Staying Six Feet Away. NYC in the time of COVID-19.
Everything seems normal. The weather is beautiful, the trees are in full bloom, the sky that perfect chlorine pool blue. It’s spring in New York.
Except the streets are strangely quiet.
It’s been almost a month since the madness swept over the city. Every day, more places close. Another restaurant, another coffee shop, always with a variation of the same sign: “We are temporarily closed by monitoring the news around COVID-19 because your health and safety is our top priority.” One of these coffee shops had been packed with people just a few days earlier, the barista wearing neither a mask nor gloves as she made drinks and chatted with customers. I tell myself these places are closing out of fear or financial reasons, not because a staff member had gotten sick and now all of their customers are potentially infected.
There were two known cases of COVID-19 in New York on March 3rd. By March 28th, that number had skyrocketed to more than 52,000, accounting for nearly half of the 120,000+ cases in the US. Given how difficult it has been to actually get tested, this number is probably only a fraction of the real number of infected. And yet still there is an unevenness to the panic. Some people don gas masks and latex gloves, some frantically squirting hand sanitizer over their hands after touching a handrail, while others happily traipse around mask-free in flip-flops walking their dogs or chat arm-in-arm with friends.
My husband doesn’t want to go to the supermarket unless it’s absolutely necessary. I don’t blame him. The lines sometimes stretch from the register through the aisles back to the entrance. And still, few people wear masks (and that includes the staff). Social distancing doesn’t exist when it comes to panic buying. People take what they can, arms piled high because there aren’t enough baskets, and they pack in tight on the lines to make sure no one cuts (which they still do). To complicate things, the city announced a ban on plastic bags at the beginning of March, leading to confusion and panic for some people who had not come prepared with eco bags or could not carry all their goods in paper bags.
Breads, milk, and pasta restock at unexpected times; it’s like a lottery every time you enter a store. The shelves are often filled with brands and flavors I’ve never tried, but I don’t care at this point. You buy what you can and get out as quickly as possible. I reluctantly pick up a pack of organic “Peasant Bread,” one of the only products left and tell myself it’s a good time to chance to try something new.
I try not to think about how just a few days earlier, Trader Joe’s announced it was closing two of its stores (Union Square and Soho) after a staff member tested positive for COVID-19. These shops were packed, their shelves bought clean just a few weeks earlier. One closed shop just means more crowding into the few remaining ones.
Online shopping is gone. Everything is sold out “due to high demand.” Things I would have never expected to be sold out, are sold out. Mouthwash. Toddler snack bars. Frozen okra. Store brand bottled water. I tried to splurge on a small slide for my son so he won’t miss the playground, but even that was sold out. An old classmate posted on Facebook asking for help to find hydroxychloroquine (which she needs to treat her Lupus) after people bought out all the stock at her local pharmacies and online. This was less than 48 hours after Trump claimed the drug could treat/prevent coronavirus infection.
For a while, the only place I could find face masks were at a small Japanese supermarket in our neighborhood where they were selling for $20 for a pack of 20. My husband bought them without a second thought, but I can’t imagine asking someone who can barely pay the rent to pay $1 for a disposable mask (and continue doing so every day until the pandemic is finally under control). Safety, as it often is, has become a prohibitively expensive luxury for some. I think of the remaining laundromats packed with nervous people who still need to do their laundry. I think of all the people living in illicit makeshift dorms in Flushing or other areas of Queens, sometimes four to five strangers cramped into a one-bedroom apartment or a windowless basement. What are you supposed to do when even social distancing is something you can’t afford?
After we buy our groceries and hurdle out of the supermarket like people trying to escape a war zone, we pass a police car parked outside of a playground. “Do your part. Stay 6 feet apart” scrolls across a LED screen on the rear window like something from a dystopia movie. My son points at the car and gleefully says, “ピカピカパトカー！(flashing police car!)”
