You can't go to a Knicks game. You can't even watch a Knicks game on TV, or an NCAA match, or a preseason baseball game. You can't take a book out of the New York Public Library, or go see a concert at Webster Hall, or check out a new exhibit at The Met, or see an author speak at The Strand. Nobody will be marching in the St. Patrick's Day Parade. Forget about getting tickets to see The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. And you may have missed your chance to immerse yourself in sickening marital dysfunction with Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Broadway, museums, libraries, concert venues, sports arenas, parades: these cultural institutions and events are the soul of the city, and they've all gone dark over the last 48 hours. The cancellations are as overwhelming in the city as they are nationwide. And as hard as it is in the short term, we should find a way to accept this as positive, because it means officials are taking the escalating threat of COVID-19 seriously. They're exercising an abundance of caution at a time when caution is truly the only thing we have control over.
This was an inevitability which Dr. Irwin Redlener, the director of Columbia University's National Center for Disaster Preparedness, saw coming: "As this pandemic expands and intrudes increasingly into our lives, I think there's going to be changes made that make us really potentially very uncomfortable," he told Gothamist this week. "But the fact of the matter is, there's some public health concerns that are going to override the economic downside of closing major events or museums, or whatever it might be. Public health is going to end up taking priority. So if there are things that need to be done to protect the broad general public health, I think that's what needs to happen."
There are still a lot of things about coronavirus that aren't clear—because of a lack of available testing, we don't really have an accurate count of how many people have been infected so far. We're still learning new information about how the virus lives on surfaces. We don't know how long the city will be essentially shut down, although Governor Andrew Cuomo cautioned people today, "It’s not going to be a return to normal next week. This is months, so prepare yourself."
We do know that there has only been one measure that's been effective against the coronavirus so far: extreme social distancing. Once China began canceling all public gatherings and asking citizens to self-quarantine, the number of new cases leveled off; now, at least according to official statistics, "every day brings more news of existing patients who are healed than of patients who are newly infected." This is an especially important strategy because slowing down the rate of an epidemic may be the only way to ensure the health care system doesn't become overwhelmed by an explosion in new cases. If we don't—if we ignore medical professionals and experts' opinions—then we'll end up something like Philadelphia during the Spanish flu.
And what choice do we really have? Just over the course of a few days, the attitudes of city and state leadership has radically changed. Mayor Bill de Blasio was adamantly against canceling the St. Patrick's Day as recently as Tuesday. Lawmakers are still struggling over whether or not to shut down schools. There's been so much confusing mixed messaging from all levels of government, it's understandable people have had a hard time wrapping their brains around just how dangerous a situation we're in—it was less than five days ago that President Donald Trump was saying he was "not concerned" about coronavirus. We've seen countless half-measures proposed by various groups, such as Broadway and movie theaters suggesting people should leave seats between one another, when we already know there is only one option.
As Vulture wrote, "The evidence suggests that the choice is not between a shutdown and no shutdown; it’s between shutting things down now, when the disease is still relatively rare in our area, or waiting until more people have died, the virus has propagated further, and the medical system starts to be overburdened."
And make no mistake: the dangers to our medical system are formidable. The Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins estimated in a report last month that America has a total of 160,000 ventilators available for patient care, with at least an additional 8,900 in the national stockpile. A planning study run by the CDC a decade ago estimated that if America were struck with a moderate pandemic like the 1957 influenza, the country would need more than 64,000 ventilators. If we were struck with a severe pandemic like the 1918 Spanish flu, we would need more than 740,000 ventilators. Thankfully, it doesn't seem as though coronavirus is quite as deadly as Spanish flu.
"I feel like the genie is out of the bottle—it is in the community," Dr. Robyn Gershon, Clinical Professor of Epidemiology at NYU's School of Global Public Health, told Gothamist. "There can be no doubt that it's in the community, but the good thing is 80% of the cases will be mild. So now we have to figure out how we're going to live with this in our midst."
Despite the fact that experts knew this was coming, Trump brushed aside entreaties by advisors to push for aggressive early testing for the virus which could have helped the country manage the outbreak better. The government's mistakes in creating and distributing the tests have handicapped our response. The nation was caught flatfooted by a growing pandemic, and now America lags behind just about every developed country in testing.
And yet, from a certain perspective, we can feel slightly more optimistic today than we could even a day ago. And that's because the city and state are starting to go in on full measures, and people are responding in kind. The federal government might be flailing, but private organizations and local officials are all-in now. And we're seeing that reflected in the newfound cautiousness with which New Yorkers are carrying themselves.
"The new buzz phrase is 'abundance of caution,'" explained Redlener. "I'm sure you've heard that. It's kind of the go-to phrase to explain why people are thinking about or enacting more severe restrictions and regulations. And it's hard to argue with it in almost all cases. Everybody involved in planning and response is thinking about how much abundance of caution is enough, and how much is more than we need."
Things are going to get worse—many more people will die, the economic and cultural impact of the virus could be devastating, people will likely lose jobs, kids will most likely be out of school for a long period—but that's because things were always going to get worse in a pandemic. The good news is that interactions are being limited—there is a good faith effort to contain the virus as much as possible now on every level.
There are other positive signs: the Mayo Clinic announced yesterday that it has developed a test to detect the virus that causes COVID-19. "This test should help ease some of the burden that is currently being felt at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and state public health laboratories," says William Morice II, M.D., Ph.D., president of Mayo Clinic Laboratories. The city will soon be able to process thousands of coronavirus tests daily, after the FDA gave emergency authorization for the tests to the Swiss company Roche.
Of course, these small steps in the right direction in the middle of a burning building don't do much to alleviate the anxiety, fear and pain coursing through the city. Anyone with an older relative or close friend with underlying health problems has a lot of uncertainty hovering over them right now. "It's very complicated and it's very emotional," said Redlener. "There are the practical considerations that have to do with people canceling events. Who would ever think, for example, that your wedding that you've been planning for a year might have to be canceled because of the prevalence of a virus in the community that you're going to?"
Redlener noted that Americans are already anxious to begin with, and now with social distancing, there are all these incredibly difficult decisions to make about how we responsibly, and ethically, conduct ourselves in our day-to-day lives. Those decisions are making us feel "even more disorganized and discombobulated about what's happening in country."
"Because normally, when a big disaster hits—even something like Hurricane Katrina or Superstorm Sandy a few years ago—it happens in a singular location. It's always 'somewhere else' for the most part. Now, there is no somewhere else for this outbreak. It's going to be everywhere. And once we start getting the right numbers for how many people are testing positive, I think we're going to find it the entire country is under the cloud, and being affected by coronavirus."
We don't know how things are going to go, and we don't know when we're going to be out of this crisis. We don't know whether anyone we love, or how many vulnerable people, will suffer because of it. But the sooner we accept the reality of the situation, as it seems officials and New Yorkers have finally done, the better. It sucks that you can't go to a play or concert for now, but you can still traverse this beautiful city and support local businesses, go to dinner, see a friend, and live your life—just as long as everybody does so with an abundance of caution.
