We’re a few weeks into the US coronavirus pandemic and the response has been mixed. Two weeks ago, the now famous Westchester lawyer tested positive for the virus, and since then his web of infection has spread enough to warrant a complete lockdown of his New Rochelle community. In New York City, companies have, for the most part, sent their employees home for the foreseeable future, doing what they can to limit any transfer that occurs throughout the workday in crowded offices. There have been countless ominous and opaque text messages floating around, implying that a city shutdown is imminent, but for the moment the subways are running, restaurants remain open and life seems to go on.
On the internet, there is a widespread push to get people inside, away from each other, and out of range of the virus. Many articles have been circulated, and a few really good ones (Medium, NYT) have forced phrases like “social-distancing” and “flattening the curve” into our daily vocabulary. If you’ve been away from social media for the last week, though I doubt you have, go online and see how many references to the above terms, as well as quarantining, you find in your friends’ posts. It’s astounding. Everywhere you look, people are posting about one of the following things:
- The importance of social-distancing in protecting others. Reminding us that for many young people, our efforts to stay healthy are not for ourselves but for the more vulnerable people we could infect.
- The importance of flattening the curve of infections. Our hospital system has limited capacity to treat patients, and so everything we can do to reduce the spread of disease will help keep us from overwhelming our medical infrastructure and will ensure any patients who need care can receive it.
- The potential implications of failing to social-distance and flatten the curve. Hundreds of thousands, millions even, will die. The charts all seem to show, as many of my friends have pointed out, that we’ll see an astronomical increase in infections in the next few weeks if we fail to act now, and that will lead to an unimaginable amount of deaths.
I’ll admit, I’m exhausted reading the same message over and over again. I roll my eyes with each subsequent Instagram story espousing the importance of staying away from one another and of acting selflessly. In such uncertain times it’s frustrating that everyone immediately takes to the internet to scold others for their lack of compassion and to espouse their own. Isn’t this all just a bunch of virtue-signaling?
It very well might be. I’m sure that some of us see these statuses from friends and decide we need to highlight all we’re doing to combat the virus as well. But even so, the information has been undeniably effective in getting us all to think about the impact of our actions in the context of the virus. My group text with college friends has spent the last couple of days debating the true danger of corona, when it typically focuses on sports betting and making fun of one another. Every single person, even those living under rocks, knows that the elderly and those in poor health are most at risk. Everyone seems to understand how quickly this thing can accelerate and that tangible choices can be made that help slow that acceleration. So despite all the woke-ness online, we are doing a good job to spread information and awareness that should help save lives.
Unfortunately, if coronavirus, and particularly the virus in this city, gets as bad as many are predicting it might, I fear we will look back on the weekend of March 14th as the place where we all went horribly wrong. Right at the height of our corona-induced anxiety, when we were ready to make the tough decision to quarantine ourselves, when supermarket shelves were wiped clean and employees were carting off their monitors for use at home, we received the blessing of a beautiful, sunny and relatively warm spring weekend and forgot everything we had been telling ourselves about limiting the spread of infection and protecting the susceptible ones around us. We flocked to bars Friday afternoon, packed in next to each other like little coronavirus humidifiers, to relax after one hell of a stressful and uncertain week at work. We threw on green t-shirts and beads and downed shots of St. Patty’s day Jameson like it was Lysol. We went out for brunch, played pickup soccer, and went clothing shopping. We treated those 72 hours like 2019, when the only thing on our minds was what to do with last week’s stock market gains.
I have been a coronavirus denier since the first infection counts popped up online in early 2020. By denier I mean that I did not believe the impact of the virus to be as serious as the media, and certain medical professionals, were making it out to be. I still am hopeful that we will respond as required to this test, that the infections will slow down, deaths will become less frequent, and hospital systems will not be overwhelmed. I still have faith that humanity can respond as a collective, that we can be empathetic towards those for whom the virus will be much more serious, but that faith was shaken a bit this weekend. What I saw (and in many ways participated in, walking around my Brooklyn neighborhood like I was) was a city that doesn’t actually take the virus seriously. Maybe it takes the selfish pursuits seriously, like having enough toilet paper in case of a shortage, or finally having a reason to avoid the disgusting subway, but if the social scene is any indication, New Yorkers don’t believe, or at the very least don’t want to believe, that the virus is here and that it is every bit as deadly in their city as it is in Wuhan, and Milan.
I’m writing this on March 15th having changed my tone on the virus response: the city needs to act. We don’t have the foresight as individuals to respond to this crisis with the severity that is needed. We can’t rely on employers sending us home, and Post articles sending us to the grocery store, in order to stamp this thing out. We need an exaggerated response to snuff out an exaggerated illness.
I believe this response is on its way – that after a hundred or so more infections, a handful more deaths, city officials will shut down the subways, close down businesses, and we all will be forced into a true quarantine, not just one tailor made for social media. Until then, we should all, myself included, do a bit more to show respect for what is now very clearly a global pandemic. None of us want to look back on our immature behavior in these critical weeks and see it for what it really was: deadly.