Nearly 19 years after the 9/11 attacks tore a hole through New York City, the 8 million residents of the metropolis find themselves once again at ground zero. While other cities, like New Orleans, Seattle, and Detroit, have struggled or are struggling with their own dire outbreaks, no city’s toll has generated the fear, the headlines, and the human drama of New York’s battle against the fast-spreading novel coronavirus.
As of Thursday afternoon, the state of New York faced 79,017 cases, roughly a third of all the 213,144 confirmed cases in the United States, and roughly 8 percent of all of the confirmed cases in the world.
The toll of the disease has escalated rapidly, as the city has progressed from mostly business-as-usual just weeks ago to a state where businesses are shuttered, office workers largely dispersed to their apartments, and residents can walk down empty streets that normally bustle with honking cars and trucks. Times Square looks so empty it’s as if tumbleweeds could roll through at any moment.
The images of emptiness, though, belie a desperate fight taking place largely out of view inside the city’s hospitals and health care centers. Over the course of the week, the New York death toll—and pace—increased daily. Last week, a New Yorker was dying of Covid-19 every 10 minutes. By early this week, that rate had fallen to every six minutes. Then, as of Thursday, a New Yorker was being felled by the virus every 3 minutes and 15 seconds—18 an hour, 432 in one 24-hour period. Altogether, New York’s 2,373 deaths account for more than half of the country’s 4,513 deaths. And the worst, doctors and officials say, is still to come.
That unrelenting toll has overwhelmed many hospitals across the region; videos surfaced online of hospital workers loading bodies into refrigerated tractor-trailer trucks parked outside after the morgues had filled to capacity. New York and the nation beyond watched as the USNS Comfort, one of the country’s two 1,000-bed hospital ships, steamed past the Statue of Liberty on its way to help ease the health care burden in the city.
To understand what life in New York is like—both on the front lines and on the home front—WIRED spoke with medical personnel, hunkered-down office workers, Covid-19 patients, and those who have seen the disease strike down their own family. The following oral history—the third in our ongoing series, Covid Spring—has been compiled from those original interviews, as well as from social media posts, online essays, public statements, and other primary sources, to tell the story of the people of New York in their own voices.
Editor’s note: If you'd like to read previous installments: Chapter 1 of Covid Spring dealt with patients and those on the front lines of the response across the country. Chapter 2 featured the voices of eight Americans who have watched what would normally be some of the biggest and most quintessentially human moments in their lives—births, weddings, loved ones’ deaths—remade and altered forever by the virus’s shadow. Quotes have been edited, copyedited, and condensed for clarity.
The view into the worst of the pandemic’s epicenter is limited, both by privacy rules and because hospitals and care facilities have been prohibiting doctors, nurses, or other health care workers from speaking to the public—sometimes threatening termination. For that reason, Jordan Culver, a doctor interviewed by WIRED, is a pseudonym. Others quoted by name below, by other news outlets, have tried to sound the public alarm at risk to their own jobs.
Jordan Culver, emergency physician, New York City: You leave your home and you’re in this new postapocalyptic world where no one’s around. Then you make your way to the hospital, and the emergency department is usually this forgotten backwater; right now, it’s the center of attention. You walk in and you don’t recognize anyone because they’re all masked and gowned.
Michelle Verhiley, ER nurse, New York, via Instagram: Though the city streets are quiet, the ER is far from it. Intubations and deaths from this virus are becoming way more frequent and unfortunately a common daily occurrence we have been witnessing. Yesterday, we pronounced four dead throughout a 12-hour shift.
Colleen Smith, emergency room physician, Elmhurst Hospital, to the New York Times: On a regular day, my emergency department’s volume is pretty high—it’s about 200 people a day. Now we’re seeing 400 or more people a day.
Jordan Culver: We’ve split the emergency department into many units—we’d been thinking that we’d separate out the Covid patients from the other patients there for other reasons. But at this point, everyone has the fucking disease. The really sick people are on one side, the moderately sick are on the other. Everyone is Covid positive, Covid postive.
Anthony Ciampa, nurse, New York City, via an NBC News video diary: We see a tidal wave coming at us.
Colleen Smith: At first, we were trying to isolate patients with cough and fever and be more careful around them, but we weren’t necessarily being extra careful around all the other patients. And then we started to realize that patients who were coming in with no fever but abdominal pain actually had findings on their x-rays and chest CTs that were consistent with this coronavirus, Covid-19.
Jordan Culver: At this point we know the disease, but the patients are still terrified because there’s such a mystery and aura around it. When you tell people they have the disease, you get this frozen look. We had one guy come in—we found he had a brain tumor. We tried to tell him it looked dangerous. He said, “I know I have a tumor, but I don’t want to get it taken care of because of Covid.” He eloped. He escaped from the emergency department. He was more afraid of the disease than he was of the brain tumor growing in his head.
Dara Kass, emergency physician, New York City, via an NBC News video diary: The rate of patients who can’t breathe is overwhelming. You see them over and over again. You’re intubating two patients in an hour. This is not what we do in emergency medicine.
Michelle Verhiley: We have doctors from all different services in the emergency department that got pulled off their service to be extra hands. A physician that just three weeks ago was practicing surgery, ortho, urology, etc., now doing compressions for our codes, starting IVs, and helping transport.
Jordan Culver: The emergency department has been getting most of the attention, but the internal medicine teams are swamped and overwhelmed. They’re working six out of seven days. The normal floors, where you have everything else going on, are now indistinguishable, because everyone is an ICU patient. It’s enormously stressful to be taking care of these really sick patients without everything that we’d want—not to mention the fear of contracting the disease yourself.
Megan Ross, nurse, New York City, via an NBC News video diary: The patients cough all in your hair. I’m not two feet away from them, I’m two inches from their face. I have Covid in my hair, Covid on my face.
Michelle Verhiley: We as ER nurses here in New York City are being asked to step up and also carry the three to four ICU patients on top of our handful of emergency department patients. The ICU team has officially set up shop in our emergency department.
Jordan Culver: The nurses are accustomed to it now. We have a unit of Covid patients who are overseen by surgeons, another by orthopedists—people who aren’t used to this, aren’t used to managing ICU patients. They’re stretching to remember things they learned in medical school. We’ve got people coming in to clean the hospital, and among everyone, no one is complaining.
