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Who’s getting sick now? Older people and those without jobs.
New York State has been shut down for six weeks. Social distancing has become the norm. Face masks are everywhere.
And yet more than 20,000 people a week in the state are still testing positive for the coronavirus. In the past week, more than 5,000 virus patients entered hospitals. Who are they?
Officials have surveyed hospitals to find out, and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said that he was surprised by the results he was reporting on Wednesday.
More than four in five patients were retired or unemployed. Only 17 percent were working.
“We were thinking that maybe we were going to find a higher percentage of essential employees who were getting sick because they were going to work, that these may be nurses, doctors, transit workers,” Mr. Cuomo said. “That’s not the case.”
Virus patients entering hospitals were primarily older: Nearly three in five were over 60, and around one in five entered the hospital from a nursing home or an assisted living facility, the survey found.
Other results of the three-day survey, which included 113 New York hospitals that had admitted a total of nearly 1,300 patients:
“That says they’re not working, they’re not traveling, they’re predominantly downstate, predominantly minority, predominantly older,” Mr. Cuomo said.
Mr. Cuomo reported on Wednesday that the virus had killed another 232 New Yorkers, the third straight day that the one-day death toll had hovered around 230.
The governor also announced that Eric Schmidt, a former chief executive of Google, would lead a commission to reimagine how New York delivers public services once the virus has been brought under control.
Nightly subway closings have begun.
The shutdown of New York City’s subway early Wednesday was the first in what will be a daily event: For the foreseeable future, as long as the pandemic is a threat, the system will stop running from 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. every night to give cleaners time to thoroughly disinfect trains, stations and equipment.
Groups of cleaners will board trains and homeless people who have been taking shelter on cars will be moved off and, the authorities say, persuaded to enter shelters and get checked for virus symptoms.
At the Stillwell Avenue station in Coney Island, Brooklyn, over a dozen police officers waited after midnight for trains to arrive. As one pulled in at 12:43 a.m., an announcement echoed to the 14 riders on board: “Last stop on arriving train. No passengers, please.”
Stephen Bell, 33, was one of several homeless riders approached by outreach officers and social workers. Mr. Bell said he had lost his job as an environmental researcher a week ago and soon afterward his home in Queens.
He agreed to be directed to a shelter.
“They were really polite about it,” he said. “It’s crazy, though.”
Mr. Bell said he had tested positive for Covid-19 three weeks ago.
Not all riders were as sanguine about the shutdown. Just before 1 a.m., one rider waiting for a train that she worried would not come shouted questions at transit workers and police officers about how to get home to her 1-year-old son.
“We’re stranded. We got nowhere to go,” said the rider, Janera Roper, who works as a security guard at a Verizon store in Coney Island and lives in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. “How am I going to go home? I got to go home to my child.”
At his Wednesday briefing, Mayor Bill de Blasio said that 139 of 252 homeless people that were approached by city workers as the shutdown commenced agreed to accept support.
“The initial snapshot is a powerful and positive one,” the mayor said.
The challenge is simply this: how to gather, and draw attention, while keeping a safe distance from one another and onlookers?
New York City police officers have broken up some protests, including one on Sunday in Manhattan, saying the demonstrators had violated social-distancing rules laid out in executive orders from the mayor and the governor.
Some civil rights lawyers say those rules are being used as an excuse to curtail free speech.
Similar issues have been raised with other recent protests across the country, many involving demonstrators who refuse to wear masks or to maintain social distancing.
New York City’s police commissioner, Dermot F. Shea, defended his officers’ actions, saying they had been enforcing executive orders intended to “keep people alive.”
“While we greatly, greatly respect the right of people to protest, there should not be protests taking place in the middle of a pandemic by gathering outside and putting people at risk,” he said on Monday.
Having worked for nearly 30 years at City Fresh Market in Bushwick, Brooklyn, perched on her stool at cash register No. 4, Cecilia Nibbs knew customers by the things they bought, keeping a mental list of their spending habits, much like taking stock of the store’s inventory.
In March, customers started disappearing. They had died, other residents told her. The news got grimmer: They had fallen victim to a new and incurable disease.
“People came to tell me: ‘Oh Ceci, remember that guy? He died,’” Ms. Nibbs said. “‘Oh Ceci, remember that one? He died.’”
