsed. He resigned as governor in August 2021 and was replaced by Lieutenant Governor Kathy Hochul. In November 2021, Brooklyn Borough president Eric Adams, an African American and a former police officer who simultaneously critiqued police violence and vowed to make the city safer, won the mayoral election. The Black Lives Matter protests of only a year earlier were followed not by a turn to the left, but a more moderate course.11
With vaccines, New York left behind the darkest days of the pandemic. But the full impact of COVID-19 on the city was yet to be measured. The city’s population fell from 8,804,000 in 2020 to 8,335,000 in 2022, and its economic recovery—so heavily dependent on office workers and service workers—was slower than in other places. In 2023, there were still many empty storefronts on city streets, real doubts over whether the city’s office-based economy would ever return, and a painful shortage of affordable housing.12
If New Yorkers were “done with COVID,” as a saying of the time went, COVID-19 was not done with them. Federal authorities declared the COVID-19 public health emergency to be over in May 2023. COVID-19 continues to evolve, however, and its future is uncertain.
Figure 20 Jacob K. Javits Center, Manhattan, January 13, 2021: Maria Diaz, a transit worker, is vaccinated early in the vaccine campaign. Photograph by Marc A. Hermann, MTA/New York City Transit.
Figure 21 Daily and rolling averages of COVID-19 vaccine doses administered, April 2020 to April 2023. Chart: BetaNYC. Data: New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.
Registration Nightmares and Vaccine Skepticism
Dave Crenshaw
As the pandemic burned its way through 2020, in Washington Heights, Dave Crenshaw worked to get people fed and tested for the virus. When vaccines finally came to his neighborhood, he confronted two problems: the logistical nightmare of getting people registered for their shot and the skepticism of some uptown residents about the value of vaccines.
In January 2021, NewYork–Presbyterian Hospital’s vaccination site at the Fort Washington Armory between 168th and 169th streets quickly attracted people from across the metropolitan area. News coverage raised the issue of White people descending on a largely Black and Latino neighborhood to get vaccines ahead of Washington Heights residents. Even people who were skilled at communications technology had trouble making appointments with the complicated system, which required registration by phone or through websites that frequently broke down. For Washington Heights residents who spoke only Spanish or lacked access to computers or cell phones, it was almost impossible.13
People were coming from all over the East Coast to get vaccines at the Armory. We had to make a big huff about it, a big complaint about it, because our people couldn’t even get appointments. What it took just to get registered was too much for the average person.
Crenshaw’s Team Dreamers had been running track at the Armory for more than twenty-five years, and he knew people from both the Armory and NewYork-Presbyterian. He also had his enduring contacts across Washington Heights, such as Professor Robert Fullilove of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University and Maria Luna, a long-time Dominican American public servant in northern Manhattan.
I had a public health network. I had people I trust. I got my own professor, Robert Fullilove, and he got a family of professors. And between Mailman School of Public Health and Hunter College High School, I was getting the best information in the world, from people I trusted and love. We’ve known each other for decades.
I started working with Maria Luna. And Maria Luna was working with ARC, which has three centers for senior citizens in upper Manhattan, and the Northern Manhattan Improvement Corporation. And they were all working with NewYork-Presbyterian to streamline the system to get people appointments over the telephone.
Eventually Mailman had volunteers in the Armory. The Armory had the best site in the city because it was right here with Columbia. Nobody had better volunteers. Every ten feet they were asking, “Are you okay?” Once you got there, you were all right.
Late in July 2021, with the pace of vaccinations declining, the Mayor Bill De Blasio announced that the city would give $100 to anyone who received their first vaccination at a city-run vaccination site.
The $100 was huge. The $100 really did work. It really did change things.
You have to force people to take care of themselves. This is part of life. This gives you the extra energy and mojo. People were lining up.
But the biggest problem was you also had to show them how to get the $100. So the Black Health interns and the Mailman interns and the Dreamers would work a site. Somebody is going to help you get registered for the vaccine, someone’s gonna help you fill out the paperwork you got to fill out. Once you get the vaccine, we’re also going to show you how to get your $100. Our vaccine sites became like a community hub.
In Washington Heights, with a large Latino community and many Dominicans, Crenshaw worked with Spanish-speaking interns who could communicate with local residents, especially the elderly.
People didn’t know who they could trust. So we became the place you could come and ask us questions.
With the training that Black Health and Mailman gave me I was able to speak facts, I was able to have good conversations. That number-one thing I learned as a coach is you don’t tell somebody they’re wrong. There is more than one truth. That’s the simple fact. Your experiences in your life are going to determine your truth.
Crenshaw confronted the arguments of people who were skeptical about the value of vaccination and even thought it might kill them.
The biggest argument they would give is, “But what about if people are dying?”
So, who? Who do you know that died from the vaccine?