Having a toddler during a lockdown is both a fantastic distraction and an insanity-inducing challenge from which there is no escape. Like most parents of small children, I’d already cast away most of my social life. Going out for drinks or partying all night are foreign concepts that don’t sit well with my bad back and longterm sleep deprivation. I’m already an expert at avoiding human contact. I’m used to working from home. None of that is new. But I’m not used to being unable to find basic supplies online and panic-buying diapers. I’m not used to being unable to ask for any help. My son usually spends an hour or two playing with his grandparents each day, but with the fear of potentially giving them the disease (both are nearly 70 years old with preconditions), we’ve decided to avoid all contact. That also means watching an explosively energetic 23-month old all day, with few outdoor options. New books work well, then Legos, then anything else you can find in the house: that random objet/sticker you got at some convention, a plush doll someone gave you that you felt bad throwing out, an empty tissue box that doubles as a ferry for his cars. Your creativity and mental endurance are tested more than most job interviews. We act out stories with his cars and plush dolls — we pretend his brown bear doll is an exhibit from the Museum of Natural History, his Lego friends ride a double-decker bus to Times Square, and his best puppy friend visits a talking car restaurant on Neptune. I’ve had ten seconds to fashion a bulldozer out of an empty paper towel roll because he had a dream of a brown bulldozer train and was ready to go on a full-blown tantrum if he didn’t see another one. Keeping a strict routine helps maintain a vestige of sanity. He still asks when we can take the train, when he can go to the museums again, when he can visit the zoo and feed the ducks. I tell him everyone’s sick and sleeping, because that’s the only way to convince him why we can’t go.
Restaurants have gone on fire sales. A nice Italian restaurant where pasta averages $20 a plate is now offering “family sets” for as low as $35, which includes pasta, appetizers (including fresh-made burrata), a side, and chocolate cake for four people. A sushi restaurant which usually imports all its fish from Tokyo’s Tsukiji Market is now selling all rolls and sushi at 40% off. Our favorite Thai restaurant, which has always been focused on take-out, was thrilled by the extra business at first, but even they’ve started struggling over the past two weeks with growing price competition and more people starting to cook for themselves. With all the sudden free time, people have turned to Netflix, Nintendo Switch (namely Animal Crossing), home-cooking, and petty bickering as new frontiers for time-killing.
We stop by a Japanese restaurant and try to order an okonomiyaki and fried chicken bowl for lunch. The woman at the register smiles uncomfortably and tells us the okonomiyaki chef is on temporary leave due to “issues with coronavirus.” I don’t know if this is referring to a fear of coming to work or that she tested positive. All I can think is “we just ordered okonomiyaki from here two days ago.” Huh. What can you do? Everything is a waiting game now. The hospitals are overflowing with patients, people are dying as they wait for a bed, bodies are being packed into trucks, but the waiting can only get worse. Just the other day, thirteen people died in a single day at Elmhurst Hospital Center, the same hospital my mom regularly goes to for her diabetes check-ups. And yet still I see friends gather on the streets, people eating together in parks enjoying the warm spring weather. I think about the Brooklyn bar that still let people drink and gamble inside until they were finally arrested, the couple that still tried to hold their 70+ person wedding in Brooklyn’s Marine Park just this past Monday, all the people calling all of this an overreaction. Is it just a blatant disregard for others or some type of invincibility complex people develop after years of unquestioned privilege?
A pair of police officers chat outside a Peruvian restaurant as they wait for their take-out. My husband, still annoyed from the crowds in the supermarket (and apparently not having read enough police brutality articles), asks the officer to please put on the mask dangling from his belt. The officer looks at us dumbfounded and then laughs, “But it’s already kinda dirty. I don’t want to put it on.” The growing sound of ambulances around us doesn’t seem to bother him.
