“Coronavirus has exposed New York’s two societies,” Jumaane Williams, the public advocate who acts as the official watchdog for New Yorkers, told the Guardian. “One society was able to run away to the Hamptons or work from home and have food delivered to their door; the other society was deemed ‘essential workers’ and made to go out to work with no protection...
We put people out there and said you got to go to work, but we didn’t give them protective gear or additional testing to keep them safe. It was almost as though these groups were expendable to keep the city moving,” Williams said. A tiger tested positive at Bronx Zoo. It generated plenty of headlines, but few media articles made the point that Williams highlighted. “A tiger tests positive – that’s good to know. If we have enough diagnostic test kits for tigers, shouldn’t we have enough for our own frontline humans?”
Different boroughs, even different neighborhoods within each borough, are experiencing coronavirus almost as though it were two different contagions. In wealthier white areas the residential streets are empty; parking spots that are fought over in normal times now stand vacant following an exodus to out-of-town weekend homes or Airbnbs.
In places like the Bronx – which is 84% black, Latino or mixed race – the sidewalks are still bustling with people making their way into work. There is still a rush hour. “We used to call them ‘service workers’,” Williams said. “Now they are ‘essential workers’ and we have left them to fend for themselves.”
People in the Bronx are dying at twice the rate of New Yorkers as a whole. Black and Latino New Yorkers are dying at double the rate of white and Asian New Yorkers
79% of New York’s frontline workers – nurses, subway staff, sanitation workers, van drivers, grocery cashiers – are African American or Latino. While those city dwellers who have the luxury to do so are in lockdown in their homes, these communities have no choice but to put themselves in harm’s way every day.
If you superimpose a map of where frontline workers live within New York over a map of the 76,876 confirmed cases in the city, the two are virtually identical. In Queens, the most intense concentration of Covid-19 infections are in precisely those neighborhoods with large numbers of essential workers.
One telling detail: at least 41 subway and bus workers have died from coronavirus. A diversity review by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) in 2016 found that 55% of its 72,000 employees were black or Latino, and 82% were male – which is also telling as more men than women are dying from the virus.
In the ER of the Jacobi medical center, Sean Petty sees the impact of New York’s two societies every day. “We have almost 100% people of color in our emergency room,” Petty said. Most of the adult Covid patients he cares for are also wrestling with underlying health conditions that make them far more vulnerable to the disease.
“Our patients are coming in with all of the comorbidities associated with poverty and racism – diabetes, asthma, hypertension. We have patients who are sicker and more likely to die because their lives have been conditioned by these chronic illnesses.”
When he looks out of the window of the staff room during shift breaks he sees the refrigerated truck lined up to receive the bodies of Covid victims – one of 80 parked outside hospitals around the city. “There is no good news story here,” he said. Petty said he has never felt as angry towards the US healthcare system and towards government – the Trump administration as well as city and state leaders – for failing to protect the city’s frontline workers. Through his union, the New York State Nurses Association, he has had to fight every step of the way to secure basic personal protective equipment (PPE) to keep him and his colleagues safe.
Uché Blackstock, an urgent care physician, has witnessed the gulf. When she goes to work at a site in an African American or Latino neighborhood she knows she will be inundated with patients with Covid-like symptoms. In higher-income white neighborhoods the demand for health services has actually declined since the start of the crisis, to the extent that several clinics in these areas have been closed.
“This pandemic is laying bare the inequities that have always existed in New York city,” she said. “We don’t invest in people, we don’t invest in neighborhoods, and this is what we get.”
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