I can tell you fifteen people off the top of my head who I know that died from COVID. But you can’t even tell me one. If that was really happening, you’ll be able to name somebody you lost to the vaccine.
“Well, you vaccinate a lot of people, but dead people can’t talk.”
So let me explain something to you. I’m in my neighborhood. I’m doing my events in my area. If somebody dies from the vaccine, I’m the first one they’re coming after, because I’m easy to find. I’m right here. I’m trying to make this work.
But here was the worst one to me.
“You do know they created the vaccine to kill you. You understand they’re getting you vaccinated so you get killed.”
But that theory, you lose with that one.
People were dropping every day in the beginning. The death rate was way higher before the vaccine came out. The vaccine was not speeding up death. It definitely slowed it down.
Folks were talking about chips so they could track you and follow you.
Yeah, but if you don’t want to get tracked, you don’t take the vaccine, you got to get rid of your phone also. You got a phone—they tracking you, baby.
But my thing was, where you getting your logic from? How long do you know them? Have you ever met him? Why you trust him?
My guy, Robert Fullilove, I know him. I know his ex-wife. I know the students he teaches, I know professors he works with, I know projects he was working on when he was in HIV and AIDS. I’ve trusted my life with him before this. He’s not someone I met during the pandemic.
And one of the lines was, “This is something that White folks is using to kill Black folks, like they did in Tuskegee.”
I’m like, you’re not really looking at this because the White folks are trying to take all our appointments. They’re lining up for this, that should tell you something right there.
It’d be one thing if they were just giving out the vaccine in the Black and Hispanic neighborhoods. But the vaccine was being distributed everywhere. People were going wherever they could to get vaccinated. And at every site you had people of color distributing it.
One Friday, Crenshaw was alerted that vaccines would be available the next day in Harlem, the neighborhood just south of Washington Heights. He went door to door in his building and took older people who needed shots to Harlem, where a worker asked Crenshaw if he had received a shot.
I said I ain’t no senior. She comes back with a paper and says, “You’re getting vaccinated today. Because we can’t have people like you getting sick and not helping other people.”
When she gave me the vaccine it was like she baptized me to get other people the vaccine. Because I know how I felt getting it. Now I could fight even harder. Now I could go even more.
The Second Shot: New York, February 2021
Rachel Hadas
New York City’s computerized system for COVID-19 vaccination reservations was difficult to navigate and often matched vaccine recipients with vaccine centers far from their homes, as when the poet and Rutgers–Newark professor Rachel Hadas was sent from the Upper West Side of Manhattan to Canarsie, Brooklyn, for her second shot in February 2021. Getting vaccinated meant making a trip, meeting strangers, and seeing new sights after months of isolation.14
Vaccination lured us out of doors.
Approaching spring and the full moon
may also have helped draw everyone together.
But not too close. Not yet.
Through the cold courtyard, all around the block,
wound a line.
The wheelchair-bound, the leaners on their walkers,
these had priority—unwritten rule.
People were patient, even a bit cheery;
a spritz of subdued small talk.
One was no longer afraid, after a year,
to turn their masked face toward a stranger’s face.
We couldn’t wholly see each other;
we all could see the sky.
As you and I drove back from Canarsie—
the water out of sight but palpable
in the tremble and lambency of afternoon—
our hungry eyes were suddenly satiated
with a luxuriance of primary colors:
blood-red truck, yolk-yellow warehouse wall,
and two immensities, two shades of blue:
dark flowing river, overarching sky.
A Question of Trade-offs
Alexandra L. Naranjo
The vaccine rollout raised concerns for many New Yorkers. Alexandra L. Naranjo of Staten Island got her shot, but her questions endured.15
I’m a twenty-seven-year-old female, a college graduate, and identify with two separate ethnic cultures, being born both Puerto Rican and Italian. I’m currently working on additional schooling for political science and photography. I also identify as a recovering alcoholic, and for the last few years, have worked in the substance abuse and mental health treatment sector of the health care industry.
The COVID-19 pandemic definitely impacted my life. Not only on a day-to-day basis—transportation, difficulty getting hands on various products, an inability to take part in activities or hobbies one is used to, and the like—but also on a deeper level. My comfortability with interpersonal communication has been impacted in the long run. My community was impacted as well, but most specifically the community of recovering addicts I’m connected to. As someone who works in the field as well, we saw almost a 33 percent rise in relapses and deaths. It was an extremely hard year on this front in particular. Staten Island I feel (as to be honest I don’t know the exact data) may have been impacted even more than the other boroughs due to a pervasive, conservative mindset that left people at risk. For example, “antimask” rhetoric.
I remember hearing about the vaccine being released in New York a few months ago but couldn’t give you a timeline if I tried. Especially with the gradual rollout. My first thoughts were that there would be complications, and second, questioning whether or not the adverse effects (we know nothing about long term effects) would be worth the risks.
