Progress Report: NYC

Annamaria on Day 100

Today, Monday 8 June 2020, is the 100th day of the Covid pandemic in New York.  And it is the day when NYC will begin Phase One of Reopening.  We are about to stand up and try to walk after being knocked for a loop.

Back before the crisis hit us, epidemiologists were issuing warnings about this new bug that might come to the US from China.  Incoming flights from China were soon banned.  In mid-February when I flew home from Florence through Frankfurt, Lufthansa wanted to know if I had a fever (No) and if I had been in China in the past two months (No, not in the past 34 years, actually).  Little did anyone know that the virus had gotten on planes in China and gone to Europe.

In the first two months of this year, I was one of three million travelers coming from Europe and landing at JFK and Newark airports,.  We were carrying all sorts of stuff: dirty laundry, new Italian shoes,  corporate paperwork, gifts for friends, swanky clothing to wear to a family wedding, souvenirs of the Eiffel Tower...  

And at least some of us were bringing in the novel Corona virus.

Three weeks later, Italy went on lockdown, and a week after that I began self-isolating in what was rapidly becoming the world's most dangerous Covid-19 hotspot.

Today, having been through three kinds of hell, New York City is ready to open up.  A bit!  Our governor--the now famous Andrew Cuomo--credits the people of New York for bringing ourselves to this moment.  What we did was follow his fact-based advice, garnered from experts world-wide.

Here is where we are as of this past Saturday, in seven-day rolling averages:

• Daily number of New Yorkers testing positive has gone from a peak of 57% down to 2%
• At the peak, the daily number of new cases was 12,000 out of 100,000 of population.  On Saturday, it was 6.4 out of 100,000 of population
• New hospitalizations are down to 1.27/100K
• In New York State, the daily number of deaths has gone from a peak of 952, down to 32 this past Friday

Our Guv's by-words that have kept us going.

Now, carefully, cautiously, with eyes and ears tuned on the Guv's daily reports, we are beginning to move around.  We must, and will abide by the cautions of social distancing and wearing masks.  We have thresholds we have to maintain.  If our stats start to climb, we all will have to put ourselves back into isolation.

I have been out more in the past week than all my cumulative outdoor time since last March 16.  On Monday the 1st, I kept an important appointment with the eye doctor, an outing within the guidelines then in force.  Eschewing my usual mode of transportation, the NYC subways, I walked the 6.6 miles round trip, which I loved doing on a gorgeous late spring morning, as attested by photos of icons viewed along my route, above.  By the way, whatever anyone else may say about me, one of the world's top retinologists pronounced me "perfect."

Paint splattered on the entrance to the cafe at the end of my block

Broken windows at a men's shop on Park Avenue

Sad to say, a couple of the things I saw on that walk were not so pleasant. Bad, but these were the only two.  You see, George Floyd had been murdered, and then criminals had hidden themselves among legitimate protestors in Union Square.  Having listened to sirens and firetrucks wailing for serval nights in a row, I expected things to look a lot worse than they were.

Those protests continue.  But they are now mostly calm.  Thanks, I believe, largely because the police are leaving the protestors to their chanting and focussing on people committing crimes.

Baracades at the ready

   

This past Saturday, I visited my beloved Union Square Market.  It has developed its own rules to keep us all safe.

WSQ monument to Mohandas Gandhi,
the patron saint of peaceful protest.

Stalls spaced further apart than before

Spacings marked for queueing six feet apart

My city is beginning to come back to a semblance of itself, and I hope heading toward a new normal that will include new rules, addressing the societal flaws so dramatically revealed by the pandemic.  Particularly, the worst of the them brought into sharp relief by the murder of George Floyd.

We in NYC worry that those mass demonstrations may result in a spike of new Covid cases, but almost all of us share the protestors' outrage.  The news of sympathetic citizens worldwide voicing support helps enormously.  And in many countries people are demanding justice also for their own underserved countrymen and women.

One of the facts that haunts me about all this is the name of policeman who in nine minutes, in broad daylight, committed the crime that opened a Pandora's Box of outrage.

Coincidence has had a profound affect on my own life.  In my case to my joy.  But I have always had almost a reverence for it.

Scaramucci

Scaramuccia

At the beginning of his administration, Trump had appointed one Anthony Scaramucci, a Wall Street financier, as his Director of Communication.  His name is Italian for Scaramouche, a villainous figure in Italian Commedia Dell'Arte.  It seemed 100% prophetic, then, when their relationship fell apart in a farcical way.

That the tragedy of George Floyd's murder and its aftermath were unleashed by a man named Chauvin looks, on the other hand, like the depths of tragedy.

No self-respecting novelist would have allowed herself to give such a name to the character who would--with that label--so predictably commit the signature act of racial injustice.

Truth once again stranger, and in this instance more unbearably tragic, than fiction.