New York & The Pandemic

In March 2020, New York City was once again America’s ‘Ground Zero’, as the pandemic hit the Big Apple first and hardest of the 52 states. By mid-April the city was recording an average of over 900 deaths per day, and was still registering over 200 daily deaths a month later. Although the mortality rates in the second wave (starting in November 2020) never crossed 200 per day, the total death count in the city to date stands at over 50,000 people. How did the city react? How well did the authorities respond? Did it bring people closer together or push them further apart? What was the impact on the city’s economy, on jobs, on business and tourism? How, and to what extent, has the city recovered? How did the American political and cultural context affect the impact and the response? In what ways was the impact similar to that of the pandemic on the UK? In what ways did it differ?

The Pandemic Perspectives group is fortunate to be afforded a unique insight into the travails of the city through the guidance of long-standing group member and native New Yorker, Carmen Torres. She led the session by drawing upon her personal experience and by introducing members to: Anca Radulescu’s account of the early stages of the pandemic, ‘Course of the first month of the COVID 19 outbreak in the New York State counties‘; ABC’s ‘Eye witness to the Pandemic’ docuseries; Deepti Hajela’s Associated Press report, ‘After long pandemic year, New York Shows renewal‘ and King and Cole’s Wall Street Journal article of March 2021, ‘How a Year of the Covid-19 Pandemic changed New York. The Numbers are in‘.

Torres began by outlining the chronology of the pandemic in New York city. She explained that the first reports of the outbreak in Wuhan found little purchase in the consciousness of New Yorkers. As for much of the rest of the world, the limited global impact of outbreaks of SARS and ‘bird flu’ made it seem merely an event happening a long way away and rang no alarm bells. Even as concerns began to rise, she argued that American’s were too weighed down with other concerns, particularly the erratic behaviour of the Trump administration and issues of racial discrimination, to pay much attention. She described the early news bulletins in March as being both cursory and terrifying, creating a sense of confusion where no one knew what was actually going on. The announcement on March 12th that citizens should ‘go home’ and not return to work had come as a profound shock. She speculated that because of New Yorker’s famed resilience the shutting down of the ‘hub of the world’ seemed particularly astounding. Faced with the news footage of overwhelmed hospitals and bodies pilling up in morgues, she described the early period as characterised by deep-rooted fear and panic. There was an exodus from the city by those who could afford to do so, further spreading the virus and leaving haunting scenes in the deserted inner city, such as post-apocalyptic views of a deserted Times Square. Fuelled by Trump’s comments, ‘One day, it’s like a miracle, it’ll all disappear’ (27 February 2021), there were also waves of false rumour, scepticism and denial. Views that the virus had been developed in a Chinese laboratory to deliberately undermine America or that it was all a hoax were commonly voiced. The contrast between the public broadcasts made by Cuomo and those of the president sowed confusion. Some insisted on wearing masks while others refused. Many people’s response was that of complacency, an assumption that a state as powerful as America would naturally be able to control the disease. As the body count rose so did the panicking, which Torres likened to a form of PTSD. Some grew depressed as others committed fully to self-preservation, stripping supermarket shelves of hand-sanitiser, tissues and meat. The collapse of the city’s economy and the lack of support systems engendered genuine fears of starvation among those with no reserves. Xenophobia rose, there was a huge spike in violence against the Asian community and posters appeared in Chinese districts declaring ‘go back home’, ‘we don’t want you here’, ‘you brought this disease’. Torres describes this behaviour as ‘animalistic’. In May, the murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis sparked off marches and rioting in the city, and further undermined the faith in leaders, already low, Torres argued, following so many years of injustice for people of colour in the US.