Figure 22 Antivaccine demonstration near Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn, October 2021. Photograph by Paul Margolis.
There are trade-offs for everything. But it is a bit more difficult to accept not knowing what the trade-off will actually be. At this point, I am fully vaccinated but still have anxiety about what this could mean for my future. Especially as a woman given that there are some issues concerning the impact it could have on conceiving a child.
Overall, though, I guess every vaccine had to start being administered to humans at one point.
Slogging Along
Christopher Tedeschi
During the summer of 2020 Christopher Tedeschi, an emergency physician and faculty member at the Columbia Medical Center and the Allen Hospital, moved with his family from Harlem to Upper Nyack, New York. In January 2021, he faced a second surge in COVID-19 cases in New York City; he was deeply involved in vaccinating people against COVID-19 at the Fort Washington Armory in Washington Heights.16
We had this nice lull, and most of that time we spent making plans for what we anticipated for the fall. And then we started becoming busy with COVID again. The surge is at its height right now and we’ve been vaccinating people for the last week and a half, en masse.
We are busy. We are stretched, but we are nowhere near where we were in March and April. Since maybe November, we’ve been dealing with this simmering pot, but the pot has not boiled over. And if this week and the next ten to fourteen days are the peak, the way we anticipate, hopefully the pot won’t boil over.
From a going to work point of view, we can handle this. We spent the summer making this plan, we know what our next step is; it’s busy, there’s sick people, but it’s not overwhelming.
March was overwhelming. Now it’s just a matter of fatigue. We’ve been doing this for a long time now and going through those motions every single day. The morale among a lot of our staff is a little bit low, despite the vaccine. We’re slogging along far more than we are freaking out.
Our memories of this from eight months ago are people rolling in one after the other in extremis, and we’re not seeing that now. We’re not seeing people come in the door who are about to die. We’re seeing people who are sick. We’re seeing people who need to be admitted to the hospital, maybe they get even sicker a few days later. But there isn’t this sense of emergency that we had been seeing before. It is night and day in terms of what you see and hear and smell when you walk into the emergency department where I work.
Changes in the social fabric of his department
It’s far more isolated. People are on guard more. The opportunity for social interaction has gone down so much. I don’t really teach in person. I don’t go to have my lunch in the conference room.
It’s hard to even walk down the hall. You don’t even recognize people a lot of the time. Sometimes you pass someone in the hallway, and they say, “Hey how’s it going?” And I’m sure it’s somebody I know well, but they’re so wrapped up in PPE [Personal Protective Equipment] that you’re really not so sure. So you have to look at their ID badge, and then by that time, you’ve walked by them. So there’s definitely this distance that persists. And I think at least at work, it’ll probably persist for a while.
Vaccines
We’re vaccinating people wholesale now. I was vaccinated on December fifteenth, some time ago now. And it’s a very profound experience. It’s a huge change in perspective, certainly at work. I still wear all the crap that I’ve always worn. But there’s a degree of, “I got my vaccine, I should be okay.”
Now that we’re vaccinating people in this huge space, it’s really interesting to interact with people. It’s actually very hopeful, and I’m usually pretty cynical about these things. There are people who have waited and waited and waited and drove six hours taking selfies after they get their shot, which is very different from the ER, where everyone is either appropriately or inappropriately miserable or mean and unhappy.
We’re vaccinating more than two thousand people a day now. Maybe twenty-three, twenty-four hundred. And so you really can look around at the end of the day and say, “A couple of these people won’t get critically ill because of this today. A couple of these people just won’t die.”
Vaccines and skepticism
We’re having a real problem at work getting certain groups of people to get vaccinated. And I’m not surprised. Because the hospital’s a huge employer, there’s thousands and thousands of people in that group. But the way it was targeted was, to my mind, probably not that effective.
There’s a really big diversity of people where I work. A huge proportion of our staff are primarily Spanish speaking, or Spanish is their first language, who work in service industry type jobs. And if you look at the sort of material that the hospital produced—“The vaccine is coming”—it’s geared to people who really have a degree of facility with being online and understanding science, and that stuff just doesn’t resonate with most of the people that are refusing or hesitant to get vaccinated now.
Our security guards are a particularly hesitant group. They were all there with us. They saw the trailers. They know what happened. Watching a six-minute video from the COO [Chief Operating Officer] of the hospital, who’s a surgeon, probably doesn’t fly that well with a lot of our staff. I don’t watch it. I can’t imagine they’re going to watch it. I delete it, you know.
To get an appointment at our vaccination site, you have to log onto the app and register, and have a pretty aggressive degree of computer savvy. Especially at the beginning, the population lining up to get vaccinated was clearly a very self-selective kind of savvy population.
And there was a reaction to that, and now the people that were in charge of this are reserving several hundred appointments a day for our local population, and reaching out in English, reaching out in Spanish. But it’s a real challenge.