We stand six feet away from another family as we wait for the traffic light to change. A middle-aged man screams at a car as he jaywalks. Some things never change. Then he grumbles ‘fucking sick chinks’ as he passes us. Now some things do. We stare at the ground, hoping it just ends with a few words, knowing that it might not. I’ve lived more than twenty years in Queens — I proudly tell any friends visiting from overseas that it’s where all the Asians gather. Where there’s no greater density of different cultures in any other place in the world, and yet here we are. I’m scared to walk past a large group gathered outside a house as they toss around a football, not for fear of disease, but for fear that one of them might want to blow off some steam or boredom with a racist comment and that the rest of them will follow. Yet still, I consider myself one of the lucky ones. We haven’t been spat on or stabbed like one of the many growing number of stories I see on my newsfeed. Maybe there’s a higher hurdle to attacking a family with a toddler happily singing Wheels on the Bus in his stroller. At least that’s what I tell myself.
On the way home, I get a new message from a friend. I’ve been getting a lot more than usual now that everyone thinks the end of the world has descended on New York. Cat photos, wellness check-ins, article-sharing. Are you ok, how’s your son, holy hell are your parents insane and still commuting to work too, let’s do a virtual get-together, how do I get out of seeing my niece, did you see photos of the hipsters gathering at McCarren Park? We’re all doomed. Everyone’s scared and bored, just varying degrees of both.
I run into my aunt in front of the house. She still takes the subway to get to her nursing home job in Astoria. She’s wearing a face mask and latex gloves, and sprays Lysol over herself after entering the house. She smiles when she sees me, or at least I think she does since I can only see her eyes through the mask. I ask her how the subways are. She shakes her head. Few people wear masks, she says, usually only the Asians, still not enough people seem to care.
“I don’t want to die though,” she says, laughing the way people do when they don’t want horrible things to sound so real.
I stare at the Lysol can, wondering how my parents are, if they have enough supplies, if my mom’s been able to get refills for her meds, how her herniated back is doing without access to physical therapy, if my dad is properly taking his new Parkinson’s meds. I haven’t physically seen them in more than two weeks, even though we live in the same building. We FaceTime them when my son asks where his grandma is, and it feels strangely the same way as when I used to live in Tokyo, more than 6,000 miles away. I sometimes wave to them from the front gate, barely able to see them through the tinted windows. If one of them gets sick, I know that I will probably never see them again without a glass wall between us.
This is my third tragedy. I was a middle schooler in Manhattan when the planes struck the World Trade Center. I remember our teacher gathering us together and ask if we had any family members in the area, if we had a place to stay overnight. I’d listened to friends from Stuyvesant, a school closer to lower Manhattan, speak of how they’d seen people jumping from the windows. On 3/11/11, I was making pasta in a student dormitory in Yokohama when all the electricity cut off after a magnitude 9.0 earthquake hit off the coast of Japan and the tsunamis swept in soon after. I remember the convenience stores selling supplies with flashlights and calculators and huddling together with all the other students in the lobby of our school, one of the TAs bringing in boxes of wine to share with everyone because alcohol was the only way to stay calm. And now we’re in the midst of a global upheaval unlike any other that my generation has seen. The speed of change on a micro and macro scale is unlike anything I’ve ever encountered. Laws in NYC (and other cities too) change so frequently and suddenly that shops are often left as if the owners had just packed up and fled from a massive incoming storm, not even having enough time to properly close. We’re left with a constant sense of unease as we anxiously refresh our newsfeeds, dreading/hopeful for what will come next. How will they describe this time in history books in the decades to come? How will the children remember these weeks/months. I’m not greedy enough to expect things to return to the way they were. But I am afraid of how much this will permanently change us. Unlike 3/11 where it felt like people had come together to heal, where everyone was a potential ally, COVID-19 has made everyone a potential enemy. We blame Asians; we blame elderly people; we blame anyone who coughs. This is the first time I’ve seen people so divided, so paranoid, and that includes post-9/11. And yet I can’t stop thinking about that glass wall, if there’s already one coming up between all of us. Will we ever really feel comfortable hugging or shaking hands with another person again?
For all of its chaos, COVID-19 is the loneliest tragedy I’ve ever seen.