Leora Horwitz, director, Center for Healthcare Innovation and Delivery Science, NYU Langone Health, via Twitter: In my seven days on one of our (now 12!) non-ICU Covid-19 units, I admitted 58 patients for Covid rule-out, of whom 50 tested positive. Two died—they had "do not resuscitate" orders—two went to hospice, and five went to the ICU. That is not my typical general medicine service week.
Jordan Culver: Things change from day to day. You work, you come back two days later and everything’s different. It’s terrifying to be thrust into the middle of it. You look around, and the hospital is full. It’s very dangerous; everyone’s just on top of each other all the time. You hear alarms and sirens. You hear patients you admitted being intubated, being paged. You look around and think: “What is double this going to be like?”
Michelle Verhiley: Even in the midst of it all spirits are high. I look around and am so very proud and blessed to have these strong, energized-for-life, beautiful souls working alongside.
Craig Smith, chair, Department of Surgery, Columbia University Irving Medical Center, daily update to staff, Saturday, March 28: The ground substance of health care is not ICU beds and ventilators, it’s people. People like my nurse practitioner, who was redeployed to a nearly overwhelmed ICU in a system hospital two days ago. After his first day he sent me a text: “Yesterday was a reality check on how serious this is … Can’t wait to go back.”
Jordan Culver: As a health care provider, it’s deeply gratifying work. Emergency medicine is typically getting yelled at by a drunk guy at 3 am. That’s what I think about as the defining synopsis of my career. Here you are saving Westeros, defeating the white walkers. But too often, it’s like being the firefighters at Chernobyl. It’s demoralizing to see the guys in spacesuits in other countries, and here we are just rolling up our sleeves and heading in.
Michelle Verhiley: I think we as health care workers are just overwhelmed with it all—the tragedy, the support, the gratitude.
Andrew Cuomo, New York’s governor, daily press conference: [The staff] are the front line, and they need relief. They are physically exhausted; even more they are more emotionally exhausted. This is unlike any other disasters. Hurricanes, earthquakes, floods—they happen, they are fast, they’re over, you start rebuilding. This is different. This is ongoing, and the duration itself is debilitating and exhausting and depressing. I’m just speaking to health care professionals who say, “Look, more than physically tired I’m just emotionally tired seeing the pain, seeing the death that they are dealing with every day.”
Jordan Culver: We’re all grieving this experience in some form or another. The toll of death is numbing. It’s the repetition. It just numbing. As Stalin said, one death is a tragedy, and a million is a statistic. The repetition takes something out of you. None of us could have prevented this pandemic, but if we had more resources, maybe if we did something different, that’s always in the back of your mind. Doctors and nurses hold themselves to a very high standard. It’s very hard to forgive yourself. It’s a prescription for burnout.
Peter Shearer, chief medical officer, Mount Sinai, Brooklyn, in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, March 27: There’s an incredible amount of frustration and hopelessness among staff. Because everyone, the nurses, the doctors, the PCA’s, everyone in the hospital went into this to make people better. And the virus is so aggressive and so aggressive in the lungs that it really leaves us with this phenomenal feeling of hopelessness.
Erik Blutinger, emergency physician, Mount Sinai, via an NBC News video diary: It feels like playing dominoes, every single minute over 10 hours straight, feeling like any one of your patients is about to fall and collapse.
Jeremy Rose, emergency physician, Mt. Sinai Beth Israel, via an NBC News video diary: When I intubated this man, he had no family with him. He was alone. When he goes to the ICU, he will be alone. And if he dies, he may very well die alone.
Dan Saltzstein, senior editor, New York Times, via Twitter: A sweet elderly couple in my building died five days apart from Covid. The wife died first, and the husband couldn’t be with her at the end. I hope they are together again.
Erik Blutinger: No matter how many times I work a shift, the one thing that always comes to mind about this disease is how lonely it becomes. You see old people, young people, middle-aged people, just slowly wither away. There’s no family, there’s no one here to just sit by their side and hold their hand.
Amy Pacholk, surgical trauma nurse, Stony Brook, via an NBC News video diary: Everyone describes all the critical care units as war zones, because that’s what it looks like.
Andrew Cuomo: The front line of this battle is our hospital system. That’s what this is going to come down to.
Anthony Ciampa, nurse, New York City, via an NBC News video diary: I feel like we’ve been at war for two years.
Dara Kass: You’re going to have an entire health care workforce that is going to have gone to war.
Craig Smith, daily update to staff, Friday, March 27: The enemy is inside the wire. This became unavoidably obvious yesterday when another colleague was intubated. At the most practical level, accept that there is no place to hide. The virus has no opinion on class, race, socioeconomic status, or professional stature.
Dara Kass: We are seeing scores of health care workers in my own department get infected.
Jordan Culver: A couple weeks back, I had a febrile illness. I ended up tested—it came back negative, but I’m pretty confident I had it, my family had it. One of our nurses is really sick. Two of our cardiologists are still intubated. We’ve got other doctors out with fever.
Anna Podolanczuk, pulmonologist, Columbia University Irving Medical Center, via Twitter: Today, I told a 28-year-old that he needs intubation. He was scared. Couldn’t breathe. I told the wife of a 47-year-old that he is dying over FaceTime. I bronched a Covid-19 patient who mucous plugged. [Editor’s Note: A bronchoscopy allows a doctor to inspect the inside of the lungs, by inserting a thin, flexible camera and light into the lungs through the trachea.] It saved his life. Risked mine.
Leora Horwitz: I was shocked by the persistence of fevers. My patients had fevers every day, often all day, often for days on end, not especially Tylenol responsive. And they had all had several days’ fevers before admission. The fevers did not seem particularly related to outcome. In fact most of my ICU transfers did not have persistent fever. They did, however, make patients miserable.
Jordan Culver: The challenge with the disease is it’s a relatively unstudied phenomenon. There are a lot of unexplained aspects of the disease so far. We use these pulse oximeters to measure the oxygen level in the blood—the oxygen saturation levels. Typically if someone’s oxygen saturation falls below 90, you’re feeling discomfort. Below 80 you’re getting disoriented. Then when you’re drifting down past the 70s, you might die. Yet these people are tolerating very low oxygen saturation rates—down into the 40s and 50s. They’re talking to you. They don’t have this air hunger. It’s a mystery. There’s something really weird going on.