It’s very labor intensive. If you’re sixty-five years old and a patient of our clinic system, there is this group of people now that are working to reach out and say, “Hey, we can make you an appointment.” I think they’ve just implemented a text message system where the patient will get a text, and if they just click a link in the text, then they can reserve their spot, which is way simpler than the other kind of procedure.
And there’s still hesitancy on top of that. That doesn’t address the hesitancy, it just addresses the access.
Getting vaccinated
Believe it or not, even in the vaccination center, I’ve seen one or two people get in line and get out of line, and get in line, and get out of line.
I’ve had many, many conversations with our staff—some of the security officers, several nurses. Many of those people are either Latinx, or primarily Spanish speaking, or Black. We have a lot of West Indians that work with us. And a lot of them I have known for years. I had a conversation the other day with a security officer who is a Latino guy who I’ve known probably for ten years.
And I feel they trust the doctors, they kind of trust people they know, and you’re able to have a frank conversation. And this particular person said, “You know, I don’t know, I’m just waiting for them to work the kinks out of it.”
To which I said, “What do you mean work the kinks out?”
“Well you know, we work with this guy who got the vaccine, and like later that day, he had a 102 fever, and he’s been in bed for a week, and he’s got a cough.”
And clearly, the person he’s describing probably had COVID, not anything to do with the vaccine. But as soon as that connection is made and your buddy is in that position, you stop and think.
I had another conversation with a security officer who is I think West African, who had clearly read a lot of stuff online, a lot of false technical information. And who said, “I was here this whole time, and I didn’t get it yet.”
And those are conversations that can go on for a long time. I’ve definitely talked to one or two people that came back to me a week later and said, “Hey I got my shot.” And so there’s a little bit of early adopter fear there. But I don’t think it’s helpful to say, “Here is why you should get the shot. And because it works, and the data shows this.”
Taking a little bit of a time to try to meet that person where they are is helpful. Although it takes a lot of unpacking. “Well, I want to wait and work the kinks, see if they get the kinks worked out” is actually kind of a conversation you can start having, because you can say “Well, they tested it on these people, and we know the side effect.”
But when someone says, “I think it’s some kind of conspiracy about something,” that’s actually a lot harder. As time goes on, hopefully people will see people they know and trust do it, because watching the video online from the COO of the hospital is not doing anything.
Reflections on how he has changed since his interview in July 2020
I feel older. I’m approaching my fiftieth birthday. A lot of things just make me feel older, and hopefully that will change. I’m very lucky to be in good physical shape.
I’m also a lot more grateful for a lot of things. I’ve seen a lot of people get sick and lose jobs, a lot of hardship. I’m grateful for a lot of the things that my family is lucky enough to still have. And I mean that sincerely.
Social skills atrophied
Things are going to be different for a long time. Whether it’s just the way we work, where I work, or the way we interact.
It’s been kind of isolating to be honest with you. I certainly feel my close relationships with my friends have suffered.
To have a frank conversation with a friend even requires some attention. I just need a minute of quiet, rather than engaging another human being. But that’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Once you get out of the habit of exercising that muscle, then you don’t exercise that muscle.
The start of the Biden administration makes him optimistic.
It’s clearly, to my mind, politically an improvement. The very specific things that will need to get done will not happen overnight. It’s like changing the course of a cruise ship, you have to make this big turn. But I clearly believe that the leadership that will be in place will have a real world effect on the way things happen.
We’re seeing it now with vaccines. You can only hope that the policy decisions that get made have a real trickle down effect. I think it will.
In terms of information, I’m optimistic that that’ll make a real difference. Not just because there’ll be more positive messages, but because there’ll be fewer negative messages. And just getting rid of the negative messages I can only hope will go a long way. Maybe that’s naïve.
It’s smart to frame this all as a trauma, a really drawn-out, protracted, slow-burning trauma. I’m not sure we’ve all come to process it as much as might be helpful. There are plenty of resources out there, but just collectively processing it, probably has a good way to go. And not just in terms of the illness, but just the social distancing and the social isolation and the kids and all of that stuff will take some processing.
Changes and Challenges
Jessica B. Martinez
By early March 2021, life in the Hamilton Heights section of Manhattan, home of global health expert Jessica B. Martinez, had almost returned to normal. Trucks, stores, deliveries, and pedestrian traffic (with almost everyone masked) resembled prepandemic levels. In an interview, she assessed the long-term impact of the pandemic and the prospect of getting vaccinated against the virus.17
I still don’t see my family, I still don’t see my friends, I still don’t go out for social reasons or to run errands. I don’t travel for work. Nothing is the same. And it’s because of the pandemic.
