Covid begins NYC / Vermont

Part 1, NYC

Cherry blossoms on Cornelia St., NYC, deserted at 9pm.

(I try to keep these posts long on photos and short on words, but make this departure from the usual format. Three years ago, Covid struck with devastating force. Today’s post describes the shut down in New York City. Next week, in Part 2, I’ll move on to rural Vermont, where much about the pandemic was the same / and much was very differrent.)

February 2020 New York City vibrates with misinformation. One rumor holds that Chinese people are Covid-19 carriers to be feared and shunned. So, in those early, ignorant weeks before the pandemic really hits, Chinese restaurants, with few customers, are sad places where financial disaster sits at the tables alongside bottles of soy sauce and hand sanitizer.

March 2020 The virus is quickly proliferating, and it is now evident that its transmission route is breath itself. In a New York minute, masks sell out in drug and hardware stores. But in storefronts that previously specialized in drug paraphernalia and sex toys, shamelessly overpriced and probably faux N95s and sky blue “surgical” masks appear as if by magic, like umbrella hawkers at the first drops of rain.

As mobile morgues and hospitals fill and the body count explodes, masks become facial billboards advertising political affiliation, adherence to science over delusion, and social responsibility over a grotesque Trump-led interpretation of freedom.

March 17, 2020 Around 9 pm, with the uncanny quiet of shelter-in-place pressing down, I venture out to see what the shutting-down city has become. My downtown neighborhood is creepy, sad, a little frightening, and beautiful in a stage-lit zombie- apocalypse way. Cars are scarce; people more so as a bare few tread wary and isolated.

Delivery bicyclists now rule. They swoop through wide avenues and swirl down narrow cross streets, claiming the middle of the road and swinging round corners in luxurious arcs. Unimpeded by pedestrians or traffic, these messengers of something-remains have become the city’s lifeblood. Carrying take-out, groceries, Amazon packages, hand sanitizer and, if you are lucky, toilet paper, the bikers pump through artery avenues and surge along thousands of capillary streets that wind to individual doors.

Restaurants and stores are deserted except for an occasional worker standing by for a to-go order, or cleaning and cleaning again, or waiting frozen in Hopper light for customers who do not come.

Shop windows display handwritten signs declaring that they are closed until further notice to protect staff and customers, or that they are open only for take-out and delivery. They promise to return, but we already know so many won’t.

The haze of danger that overhangs the streets resembles the apprehension that was normal in the wild old New York of the ’60s and ’70s, when a nighttime walk alone risked muggers and junkies. Now, the rational fear is of all fellow humans, any one of whom might be harboring a deadly virus.

Occasionally though, I stop to talk to someone and find quick, companionable rapport. What are you doing? I ask a guy with an electric bike hauling a wagon filled with black and yellow plastic crates. Delivering for Amazon, he says. And he likes the work. It pays $15 an hour, no one is looking over his shoulder, and he loves to be on the bike. “It’s a good way to kill time, and now the streets are empty and people are really grateful and glad to see me.” He is young and sweet and seems in no rush.

I meet another lone woman on my block, who says she’s lived in New York all her life and this is the strangest time yet—stranger even than after 9/11. We talk about how, then, you could smell death in the air. Yes, she says, it even coated the windows. But this is stranger yet, we agree.

I want to walk more, but start to feel increasingly lonely and creeped out. So I climb to my 5th floor studio walk-up—where the cat waits to be fed and the world is safe—unless, of course, the virus is already inside me. And indeed my throat feels scratchy, my chest a little tight. It is so like all the apocalypse films you’ve ever seen, and yet, here it is.

• “Historically, cities have made it easier for people to live alone without experiencing constant loneliness. For single women, with or without children, cities offer domestic infrastructure. The city itself becomes a kind of partner, providing for single women the kind of services that women have, for generations, provided men.” —Rebecca Traister

March 19, 2020, NYC As Covid-19 hangs over the city, pervasive as the smell of urine in a summer subway, many of those city-bred services are gone. Loneliness, merged with isolation, is now enforced. Tonight, along with the sweetness of cherry blossoms, the spring breeze carries a scent of fear, not only of Covid, but of the future itself, when so many of the city’s low-income workers—a paycheck away from disaster—will see their jobs, their children's education, and perhaps their lives vanish as if by cruel magic trick. Unlike me or the denizens of Wall St., these truly essential people cannot work from home or flee the city.

One remarkable change is how the definition of “essential” slips down the class rungs as society (all too briefly) notes previously invisible, undervalued workers: healthcare providers, first responders, grocery store clerks, trash collectors, subway and bus workers. Whether propelled by lack of choice or commitment to serve, they do their jobs despite the lack of protective masks and sanitizers that would ease their worry and increase their odds.

In 2020, Covid was key in driving down life expectancy 1.2 years for whites, 2.9 years for Blacks, and 3 years for Latinos. By 2023, one third of New Yorkers; more than 3 million people, have caught Covid; 43,000 have died, some isolated or alone, straining for breath.

Meanwhile, I try to figure out when and how to get back home to Vermont, which seems safe, but, of course, is not.

(Continued next week.)