Anna Podolanczuk: I walked through the emergency department as the ambulances kept rolling in, bringing more patients with [oxygen saturations] in the 60s.
Jordan Culver: When this started, we were following the protocols from Italy. Once you’re not getting sufficient oxygen from the nasal cannula [the in-nose oxygen tubes], the Italians were intubating these people; there was this prediction that we’d need these mountains of ventilators. The ICU protocols are still once you reach a certain level of oxygen, you need to be intubated. There are normally some bridges we use in between, but they’re aerosolizing, so we’ve decided to not use those to not risk spraying virus all over the ER. But once you get intubated, your morality is like 70 percent. For the most part, these people are taking a long time to get better.
Peter Shearer: Most of the patients that we put on ventilators are still on ventilators. A few of them have died. We have not been able to successfully transition people off of the ventilators back to breathing on their own.
Andrew Cuomo, daily press conference, April 2: At the current burn rate, we have about six days of ventilators in our stockpile.
Colleen Smith: Unless people die, I suspect we’ll be back to needing to beg for ventilators again in another day or two.
Jordan Culver: I’m convinced that the protocol is killing people. In our department, we’ve had a lot of disagreement about how to handle this. It’s entirely possible we’re mismanaging this disease at a national level. It’s possible that the answer is high-flow oxygen via a nasal cannula—that way, just the pressure of the oxygen flow keeps the lungs open.
Colleen Smith: The frustrating thing about all of this is it really just feels like it’s too little, too late. Like we knew—we knew it was coming. Today is getting worse and worse. We had to get a refrigerated truck to store the bodies of patients who are dying.
Dara Kass: We’re dealing with an overwhelming need for PPE, in a way that’s unprecedented. If we looked at Italy and China, what they tell us to do—which is to gown up for every patient, make sure there are no breaches, even use a buddy to make sure that you’re well-protected—it’s just not our capacity right now, anywhere in America.
Jordan Culver: We use the N95 masks for a week at a time. We have these permeable gowns; we recently got some Tyvek suits, which some of us have started wearing. I don’t know how our procurement department did it, but we managed to get masks—we’re still running low, but we have some. It’s not China-grade, but I don’t know anyone has that right now.
Colleen Smith: I put on one N95 mask in the morning. I need to have that N95 mask on for every patient I see. I don’t take it off all day. The N95 mask I wore today is also the N95 mask I wore on Friday. [Editor’s Note: On Tuesday night, The New York Times reported that Smith has tested positive for the virus; her symptoms, so far, are mild.]
Craig Spencer, director of global health in emergency medicine, Columbia University Irving Medical Center, via an NBC News video diary: Places are running out of ventilators. There are shortages of masks. The disconnect between what you might be hearing at a press briefing and what I’m hearing at sign-out every single day in the emergency department—that chasm couldn’t be wider.
Dara Kass: The federal government started making suggestions about how to protect yourself with no mask—like using a bandana. Which is an absurd suggestion. It’s not protective, it doesn’t do what it needs to do, it puts medical workers at risk.
Andrew Cuomo: I am tired of being behind this virus. We’ve been behind this virus from day one. The virus was in China. We knew it was in China. Unless we assume there’s some immune system variation with Asian people, it was coming here, and we have been behind it from day one, since it got here, and we’ve been playing catch-up. You don’t win playing catch-up. We have to get ahead of it.
Colleen Smith: It’s America, and we’re supposed to be a first-world country.
Across the New York City region, millions of people find themselves adjusting to a new—potentially long-running—reality of sheltering at home and social distancing during rare trips outside for exercise or to fetch supplies.
Brian Walsh, impact investor, Manhattan: There were two camps originally, at the start. There were people who looked at the reports coming out of China, followed the different epidemiologists on Twitter, people who were really trying to sound the alarm. People who saw this coming thought as China and Italy went, so would go the US and particularly New York. At the other end of the spectrum there were a lot of people who either downplayed it or didn’t realize what would happen. I’ve been on so many calls where someone would say, “Who could have predicted this?” I was definitely in the camp of people who saw this coming. There’s no prize for getting it right, but it did allow me to emotionally prepare.
Michael Johnson, communications, Queens: My son is 2 and a half, and he has a rare genetic disorder. He had a really difficult first year of his life; he was intubated five times. I’ve had to go through the experience of seeing him with a tube down his throat. When you heard that this virus was starting to circulate back in January, I viscerally know what this looks like. I know what it’s like to see someone you love, someone who is your whole world, go through something like that. It’s more real for me. It’s a curse and a blessing, because I understood what the threat of the coronavirus would be.
EJ Dickson, writer, Rolling Stone: The beginning feels like a lifetime ago. I went into crisis mode when the first case was diagnosed in New York, and we started taking precautions. But the turning point was last Thursday, reading about Anthony Fauci saying in his interview with Steph Curry, “This is different than China because there are these young people getting sick in the United States.” Up until that point, we had taken it very seriously—The New York Times had reporting about how the virus was spreading in New York—but we’d been doing grocery runs and taking runs before that. We stopped all of that.
Brittney Gilbert, social media strategist, Queens: I’d been paying attention to coronavirus since January as part of my job. My daughter’s preschool has an Instagram feed, and every time I’d see the daily post, I’d look at those people bunched together and think, “These kids shouldn’t be in school.” My husband and I had a long conversation about whether it was responsible to keep sending her in. They closed the schools by the time the weekend was over. That’s when I realized not just that things weren’t going to change, but that they weren’t going to change back anytime soon.
EJ Dickson: I’ve lived in New York my whole life, my husband too. My in-laws are here. We’re not leaving the house at all right now. We wake up, I try to get my kid ready to do something approaching homeschooling—he’s just 3, so it’s not really homeschooling—more just like activities. My husband and I are switching off child-care and trying to do snatches of work, like when he’s napping. We are fortunate enough to have a little balcony, and so we can take him outside for some fresh air. At night we FaceTime, because we can’t see anyone right now. The days just kind of blur. It’s a really scary time to go out, and we’re trying to figure out whether we should leave.
Brittney Gilbert: There’s a super high level of anxiety in the city, particularly from people who have lost their jobs. I have downstairs neighbors who worked in restaurants. She’s a bartender. I don’t know how she’s paying her rent this month. Parents with school-age children are floundering. Teaching children is a full-time job. I’ve heard a lot of parents say, “I can’t do this.” This is not sustainable. There’s a lot of desperation and frustration.