Their deaths were ominous early signs of the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic.
Suddenly, going to work felt like walking into a war zone where the enemy was invisible and could be carried by any person whose groceries she packed and into whose hands she placed change.
What used to be a mundane job became fraught with anxiety, nearly overnight.
“When you’re working in the store, you interact with a lot of people. You don’t know which one is the sick one,” Ms. Nibbs, 58, said. “You don’t know which one is the good one.’’
“I tell you, it’s scary,” she added.
Supermarkets do not usually stand out as providers of essential services like hospitals, police precinct houses or fire stations do. But they have emerged as vital to the city, keeping New Yorkers fed and communities together. At the same time, they are places of danger for workers because of the waves of customers shuffling in and out.
At City Fresh — like at most grocery stores — workers’ rituals have changed in ways they never could have imagined.
There are the usual tasks — turning on cash registers, stocking the cereal aisle, setting up the cold cuts at the deli counter. But now they protect themselves behind plastic shields and cloth masks, slipping on gloves and carrying disinfectant wherever they go.
The order, by Judge Analisa Torres of Federal District Court in Manhattan, came in response to a lawsuit filed by Andrew Yang, the former Democratic presidential candidate.
Mr. Yang had sued the State Board of Elections over its decision in late April to cancel the contest, a move the board had said was driven by health and safety concerns and the fact that the results would not change the primary’s outcome.
The decision to cancel the primary drew an immediate backlash from the campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders, whose April decision to suspend his presidential made former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. the presumptive Democratic nominee.
A board official said late Tuesday that the board was “reviewing the decision and preparing an appeal.”
An Amazon worker on Staten Island died of virus complications.
An employee at an Amazon warehouse on Staten Island has died after contracting the coronavirus, the company said on Tuesday, weeks after the building was the scene of a protest over what workers said were inadequate safety precautions.
The unidentified employee, in his late 60s, was last at work at the warehouse on April 5, the company said. He was confirmed to have the virus six days later and had been in quarantine since then, the company said.
The Staten Island worker is at least the third Amazon employee who the company has confirmed died of complications of the virus. The others worked in California.
By early last month, workers at more than 50 Amazon warehouses in the United States had contracted the virus. It was unclear exactly how many workers overall had tested positive for the virus, gotten sick or died of it as of Tuesday.
It was also unclear whether the Staten Island worker or any other Amazon employees had contracted the virus on the job.
Amazon said that an unspecified number of other workers at the Staten Island warehouse had tested positive for the virus but that the company did not believe the cases were linked.
The Verge, which first reported the death of the Staten Island employee, said that at least 29 workers at the warehouse had become sick.
Health centers that serve the most vulnerable reel from the impact of the virus.
For Callen-Lorde Community Health Center, a federally funded public clinic network in Manhattan, and for its patients, times were already tough before the coronavirus hit.
The center serves some 20,000 people a year from four locations. One-quarter are H.I.V.-positive, and could be at greater risk of illness or death from Covid-19. Many deal with mental health and substance abuse issues or lack of housing. Other patients were shut out from traditional medical care because they lacked insurance, or self-exiled from a medical system that treated their transgender identities with confusion or scorn.
Callen-Lorde and other community health centers in New York are reeling from $2.5 billion in cuts proposed by Governor Cuomo’s Medicaid Redesign Team — part of a funding shift that predated the virus crisis.
Now, in New York City as around the country, community health centers — providers of last resort to “medically unserved” populations — are being strained like never before even as they try to ramp up service to serve their vulnerable clients during the outbreak.
Callen-Lorde received less than $600,000 from the federal stimulus bill, enough for one week of payroll. It never heard back about its initial loan application. Loans for Shake Shack and Ruth’s Chris Steak House, meanwhile, were approved.
As The New York Times follows the spread of the coronavirus across New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, we need your help. We want to talk to doctors, nurses, lab technicians, respiratory therapists, emergency services workers, nursing home managers — anyone who can share what’s happening in the region’s hospitals and other health care centers.
A reporter or editor may contact you. Your information will not be published without your consent.
Reporting was contributed by Jonah Engel Bromwich, Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura, Christina Goldbaum, Andy Newman, Sarah Maslin Nir, Azi Paybarah, Mattathias Schwartz, Nate Schweber and Matt Stevens.
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