I’m scared for myself, so I don’t want to get infected. And even though I know that now we have things like the monoclonal antibodies, and I know exactly how to get them, and I’m not terribly worried from a health perspective because I don’t have any underlying comorbidities, I still don’t want to get sick. And more importantly, I wouldn’t want to be part of a chain of transmission. So no, nothing is the same.
How the pandemic has changed her
I had a pretty massive bout of insomnia for a while there and so I finally went and talked to a doctor about it. Prescribed a medicine that is non–habit forming, nonscary because that was a concern of mine. And so now I’ve been sleeping very well.
I’ve always been okay about dealing with stress. But I will say here and now I’ve realized that actually stress has gotten to me more than I thought over the past year. That was a bit of a shock.
I’m losing my hair. I’ve always had a lot of hair, and if I pull it back in a ponytail, the ponytail is thinner than it used to be. So I know that that’s stress related.
I’ve gained weight because you try not to eat but even if you’re just eating fruit, it’s still more calories than you would normally eat.
I’m realizing that there have been stealth ways that I have been stressed without realizing that it’s a much more insidious kind of stress. It’s not the sort of gut punching, stomach twisting stress, it’s more of the constant low-grade that has that impact.
My skin looks terrible. I’m breaking out. I’m like freaking forty-five years old and I have acne sometimes!
And I think I see the same in my husband. He is normally a very Zen person, but I have noticed that he’s a little bit quicker now to anger or to get frustrated and that’s unusual too. I hate to be clichéd and say that I’m stressed but I have to admit, I am.
I do try to be more active. We got an elliptical machine, so I try to get on that on a more regular basis. I try to force myself to do things that help to make my house a more comfortable environment, do the laundry, clean the house, cook. Maybe they’re not enjoyable per se, but they break up the monotony. In the end I’m glad I got them done. They give me a bit of a sense of accomplishment.
Her new normal
I usually wake up around seven-thirty, eight o’clock. I go for a walk, try to wake myself up by doing a little bit of moving around. And then I spend a good two or three hours in the morning, New York time, just kind of catching up on emails. My day doesn’t actually start in earnest until about noontime.
And then I start my workday. Lots and lots of meetings.
And my day usually goes until about seven or eight at night. And then I just kind of spend the rest of the evening with my husband, our cats, watch a bit of TV, read a bit. Pretty straightforward, kind of boring to be honest with you. You know, run some errands in between but nothing major.
The challenges of virtual meetings and work
I have to give a lot of props to the New York City broadband infrastructure. I haven’t had significant problems. But I will say, it is tiring. In an effort to try to make sure that you’re having that human connection, I personally feel like I have to be more expressive, I have to be more conscious about looking at the camera. There’s an element of additional effort to make sure that those meetings go as well as they could go.
Work’s been very frustrating for a lot of reasons. More frustrating than I think I would have imagined, which I think also is a huge contributor to stress.
I say no more to stuff at work. I don’t raise my hand as readily as I used to for special projects and things like that.
I work in global health. And, I have been doing COVID work since last January. And it’s been very rewarding in a lot of ways. But because of the nature of health care, in particular because of the nature of drug development, over the course of the year, there’s been the realization that products fail, or promising therapeutics don’t actually turn out to be as promising as you thought they were.
Her anticipation of the vaccine
Oh my god, I’m going to cry. I’m going to cry tears of joy and relief because the fact that there is a vaccine that’s been made in a year, one year, is just amazing. Just scientifically speaking, it’s just incredible, absolutely incredible.
But then also, to be able to not fear the virus, to be able to feel like I am vaccinated. I’ll still wear my mask everywhere and I still will be conscious of being potentially a vector since we don’t know whether or not it prevents asymptomatic infections, but just knowing that my family is safe, that I’m safe, that my husband is safe. When I managed to snag that appointment for my grandmother, within like thirty minutes of when my parents got their shots I cried. And I have a feeling I’m going to have a hard time not shedding tears of joy and relief when I get the vaccine.
I will see friends who are also vaccinated.
I will go to restaurants.
And I know that I would go and see friends who also hopefully would be similarly vaccinated. It would allow me to go out and just see people again. I know it sounds trite, but I really haven’t seen people in a year, so it would be nice.
Figure 23 Demonstration against anti-Asian violence, Columbus Park, Chinatown, Manhattan, March 21, 2021. Photograph by Robert W. Snyder.
She reflects on how she is different from the person she was at the start of the pandemic and offers her thoughts on the storming of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.
I don’t think I’ve changed that much. I don’t think I’m more cynical, but I do think I’m more worried. I think I’m a little bit less tolerant of other people and that makes me a little bit sad. There are people, either because of the way they behaved in the pandemic or because of the way that they reacted to what happened on the sixth, that I don’t think I will ever be able to trust again. I’m a lot less tolerant of differences of opinion, quote unquote. So, in that sense I guess I’m a little bit less patient and more willing to draw a line in the sand. But otherwise, I don’t think I’m that much different.