EJ Dickson: I was here for 9/11, my husband was here for 9/11, and it’s a similar vibe. But the difference is that night, I remember there being a candlelight vigil, and everyone was singing patriotic songs and giving each other hugs. It was really powerful. It was the strongest sense of community I’ve ever felt in New York. There’s no moment like that. No one can come together. We can’t hug each other. This feeling of collective grief is palpable, but it’s harder to deal with for a lot of reasons. People are terrified. No one is cavalier about it. It’s a really dark time.
Brittney Gilbert: The people of New York are what make it so lively and interesting to live here. Even if you don’t interact with them, you’re getting a boost of energy just from being among them. With the streets empty, it just feels like it’s not New York. I saw someone joking, we shouldn’t have to pay New York City rent prices if New York City doesn’t come with it anymore.
Michael Johnson: In this area in northeast Queens, one of the things that’s constant is airplane noise. In the morning, they take off so regularly that it’s like an alarm clock. You can tell it’s like half or a quarter of the normal air traffic. That makes it even more quiet. You’re used to the normal loudness of the city. Weirdly, you do still get the ice cream truck coming by, and the music he plays cuts through everything so much more.
EJ Dickson: When I look out my window, I don’t see anyone right now. That wouldn’t have been the case last week.
Brittney Gilbert: It’s a strange day every day that you wake up. The city is normally so noisy. Lately, the only thing I can hear is sirens. It’s extremely quiet except for 24/7 ambulances, fire engines, and trucks.
Michael Johnson: It’s eerie. You hear ambulances all the time.
Molly Jong-Fast, via Twitter: Everything is so silent except for the sirens.
EJ Dickson: The sirens are the most noticeable now. I first started noticing the sirens late last week. We live close to a major hospital. They’re just constant. It’s just constant. It feels like every hour on the hour. When you grow up in the city, it normally just blends into the background, but right now they’re definitely noticeable.
Brittney Gilbert: Everyone who can work from home is working from home, so sitting in my bedroom, trying to do meetings and manage a team, it’s extremely disconcerting to have this constant reminder of the level of distress that’s happening everywhere. You try to take your mind off it, but you’re almost constantly reminded of the sirens.
EJ Dickson: It’s hard to tell when they’re going and when they’re not. You always imagine it. It sucks. It fucking sucks.
Laurie Garrett, via Twitter: Every siren wailing is carrying more lives to an already overcrowded hospital. And every siren signifies an EMT crew risking their lives to save others.
Last week, New York City’s historic record for most emergency medical calls was broken three different days. On an average day, 911 dispatchers receive about 4,000 medical calls. The record last week was over 7,000.
Dan Nigro, fire commissioner, New York City, via press release: Our EMTs and paramedics are facing an unprecedented number of medical calls each day. There has never been a busier time in the history of EMS in New York City.
New York City press release headline: Mayor de Blasio, Commissioner Criswell, and Commissioner Nigro announce partnership with FEMA to bring 250 additional ambulances to New York City.
Brian Walsh: I’ve been trying to get out of the house once a day to go on a physically distant run. I usually go along the river, in part because the trails are wider, so it’s easier to avoid people. The trails have been quite busy, so I’ve altered when I go running—I try to go in the middle of the day or on days when it’s overcast. I joke that it’s like complaining about traffic when you’re in traffic because you’re part of the problem too, but there’s a way to do it safely and conscientiously.
When I heard the USNS Comfort was coming into Pier 90, I headed over there for my run that day. There were tons of media trucks parked along the West Side Highway. There were a lot of other people taking photos. I was very conscious of the irony of this 1,000-bed hospital coming to take surplus patients, but it was drawing onlookers who might contribute to the spread themselves. I took some photos myself, always from a safe distance.
John Mulaney has a bit in his stand-up act about those old-timey photos of people welcoming a ship into port: “What are you doing today?” “Oh I think I’m going to wave my handkerchief vigorously at a ship.” It does feel like I was back in time, as people frantically wave and welcome a ship into the harbor. There’s got to be a German word for it—reassurance mixed with anxiety. I’m glad this ship is here, but I can’t believe our health care system is at a point where we need it. And, of course, it’s only going to be a relative drop in the bucket.
Brittney Gilbert: We’re trying to go for groceries every three days. But living in New York City, you’re used to shopping almost every day, so even going every third day is a big change. We don’t have a vehicle, so stocking up for two weeks is just not possible.
Michael Johnson: We live in Flushing—it’s very diverse, a lot of Chinese, Korean immigrants. You see people somewhat going about their daily business, but they’re wearing masks and practicing social distancing.
New York’s non-emergency city services number—its 311 system—fielded more than 1,700 requests in the last four days of residents complaining about groups not practicing adequate social distancing.
8:35 pm, March 28—social distancing complaint at 2 Metrotech, Brooklyn
11:41 am, March 29—social distancing complaint at 5520 4th Avenue, Brooklyn
11:18 pm, March 29—social distancing complaint at Central Park Pool Path at 100th Street, Manhattan
2:46 am, March 30—social distancing complaint at 43-26 Ditmars Boulevard, Brooklyn
12:29 pm, March 30—social distancing complaint at Penn Station, West 32nd Street, Manhattan
4:34 pm, March 30—social distancing complaint at intersection of 5th Avenue and East 106th Street, Manhattan
8:22 am, March 30—social distancing complaint at Times Square, between West 41st and West 42nd Street, Manhattan
10:19 am, April 1—social distancing complaint at 1455 Coney Island Ave., Brooklyn
11:31 am, April 2—social distancing complaint at 1367 51st St., Brooklyn
12:03 pm, April 2—Covid-19 non-essential construction complaint, 200 Amsterdam Avenue, Manhattan
11:56 am, April 2—Covid-19 non-essential construction complaint, 10 East 30th St., Manhattan
Brittney Gilbert: New Yorkers don’t typically give each other a wide berth. Normally, you shoulder-check people on the sidewalk if they’re in your way. Now, though, you’re seeing people cross the street to avoid you. The streets are empty, so you can walk in the middle of the street to avoid people. The grocery stuff is tough because it’s impossible to keep 6 feet distant in a store. It’s really stressful. You see people peeking around corners like a haunted house—what’s in this aisle? Who’s in this aisle? I’ll come home and realize I didn’t get a third of the things because I was so focused on avoiding people and getting in and out as quickly as possible.