Responding, Richard Kendall noted that whereas in Torres account of the pandemic’s impact on America other issues, most importantly that of racial injustice, remained prominent, in the UK, the pandemic ended completely the endless disputation over Brexit that had dominated the media for months. He noted that the assumption that it was a problem for other people not the British, however, was similar, that even the proximity of the early crisis in Lombardy was portrayed as happening a long way away. Christopher Griffin, noting the anti-Chinese xenophobia described by Torres, speculated that contagion had often been presented as less disease than psychosocial threat and referenced the ‘Yellow Peril’ hysteria of the late 19th and early 20th century. Niall Gallen suggested an even earlier genesis to anti-Chinese hostility, noting that fears of contagion from the East were inherent in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and stretched back to the advent of the bubonic plague. He noted that although, due to Huawei’s involvement, the 5G conspiracy theory could be considered in the same light, he wondered whether such conspiracy theories were more anti technological than specifically xenophobic. Torres said that Chinese-Americans had often been dealt a bad hand in the USA, often being pushed around and made fun of, and that hostility was often stoked by politicians, who accused them (along with other migrant groups) of living ten to a room and undercutting the wages of other Americans. She explained some of the complexity of American society by noting that moves for positive discrimination for African-Americans at an elite school had been resisted by Chinese-American groups who feared it would undermine the institutions academic reputation, and who had, in turn, faced hostility and abuse from African-American groups. Griffin, referencing a recent article in Tribune, pointed out that in the early part of the pandemic there had been an upsurge in self-organising local groups providing support in the UK, but this had rapidly petered out. He wondered if New York had experienced a similar pattern. Torres did not feel that New York had experienced an upsurge in support groups, although she speculated that some church groups, particularly in Slavic and Irish districts had taken action. She felt that a renewed religiosity in some, (people began saying ‘God bless you’ in greeting more commonly), had not lead to greater humanitarianism and was most probably due to the immanent possibility of death. Sadly, she felt that in the impoverished, oppressed and fractured BAME communities of New York, under threats of evictions by landlords, fears of destitution before the first welfare checks were issued, and fear of each other, had led to the opposite of mutual support, with a huge surge in gun violence, the robbing of stores and other people – that under the additional stress many had simply ‘lost it’.

New member, Dr Phil Cohen, argued that one of the key questions raised by the pandemic was who do you trust? He noted that with normal social networks being truncated under lockdown in the UK, the British public had been subject to top-down measures directed from the centre. He noted that it appeared that Cuomo in New York had been initially feted for his responses to the pandemic and queried what the comparative response of the British people had been. With the rise of digital and telephone access to medical services he queried the impact on the doctor-patient relationship. Torres argued that New Yorkers were markedly mistrustful in general, not just of politicians but of each other. She pointed out that the most likely response to someone saying ‘Hi’ to a New Yorker, would not be “Hi”, but ‘Why are you saying ‘Hi to me?’ She pointed out that apart from among the elite, in America’s privatised medical system, there was no doctor-patient relationship. Faced with a lack of reliable medical information in the US, rumour mills grew up very fast and extra confusion was created by Trump’s advocacy of quack remedies such as Hydroxychloroquine and disinfectant. She argued that the administration had made very little effort to educate minority communities and she had been forced to develop her own networks of doctors speaking to the BAME community on Instagram.

Kendall, describing lockdown as constituting a ‘huge societal experiment’ noted his own reluctance to accept any ‘new normal’ that was the same as the ‘old normal’ and speculated about the impetus for a radical re-structuring, noting that the massive political upheaval that had occurred in the US (the overthrow of Trump, the BLM movement and Biden’s new policy direction). Griffin noted with alarm the Wall Street Journal’s account of the economic impact on New York, with over half a million job losses and a return to pre-pandemic employment levels expected to be achieved only in 2025, tourism decimated and office occupancy down 84%. He also referenced Mark Fisher’s views as expressed at Warwick University’s ‘Virtual Futures’ conference that in the digital age ‘the office is with you all the time’ and that the physical office building is no longer necessary. He also ironically pointed out that the aims of ‘little Englanders’ to separate from the continent had been accidentally achieved by the vaccination of 50% of the population and an unvaccinated and hostile EU they would no longer be able to visit. Dr Cohen was both more and less hopeful, concerned about the possible negative consequences of greater centralisation as a result of covid, but noted that centralising measures taken during WW2 had led to the Beveridge Report and the founding of the welfare state. Torres was less pessimistic than the Wall Street Journal about tourism, noting that travel within the US was opening up despite the recent surge in covid cases, the numbers using airlines internally was up and speculated that people were drawn to visit the epicentre of the crisis. David Christie noted that such a phenomenon had occurred after 9/11 with the site of the fallen twin-towers becoming a pilgrimage destination. Torres was also bullish about the city’s recovery, suggesting that New Yorkers’ individualism and libertarian instincts had meant that the city only briefly went quiet, with the police regularly breaking up parties of 400 even when the virus was raging in the city. The same attitude, she argued, was evident in the mayor’s call for everyone to be back in the office by May, and a common view that if you hadn’t had the vaccine and caught covid that was ‘your problem’. She suggested that this attitude would be used by employers as a bullying tactic to force people to get vaccinated in order to keep their jobs. Torres was both hopeful and sceptical about the possibilities for radical change. She felt that in the most important issue of all, the ending racial injustice, the likely outcome was tokenism, with people of colour given prominent positions but no power, but was also hopeful that there was a real sense that people were yearning for social justice and greater equality and would not so easily be fooled by half-measures in the future.

There was so much more…join pandemic perspectives to have your say or set up your own group…