She has lost trust in both the people she encounters in her daily life and in the larger world.
I think it all sort of came to a head last year because I am of Hispanic background. My father is Hispanic, my mother is White, so I’ve been a mutt all my life. But I purposefully kept my last name Martinez, because my father only had daughters and it made him sad to think that he was the last of his line. Also I got married later in life and that’s my name. I’m known that way. If I take my husband’s name, I think people would probably think that I was White and so they have. I have had people say things in my presence who don’t know my last name who look at me and don’t necessarily see somebody who is Hispanic. I guess you could say I can pass. And they’ve said awful things.
So that’s always been an issue, but it really became an issue now with Trump. I mean that happened from time to time, but I can count the times that it happened before Trump probably on one hand. Whereas now, it’s a much more common occurrence, and of course that hits my parents, because my father is Mexican. And so, my mother has to see people act towards him in really horrible ways sometimes.
And then my husband is African American and now you have these people who were friends with my parents, some of whom are Hispanic and have experienced racism themselves because they’re Hispanic, but are equally virulently racist against people who are Black.
It just really has laid bare a number of probably things that were just under the surface, but people were more polite. Or too polite to say anything about until now.
I have to admit, if I am not in New York, if I am out on Long Island where there’s a pretty nasty strain of racism that’s alive and where we have a weekend home, I worry about Will driving in a car by himself. I see people who are Caucasian and I worry, and I wonder. Are they Trump supporters, and will they see me or my husband as subhuman?
I never used to think about that. It never used to worry me. I never gave it a second thought, actually. And now I do. And that’s awful. I hate that. I hate prejudging people and worrying about them just because of how they look, because that makes me like them.
Lexicon of the Pandemic
Pace High School students
By the spring of 2021, New Yorkers were so immersed in the pandemic that they had developed their own vocabulary to describe it. “Lexicon of the Pandemic” first appeared in Covid Class 2021, a platform for students in David Rohlfing’s English 12 class at Pace High School, a public school bordering Chinatown and the Lower East Side. Reflecting on the assignment that produced the lexicon, Rohlfing wrote, “High school students often think the authority of English class, the teacher and the educational institution are all designed to standardize language and their language. Though, of course, urban high school kids also understand the converse—that they are part of a vibrant culture that creates language and meaning of words. The pandemic gave us a sped-up and dramatic lesson in this, and it was easy and important to point it out to them. To give my students the job of recording these changes to language was also my attempt to empower them.” Pace students, who come from all five boroughs and from many racial, ethnic, and economic backgrounds, compiled a list of words and phrases that came into use or took on new meanings during the pandemic.18
A
anti-vaxxer someone who is against getting the COVID-19 vaccine.
antibody test a blood test to find antibodies from a previous COVID infection. “I think I had the COVID last March, because I lost my sense of smell for a week. I never got an antibody test, though.”
asymptomatic somebody who has COVID-19 but isn’t showing symptoms of the virus. “She was exposed to COVID but was asymptomatic.”
asynchronous instruction a flexible form of teaching and learning in which lessons and work can be accessed and done at the students’ leisure as long as it is done before the deadline given. “I’ll go to the store for you since my classes are asynchronous today, I can worry about them later.”
B
bandemic making money during the pandemic. “Pandemic turnt into a bandemic.”
blended learning a style of education in which students learn via electronic and online media as well as traditional face-to-face teaching. “Due to the pandemic, students had to start blended learning.”
C
clappy hour when New Yorkers went outside at 7:00 p.m. and clapped for health care workers during the height of the pandemic. “I brought my tambourine outside for clappy hour today and waved at my neighbors.”
contact tracing the process of contacting all people who’ve had contact with someone who tested positive for COVID-19. “My mom got a new job during the pandemic doing contact tracing. She lets people know that they have been in contact with someone who has tested positive for the coronavirus and that they have to be quarantined.”
COVID bubble people outside your household who you trust and feel comfortable being with safely during the pandemic. “My COVID bubble included my family and friends who I enjoyed my time with.”
COVID party a gathering, at which the host typically has COVID-19, held to see how many people, if any, get COVID from the host. “I heard that two of the people that went to the COVID party last week are in really bad condition now.”
Covidiot a person who doesn’t wear their mask and doesn’t social distance or follow simple COVID-19 protocols. “Don’t be a Covidiot, stay at home if you feel sick.”
COVID Karen a White woman who amplifies her privileges when it comes to exerting her opinions in reaction to the COVID virus. “I was greeted by a COVID Karen today at Target who was screaming, ‘Stay six feet away!’ at everyone in the cleaning aisle, even though she wasn’t wearing a mask.”
D
doomscrolling endlessly scrolling through social media for negativity and bad vibes. “No wonder I’m anxious and depressed, I just spent the past three hours doomscrolling.”
double-vaxxed getting both shots of the vaccine. “Thank god, now that I’m double-vaxxed, hopefully I’m on track to making the world safer.”
drive-thru testing getting a rapid COVID test from your car. “Before they let me in I had to get drive-thru tested.”