EJ Dickson: Luckily, we have enough food for the time being. I don’t know how other people are handling it, because we just tried to get groceries delivered to my in-laws yesterday, and all the services are booked up for weeks. I really don’t know how people who physically can’t leave their apartments are handling this. [An ambulance siren passes in the background.] There—you can hear them now.
Memo to “All Residents,” posted in a Manhattan building elevator: Please do not press any of the call buttons with your feet.
Michael Johnson: Our daughter is in pre-K, and they obviously shut down the school. The first week, we organized the Zoom meeting with her classmates, which was chaos but fun. The second week, her teacher organized it. She liked being able to see her classmates. They’ve been trying to send out some virtual lessons. A couple days ago they did “What’s coronavirus, and this is why we can’t go back to school.” She understands what’s happening to a point, but she keeps thinking her teacher is the one who canceled school. It’s surreal at some level.
EJ Dickson: Our son is old enough to sense something is different. That was the most heartbreaking part at first. His life actually did change in an instant, and he really struggled in the change in routine, not being able to see his friends. He’s a very social kid. They say no playdates, no playgrounds. How do you explain that to a 3-year-old, that he can’t go a playground?
Brittney Gilbert: It’s hard to explain to a preschooler why they can’t play with someone else.
EJ Dickson: Now, though, as time passes, there are other concerns that are just so much more urgent right now—like how to get my in-laws toilet paper and groceries?
Brittney Gilbert: Our daughter’s young enough that most of this isn’t worrying her, but you see these moments in her pretend play, these topics, that make clear she understands. She’ll be playing with her dolls and she’ll say, “You’ve got to wash your hands or you’ll get sick.” Or she’ll say, “We’re going to go to the playground when it’s open.” You can tell that she’s definitely frustrated and noticing.
Michael Johnson: I’m working at home. We live with my wife’s grandmother, who’s around 80. She’s at risk. We order food, get it delivered. Because of our son, we’re pretty protective through every single winter—we Lysol everything every day, wash our hands—so for us it’s not much of a change. You just have to hunker down. I walk my daughter down to the end of the block when I can.
EJ Dickson: A lot of people I know have left. The government is telling us to stay in very clear terms. But many people aren’t listening, and when you hear people leaving again and again, it’s very hard to curb that sense of panic.
Brittney Gilbert: We don’t really have an option to flee. We don’t have a vehicle. We don’t have a second home. My family is in Tennessee, my husband’s parents are from Texas. Plus our parents are in their 60s, so I’d never forgive myself if I brought the disease home to them. Besides, I don’t think things in rural places are going to be any better in a couple weeks. I was counting on the infrastructure that exists here and the national attention to keep things working. We’re just hunkering down here and hoping for the best. For us there wasn’t a good alternative.
Brian Walsh: The hospital ship, the tents going up in Central Park for the first time since the Civil War, it’s bone-chillingly surreal. Even though I anticipated these things happening, surreal is the only word I have. It feels surreal to be able to walk in the middle of normally busy streets in Manhattan. Our apartment building is a huge, square block—it’s like 2,000-units. And at 7 pm every night—it started maybe a week ago—all the neighbors open their windows to cheer for the front-line medical workers.
I look across the courtyard at our neighbors, to see them cheer—one night someone played "Start Spreading the News," one night we played from our apartment Alicia Keys’ song "New York"—it’s a communal moment. It’s a very affirming moment among a group of people who would otherwise keep to themselves.
Countless New Yorkers are living through this period wrestling with their own cases of Covid-19, trying to make do at home if their symptoms are mild. Anecdotal evidence suggests that “community spread” of the virus has been widespread, but given testing limitations, we may never know the true reach of the disease.
Emily Schmitz, Crown Heights, Brooklyn: I just moved in here a few months ago. I live with three other women. They're all in their mid-twenties. I really love them; they are all friendly and nice. We didn't know each other before, but it’s been working out, and we’re all getting to know each other really well right now.
The week before the city shut down, I had gone to see Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf—amazing show—and I think Wednesday of the next week it came out on the news that an usher who worked my section at that play had been confirmed to have Covid. There’s a chance I could have been exposed then. But I was less worried specifically about that, and it was more just a wake-up call in general that, “OK, this is really widespread—it’s not just in New Rochelle.”
Luckily my roommates and I are all very much on the same page. We’ve all been taking it seriously since things started to become clear that New York was going in that direction. When other people were still going out to restaurants and everything, we were already trying to socially isolate and be careful about that.
Suraj Patel, Democratic candidate for Congress, New York’s 12th district, Manhattan: It was two weeks ago I knew something was off. I’m 36, I run a lot, I work out, and so for me to go up stairs and be wheezing, that’s odd. I didn’t have any other symptoms at first. There was strangely just not having enough oxygen with each breath. It felt like I had to take two breathes for each normal one.
I live with my brother—an ER doc—and my little brother, who works on my campaign, and he’d been sick earlier in the week. My brother’s girlfriend lives with us, and she’s a cardiologist. We’re packed in this house. We’re all nerdy. We were like, there’s something going on here. My brother was not going to be able to go back to the ER if he was Covid positive, neither would his girlfriend be able to return to her cardiology clinic. So we were able to do a swab at home and send it securely to the lab. We were all positive.
Brittney Gilbert: I know some people who think they have it but haven’t been able to get tested. I have friends self-medicating, but they’ll never know if they have it.
Emily Schmitz: My chest has been tight for about a week and a half, but I really started feeling the symptoms last Wednesday. I started developing a mild cough and fever. They’ve stayed pretty mild throughout, but it’s very on and off. Especially at first, I kept thinking I was making it up. I talked to my doctor on a video call, and she said it might be Covid, but they’re not testing unless you’re hospitalized right now. I’m just monitoring at home and trying to rest up.
Charlie Bardey, comedian, New York, announcing his infection via Twitter: i wanna get FUCKED UP and BE IN LOVE but INSTEAD i just have coronavirus!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Emily Schmitz: Hearing that diagnosis from her was definitely emotional; I’m young and luckily have mild symptoms so far, but it made me realize how scary this is going to be for a lot of people in the city.
Suraj Patel: We remained very sick for several days—102 fevers, but we knew we were stable. We weren’t getting worse; we could treat it with Tylenol every four hours. Every three and a half hours, the fever came back, like clockwork. Come last Monday, we were feeling fine. Then a couple days later, I realized I’d probably tipped over into pneumonia. I started a Z-pak that day, and now I haven’t had a fever for five or six days.
Emily Schmitz: Getting sick surprised me because my roommates and I have been very careful. That just speaks to how widespread it already is, especially in Brooklyn, especially in Crown Heights. My biggest fear the whole time has been spreading it to other people. Before any of this had happened, we had all—kind of joking but also seriously—had made a pact that if one of us got it, the others wouldn’t be mad if, like, one of us was the one to infect the household. It seems like my other roommate is starting to feel sick too, which is scary, and I feel bad about. But when you’re living in close quarters like this …
More than 1,000 New Yorkers have been killed by the Coronavirus over the past week. One of them, last weekend, was Alan Merrill, the songwriter behind the hit song “I Love Rock ’n’ Roll,” made famous by Joan Jett.
Joanna Lisanti, Merrill’s wife: Alan had a musical genius. People who know him, they can’t believe his ear and his music. He wasn’t a one-hit wonder, but he never became famous. He was a star in England and in Japan. In America, his record label didn’t promote “I Love Rock ’N’ Roll.” It actually was a B-side originally. He would play small clubs. He used to pay Wembley, but wherever he was, he’d give the same performance energy. I don’t think he cared he never got the credit for that song, but he just wanted people to know he wrote it. We will have been married, on April 4th, 33 years. Meatloaf signed our wedding certificate. It says “Meat” new word “Loaf” on our wedding certificate.
Laura Merrill, Alan Merrill’s daughter, photographer, Manhattan: I’m a freelance photographer, and a lot of my work is photographing travelers visiting New York. The impact of this epidemic started there—all my clients started canceling as they canceled their trips. I had just seen my father two weeks ago—he’d had a show here in Manhattan. We’d just heard of the virus. It was still nothing bad. He was still gigging. I took my boyfriend, he met my dad.
My boyfriend was really concerned about the epidemic, but I didn’t think that much of it. I thought the media is hyping this up. But he persisted, so I grabbed my cat and my clothes and went to my boyfriend’s house in Connecticut. When I got out to Connecticut, I heard my dad had a cold. I told him, “This sounds like this is getting serious, so be careful.” We were mostly concerned about my grandmother, who is 91. Thinking about how to protect her. We were focusing on her, never thinking my dad would be in the line of fire.
Joanna Lisanti: Two days after his gig, he had a cold. Then it was flu-like. He wasn’t even eating, even though I’d gotten him all the matzo ball soup he could want.
Laura Merrill: He was downplaying his cold. “I’m all right, I’m all right.” He was playing ball with his dog on their patio. But it started to go on and on. He had a fever of 101. My stepmother called the doctor, but she was told, “Unless he can’t breathe, he should stay home and self-quarantine. Don’t send him to the hospital.”
Laura Merrill: It wasn’t until Saturday that my sister Allegra, she lives in DC, and she texted me, “He can’t breathe this morning. He’s wheezing and gasping for air.” The doctor told my stepmother, call 911 and get him to Mount Sinai. The EMTs came. They took him. No one could go in the ambulance with him, no one could go into the ER with him. The doctor called an hour later and said they’d put him right on a ventilator.
They’re testing him, but it’s going to take about 10 hours to get the results. Then they’ll send him up to the ICU with the pulmonary team. So he was waiting in the ER, sedated because he was panicking. As soon as I heard, I rushed down to the city. I’d been trying to avoid being there, to avoid being exposed, but it’s my father. I went right to my apartment.
Joanna Lisanti: I have a friend who was an emergency doctor who has been coaching me through this experience. He said my husband was lucky to get on a ventilator, because they’re going to disappear soon. He says he feels like that they sent him to Afghanistan with a gun but no bullets.
Laura Merrill: Around 10, 11 pm, they called and said the test had confirmed it was Covid-19.
Joanna Lisanti: They didn’t take him to the ICU. He spent almost 10 hours in the ER. They needed 10 hours to test him for something that he knew he had. We knew this plague was coming. It’s not a joke.
Laura Merrill: They said his vitals were failing, they think he’s going. We asked if he was going to die alone? They told us, “If you hurry, we can let you in.” It could only be two minutes, and only one person at a time. We had to take turns. Getting to the hospital was very eerie. There was a security guard at the door, not letting anyone in. I had to explain in tears I was coming to say goodbye to my father. Finally, someone came and fetched me; they said, we’re really not supposed to let you in here. They put me in full protective gear—eyeshield, gloves—and told me, “You have two minutes.”
Laura Merrill: By the time I’d gotten there, his vitals had stabilized, so I thought—and they thought—maybe he had a chance. So I’m in there, kissing him, rubbing his head, telling him that me, my brother, and my sister love him and he’s got to get through this. I had just photographed his new album cover. I wasn’t really thinking this was goodbye.
After my time was up, my stepmother went in, and I just sat in the emergency room stunned. Finally, I walked home from 99th Street to 51st. I figured I’d definitely been exposed, so I didn’t want to get in a cab and give it to a taxi driver. It was so eerie. There are no taxi cabs on the street; you normally see yellow cabs everywhere. I saw maybe three. If you saw someone in the street, they had a facemask on.
It was like that movie, Vanilla Sky, with Tom Cruise—there was just no one in Manhattan. Every store I passed had notices in the window—you can’t come in, you have to abide by a six-foot limit for social distancing. It’s everywhere. I felt like it was so alone. And then I realized that I was going to be alone. I had to self-quarantine.
It took me about an hour to get home, and my sister texted me, “He’s gone.” His lungs had given out as they transported him to the ICU. His lungs were so damaged, they just failed. I was hysterical. It just started sinking in: We can’t have a funeral. We can’t mourn as a family. I have to stay in my apartment. My stepmother has to stay in her apartment. We can’t grieve. Friends who knew him are sending so many messages, but it’s just bizarre to not to be able to grieve properly. I can’t hug anyone for two weeks.