E
essential worker someone who works in health care, transit, food, child care, or something that contributes to keeping the city running. “Essential workers risked their lives on the frontlines of the pandemic, so they had access to the vaccines first.”
H
hybrid learning a combination of face-to-face learning and online learning. “When schools opened back up, students had to do hybrid learning.”
hygiene theater a practice of taking hygiene measures such as wiping surfaces and wearing gloves and using hand sanitizer to give the feeling of improved safety from the virus. “It took about ten minutes to get into the store because of all the hygiene theater required.”
I
immunocompromised a person’s immune system’s defenses are low, affecting its ability to fight off infections and diseases. People with this condition are at high risk of serious problems with COVID-19. Doctors have to care for immunocompromised patients so they advise them to wash their hands and keep their hygiene up.
L
lockdown a state of home isolation to keep from getting Covid. “During the COVID pandemic the city was put on lockdown and most public places were closed.”
long hauler person who has gotten COVID-19 but still has symptoms or has not fully recovered after a long period of weeks or even months. “I can’t believe Steve’s still coughing and hasn’t gained back his sense of smell, only taste! Hasn’t it been like 4 weeks since he was diagnosed with COVID? What a long hauler!”
M
mask a protective mask that covers the nose and mouth to prevent the spread of COVID.
maskhole someone who does not care about the well-being of others and does not take the responsibility to put on a mask; also referred to someone who doesn’t believe in the pandemic. “I ran into some maskhole while in the grocery store, I made sure to stay as far away as possible.”
maskne acne from wearing a mask. “Jackson refused to turn on her video in Zoom class because she had a terrible case of maskne.”
mute (unmute) when you pull yourself back from speaking during Zoom class. “After speaking with Mr. Rohlfing during class I put my audio on mute.”
N
nonessential worker someone whose job isn’t crucial to keep things running during a time like a pandemic or after a natural disaster. Many office workers in New York City were nonessential workers so they worked from home during the worst months of the pandemic.
P
personal protective equipment (PPE) essential workers and nonessential workers wear protective equipment to stay safe from contracting COVID-19. “I think we’re running low on PPE again.”
Q
quaranteens a not-so-nice way to describe the generation that is stuck living their teenage years indoors during quarantine. “I hate being a quaranteen, I’m never going to enjoy my senior year—no prom, no formal graduation!!”
R
remote learning the temporary move from in-person face-to-face learning to learning online from home. “The school called and said we were switching to remote learning.”
The Rona the term we use to describe the coronavirus. “Put your mask on, Rona outside.”
S
shelter in place find a safe location indoors and stay there until you are given an “all clear” or told it’s safe to come out. “We had to shelter in place when coronavirus hit New York City.”
social distancing the practice of staying more than six feet away from another person to decrease the risk of being in contact with someone who may be infectious.
social isolation when someone isolates themselves from society, usually because they have been exposed to someone with COVID or they have tested positive for COVID themselves. People do this so they don’t spread the virus. “Last week I had to go through a social isolation because I tested positive for COVID.”
stimmy the stimulus check that American people received for financial help. “Yo, my stimmy came in, let’s go to Miami!”
superspreader events that cause COVID-19 to spread fast to a large group of people; a person who spreads the virus to a massive amount of people typically in the crowd or at a social gathering. “Someone’s having another superspreader party.” “Stay away from that dude, you can tell he’s a superspreader.”
swab a material used by health workers for taking samples from the nose for a COVID test; the act of taking a sample to test for COVID-19. The swabbing is then repeated on the other side of the nose to make sure enough material is collected. “As she put the nasal swab up my nose, it felt as if I was going to sneeze.”
T
test the process in which people can know whether they carry the COVID virus or not. “My mom went with her friend to get a test at CityMD.”
U
unemployment people who lost their jobs received money to help pay bills. “Yo, did you get unemployment today because you’ve been out of work for about two weeks now?”
V
vaccine hesitant a person who delays or refuses to take the COVID-19 vaccination. “Mr. Jones was vaccine hesitant until he had to return to the school.”
Figure 24 Before vaccines: Houston Street in lower Manhattan, March 25, 2020. Photograph courtesy of the City of New York.
Figure 25 After vaccines: Houston Street in lower Manhattan, April 12, 2022. Photograph courtesy of the City of New York.