Joanna Lisanti: Then you have to grieve alone. My daughter can’t even come and be with me. People don’t even know what it’s like to grieve alone. You have no one to hug, no one to touch, no one can help you. That’s the difference with this epidemic. That’s what this virus is doing. It’s not just punishing the people who die, it’s punishing the people who are left.
Laura Merrill: You don’t think it’s going to happen to you, until it does. And when it does, it’s the worst way possible. You die alone, no one can say goodbye, and then you’re left alone. You feel like you’re in a crazy sci-fi movie. It’s not a joke. Don’t go outside because you might pass it to someone like my dad. You don’t know how this virus will affect anyone. My dad was healthy. He was joking around, texting the morning it all turned around. It might not affect everyone the same. It’s like playing Russian Roulette.
I’m still in a state of shock. I woke up achy and my feet were cold. I’m thinking, “Is this the virus?” And, “If I’m sick, I can’t go to the hospital until my lungs start to fail.” I’d have to wait until I can’t breathe before I can be admitted. It’s scary. It’s frightening. I lost my dad, and now I’m scared for myself too. What happens if my fever shoots up? Will the hospital turn me away? If you do end up in the hospital, whether you live or die, you’re there by yourself. It’s scary. It’s spreading like crazy. People just need to stay inside.
Outside the patient wards, hospital administrators, local, state, and federal officials are racing to increase the capacity of New York’s health care system, postponing elective surgeries, and doing everything they can in short order to meet a Covid-19 pandemic apex that is estimated to be somewhere between five and 21 days away.
Bill de Blasio, mayor, New York City, daily press conference, Wednesday, April 1: The toughest weeks are ahead. This is going to be an ongoing effort and it’s going to be like nothing we’ve ever seen in the history of the city. I’ve put Sunday, April 5, as that kind of demarcation line, that D-Day, by which we have to get ready—this coming Sunday.
Mitchell Katz, president and CEO, New York Health + Hospitals, daily press conference, April 1: We have 324 ICU beds in our public hospitals that we run on under normal circumstances and a total of 4,428 beds. While those are very large numbers, they pale in comparison to what we’re actually going to need in this crisis. Elmhurst Hospital, which is on the forefront of handling Covid patients, has already increased from 29 intensive care beds to 111 intensive care beds. That’s in the matter of 10 days.
These are changes that you would expect under normal circumstances would take six months to a year—to get the beds in place, to get the staff in place, to get the equipment in place. At Lincoln Hospital they’ve grown their ICU from 34 beds to 114 beds with 30 more coming there. And Bellevue Hospital has grown from 66 to 127, with 52 more coming. This is really just the beginning of what we need in order to handle this emergency.
Jordan Culver: We converted everything to patients, even administrative spaces. It’s got a little uncomfortable looking around—the beds are about 80-90 percent full. There are just sick people everywhere.
Peter Shearer, chief medical officer, Mount Sinai, Brooklyn, in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, March 27: We’re up to about 225 patients in the hospital, and 171 of them are Covid positive patients. There are currently 20 other patients who are still in the emergency department waiting to get up to a hospital bed. It’s very tight, very crowded, and these patients—they’re indescribably sick.
Colleen Smith: What’s a little bit scary now is the patients that we’re getting are much sicker. Many of the young people who are getting sick don’t smoke, they’re healthy, they have no co-morbidities. They’re just young, regular people between the ages of 30 and 50 who you would not expect to get this sick.
Craig Smith, daily update to staff, Monday, March 29: “Field hospital” facilities are springing up here and across the region (Javits Center, USNS Comfort, possibly Riverview Terrace, and more). Field hospitals are familiar elements of forward areas in armed conflicts and in natural disasters. Yes, it is getting that serious. Triage is a fundamental operating principle in field hospitals. Triage determines who should be treated first, how they should be treated (surgery, fluid resuscitation, etc), and who should be kept comfortable. Broadly construed, we will all be operating more and more on field hospital principles as we move through the next few weeks.
Bill de Blasio, in an interview with NBC’s Today Show: We have about 20,000 hospital beds in all of New York City. That’s where we were, say, the beginning of this month—normal times. We project the potential that all of those beds—all 20,000—will have to be turned into intensive care beds to focus on Covid-19 patients who are really, really sick.
Craig Smith, daily update to staff, Sunday, March 29: The slope of the new-case curve is steady. As long as that remains true, and for some period after the peak, we will be dealing with emergency department and ICU demands that are beyond anything we have seen in our lifetimes.
Peter Shearer: What I have going on here is absolutely unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.
Bill de Blasio, daily press conference, Wednesday, April 1: Next week is going to be a very difficult, intense week. We need to build out an additional number of 65,000 hospital beds in the City of New York by the end of April.
Andrew Cuomo: Overall the numbers continue to go up. We’re still on our way up the mountain. We’re still looking for a curve. We’re still looking to see where we hit the plateau. Everyone asks the same questions, and they’re all good questions. When is this going to be over? What happens? How does it end?
Jordan Culver: We don’t know where we are on the curve, to be honest.
Craig Smith: daily update to staff, Wednesday, April 1: I can’t possibly be the first person to shout out the first four lines of “The Wasteland” by TS Eliot. But first or not, I can’t resist: “April is the cruelest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain.”
Andrew Cuomo: Anyone can get this disease. There is no superhero who is immune from this disease. That goes for a New Yorker, as well as a Texan, as well as a Californian. Anyone can get it. No one can be protected from it. I couldn’t protect my own brother. With all he knows, and as smart as he is, he couldn’t protect himself.
Chris Cuomo, anchor, CNN, opening comment on his show, March 31: You will have stories like mine popping up all over you in your life. You probably do already. Why? Because testing is just starting to catch up in pulling back the curtain on what we have known to be true for so long. It is not “if.” It is not even “when.” We are in it. This is a fight. It is going to get worse. We are going to suffer. And you have to accept it not with fear, but with almost a fanatical sense of passion to fight. Because that’s the only way you have ever made it through anything hard in your life and this will be no different.
Jordan Culver: Last week, the people who came to the hospital, 60 percent of people Covid positive. I wouldn’t be surprised if half of Brooklyn has it. Maybe when the antibody tests finally start arriving, we’ll able to figure out how big this thing was.
Suraj Patel: I’m on a warpath for universal testing. Let’s give people the unvarnished truth. We were lied to at the start of this. You can’t now double-down on the failure and ask people to stay home without knowing if they’re sick. You’re shaming people for something that all humans want—certainty. This is doable. England ordered 10 million antibody tests, for $12 a piece, and they’ll be at every corner Boots pharmacy.
We need to know if and when someone’s had the disease. Once you have the antibodies, you can go back and be a productive member of the community—you can help out in essential services, you can work in restaurants, you can go out again. We know from other countries that the only thing that has begun to stem the tide is widespread testing. Until we know how much it has spread, we won’t be able to reopen the city. New York is a pedestrian city. This is not a technological problem. This is a political problem and logistical problem.
Andrew Cuomo: To the extent people watch their nightly news in Kansas and say, “Well this is a New York problem,” that’s not what these numbers say. This says it’s a New York problem today. Tomorrow it’s a Kansas problem, and a Texas problem, and a New Mexico problem.
Jordan Culver: The big problem in this country, you’ve got half the country in a science-denial stage. If they don’t see it before their eyes, it’s probably conspiracy or fake news. I would have thought this Covid pandemic would have been the perfect Republican talking point—it’s fear of foreigners, it’s fear of dense, urban areas, it’s distrust of others, it’s about purity.
And yet Covid has been a blue state phenomenon so far. Trump just saw this as a threat to his reelection and the stock market that they all fell in line. The red states are only now getting their act together. Florida’s going to get fucked, to use a medical term. My parents are there, in a condo there. I’m really worried about them.
Deborah Birx, coronavirus coordinator, The White House, in an interview with Fox News: We don’t think any city will be spared from this virus.
Andrew Cuomo: I say to my fellow governors and elected officials all across this country: “Look at us today, see yourself tomorrow.”
Jordan Culver: Our doubling rate is up—or down, really—to six days. We had been at every three days earlier, so that’s reassuring. We’re making some progress. I worry, though, about all the people who don’t have income. I don’t think there’s going to be social unrest, but all of society has been turned upside down by this. We’re mindful of the extreme price of. I’m worried people are going to stop doing it. Some people are going to just die, but there’s a substantial percentage who can be kept alive if the health care system is intact. If we want to keep people alive, we need to keep doing social distancing.
EJ Dickson: This epidemic has really highlighted the class issues. Normally, it manifests itself in small ways in New York—like you know who rides the subway to work and who Ubers to work. It’s never been more clear to me who the working class, the middle class, and the upper class are. The upper class, they were all able to leave for their homes in the Catskills and the Hamptons. They’re going to fare better because they could leave.
My husband and I are really fortunate to both still have our jobs. Everybody knows someone who’s lost a job. It’s really complicated. That’s been the most frightening thing to me—how sharply class lines have been drawn. When the dust clears, I worry we’re going to see real stratification.
Brittney Gilbert: I don’t think most people in the rest of the country understand just how small most New York apartments are. New York apartments are so small that getting out is usually the only way to stay sane. I look forward to the day when we can all go outside again. It’s going to be a pretty joyous occasion. My big concern is sustainability. What happens in April or May when people start to really feel cooped in? There are a lot of people living in unstable households, who don’t have the resources or the escapes they typically have. I hope people can hold out as long as they need to.
Michael Johnson: I don’t really stress about the immediate—like what’s going to happen today or tomorrow. I’m lost, though, thinking about how we’re going to come out of this. I think there are going to be dramatic changes about how people approach society and life. I wonder how our society is going to meet that moment. A lot of good could come out of it, but a lot horrible things could too. You can’t really sit on the sidelines. I have two kids. It doesn’t seem like there’s any going back to the way things were. That’s where my thoughts drift when I have a moment.
Andrew Cuomo: Let’s make sure we’re taking the positive lesson and not the negative lesson.
You could get wary of intimacy and contact and density. “Social distancing, don’t go near anyone.” What a terrible thing to live with as a human being. What a cruel torture. “Isolate yourself from other people. Be afraid of hugging someone.” Just think how emotionally and personally repugnant that concept is, right? We crave human connection, and now we’re being told that could be dangerous. You can’t kiss. You can’t hug. You can’t hold hands. So how we come out of this, and making sure that it’s positive and not negative. How do we learn from this? And how do we grow from this, right?
Michael Johnson: People used to have a game plan about what their lives were going to be like and what their kids lives were going to be like. I don’t know that we have that right now. I do worry that our lesser angels will defeat our better angels.
Andrew Cuomo: We have to start to think about that. We also have to be smarter from what we went through. How do you make the economy more resilient? What happens when something like this happens again? And something like this will happen again. “Oh, no, this is a once-in-a-lifetime, never again.” Something like this will happen again. We’re seeing it in the environment. We’re seeing it with floods, we’re seeing it with hurricanes. Something like this will happen again. You can’t just turn off the economy like a light switch. We’re not built to be isolated for long periods of time and not have human contact. So how do we deal with that? These are the types of questions that we have to start to think through. But not today.
Each week, WIRED’s Covid Spring project will offer updates on voices from previous chapters. This week we can report that legal recruiter David Lat, who had been in critical condition, was taken off a ventilator last weekend as he improved.
David Lat, legal recruiter, via Twitter, April 1: Not an April Fools Day Joke: After 17 days at NYU Langone, including 6 days on a ventilator, I’m being discharged! Thanks to the #HealthCareHeroes here at NYU Langone who not only saved my life, but made a long hospitalization as pleasant as such an experience can be.
Morgan Madison, age 18, from Chandler, Arizona, who shared her story of struggling with what she suspected was Covid-19, shared an update as well: My cough is finally gone but now my stomach is super upset and my entire body is just sore. My arms especially just ache like I pulled a muscle. Everywhere generally hurts a bit. I spike fevers in the mornings and the afternoons and every morning I wake up with a horrible chest pain and stomach aches.
Arizona has finally opened up testing to immune-compromised people—I have primary immunodeficiency disease—so I finally got tested. There was a drive-through testing center at a church. I still don’t think I’ll be paid by my work, but at least it’s getting somewhere with testing opening up. I’m really hoping I get a good check in the mail soon because I’m already worried that I’m going to lose my house next month.
Nora McGreevy and Jenny Pachucki contributed research and reporting to this article.
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