Eating Bitterness
Mackenzie Kwok
Mackenzie Kwok, a Chinese American folklorist and singer-songwriter based in Brooklyn, New York, turned to music to process pandemic experiences that included violence against Asian Americans. As she noted, well after vaccines reduced the deadliness of COVID-19, racist violence threatened Asian Americans.19
My favorite subway station in New York is the Canal Street Q station. I love that it is the first stop in Manhattan on the ride from Brooklyn, after crossing the Manhattan Bridge where everyone catches their breath as they look out the window. I love that it’s in Chinatown, right around the corner from vendors selling knockoff Louis Vuitton purses. I love the store directly up the stairs, the window adorned with bags of all sizes in the shape of chickens. I love the sign on the window that reads, “Look at all my chickens.”
But the Canal Street station also has me on edge lately. I don’t recall the last time I peered over the platform edge to see if the train was on the way. Not since Michelle Go was pushed to her death in Times Square in 2022. Not since an Asian friend from my running club mentioned that he’d had a knife pulled on him at that station. Not since spa workers in Atlanta were killed. Not since a man uttered “ni hao, sexy,” to me on a dark walk home one night.
Let me be clear: I don’t feel personally targeted. I do not feel that there are racist men out to attack me. I do not even live in a historically Asian neighborhood where many of these anti-Asian hate crimes frequently take place. Still, I have learned to keep away from the edge of the subway platform, to dress boyishly when I am out alone, to keep quiet so I do not stir the pot.
In Chinese, there is a phrase, 吃苦 (chi ku). It means “to eat bitterness,” to endure hardship, to carry on, to persevere. My great-grandparents, Kao Tsao-Yuan and Loh Mei-Chun, fled Shanghai for Hong Kong in 1949 before settling in the Bronx in 1960. They crossed through Ellis Island amidst intense immigration restrictions from Asian countries. Leaving Shanghai was their bitterness to eat, as was navigating a new country.
In February 2020, I went to a comedy show in Brooklyn. During a moment of audience interaction with edgy humor, the host asked what my ethnicity is. I said “Chinese.” She said “Stay away from me. Coronavirus made me racist.” I didn’t know what to do in front of an audience that, to be fair, was also getting roasted. I didn’t say anything, but I pretended to cough. I did not stick up for myself; I just went along with it. This, to me, was eating bitterness. By not resisting the joke, I was swallowing my discomfort through a joke and a smile.
I eat bitterness in the Canal Street subway station when I take care to stay by the wall, or stand toward the middle of the platform. I eat bitterness when men in cars comment on my body, and I stay silent, hoping they’ll leave. I eat bitterness feeling that I am safe while wondering if I will be singled out as a lone Asian woman to the wrong person with hungry eyes.
Sometimes, when I tell people about being followed, they will tell me I am strong. That’s what eating bitterness is, after all, a sign of grit and strength. But to me, being called strong is the most bitter taste to chew on. I do not stay silent out of strength; I do so out of protection for myself. I do so out of anxiety, even fear.
I wrote a song for Annie Lanzillotto’s Tell Me a Story salon, a virtual talk show that began during lockdown. Annie, an artist and community activist, invited me and other young women to share pieces for an episode called “The Orb of F— Off: Girls’ Bodies/Public Spaces.” During a brainstorm session, Annie asked, “What is breaking your heart most today?” I said, “Being called a strong woman.” Eating bitterness and being told I’m noble for it. I wrote this song called “The Bitterness I Eat.” The first verse goes like this:
I’m not strong, it’s just I have to be
Thirteen years of mediating
Man, it’s getting heavy.
What do you want me to say
When I’m followed down the street?
Thank you for the bitterness I eat?
There is much bitterness now, following the Sunset Park subway attack and more deaths in Chinatown. As New Yorkers are well aware, life goes on not because we are brave, but because we have no other choice. Sliding my hand into my pocket and feeling for the sharp edges of my brass knuckles lets me feel relief when I am on edge. So does keeping away from the end of the train platform, or covering myself with baggy clothing at night. I don’t want to live in fear, but I have these little lines of defense, just in case.
I pray that the Chinatown community, that Asian American elders, parents, young adults, and children, are not called “strong” for going about life after hate crimes. We are unsure and afraid. “Text me when you get home” has an additional layer of concern to it. I pray that our community is met with the gentleness and softness we deserve instead of being called “resilient.”
We can eat bitterness, but I am tired of it. I would like something sweet. I would like to be able to lean over to see if the Q train is coming again.
The Island of Pandemica
Steve Zeitlin
By April 2021, when the folklorist Steve Zeitlin wrote “The Island of Pandemica,” the vaccine was already in use and the culture of fear had eased enough for him to end this poem on a semi-hopeful note.20
On the island of Pandemica
we struggled, isolated and alone,
surrounded by contaminated waters
disturbed by those
who accidentally dipped their toes
and went under
or who, stranded in the poison rain,
suffocated in a bed alone,
their families torn asunder.
Till, one year later, we flexed our vaccinated muscles
and started swimming towards dry land.
Let us pray that for
the younger generation,
children of the plague,
Pandemica might be a place to which we traveled—
a distant, foreign land.