Empty streets in New York City
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- New York City takes cover from the coronavirus. The “City that never sleeps” threatens a complete lockdown.
- In hardly any other city in the world is the endangered group of the elderly as socially active as here.
- Alexander Görlach lives in New York. He describes why the virus would be a particularly difficult challenge for the city, which has weathered terrorist attacks, snowstorms and cyclones.
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Until a few days ago everything was as usual: a city full of parties, in clubs and in private apartments. There was theater on Broadway, Times Square glowed ugly and New Yorkers avoided it, as always. Empty supermarket shelves could only be seen in news from Germany. The coronavirus was far away.
Then it happened quickly. In just three days everything has changed in New York, one of the liveliest cities in the world: the lights are out on Broadway and there is no more dancing in the clubs. Schools are being closed, universities are sending their students home.
Talk of the Town ist nun “social distancing”. The term specifies how people should meet each other in their narrow New York area in times of crisis: ideally not at all. Social distancing is an upscale expression for “getting out of your way”. Millions of people are supposed to avoid the virus in this almost archaic way as long as modern research and medicine have nothing to counter it.
But “social distancing” is a problem for New Yorkers if only because they love to stand in lines, in summer and winter. And if you have to for hours: in front of one of the city’s major museums, if admission is free, or in front of a new, trendy restaurant. Few places are like New York, where you can taste all the kitchens in the world in a very small space, immerse yourself in all trends and fashions, see every style of art and indulge in every sport. Everything here has a stage and a following.
Another special thing about New York is that elderly and old people are in the middle of the hustle and bustle here. The group most threatened by the coronavirus takes an intensive part in public and social life in New York. In Germany, when a pensioner with bow tie dances in the Berlin scene club Berghain, night magazines report about it. Nobody in the Big Apple would be worth a note of that. The over-70s dances in many of the city’s bars.
Woe to you when the subway closes
Everything social in New York is made possible by the subway, the subway that connects all people with all locations and all the long lines in front of them. The rumor has been circulating over and over again in the past few days that local public transport could be stopped. That would be the moment of the acid test.
New Yorkers are known for their resilience. For this they were admired after the attacks of September 11, 2001, also after Hurricane Sandy or numerous snowstorms. But a complete shutdown of the subway would demand a good deal of resilience from them. As hard as this incision is, experts say it will be necessary to protect the lives of thousands of people.
How New Yorkers will behave will become especially clear if there is a major outbreak of COVID-19 in Manhattan or one of the other parts of the city. At the moment, most of the cases are reported from New York State, not New York City itself. We were in New York State on Sunday morning 613 infected people reported, including 269 in New York City, in the total around 8.4 million live.
No trust in the currently most famous son in town
The city has no illusions about the skills of its currently most famous son, Donald Trump. The day after his address to the nation, in which the president announced, among other things, that flights from Europe will no longer be allowed to land in the US for thirty days, a friend of mine posted on Facebook how she was trying to get reliable information in New York City and get a test to find out whether her symptoms are flu or corona. No chance.
The astrophysicist Martin Rees, who set up the Center for Studies on Existential Risk at Cambridge University, told me years ago in an interviewthat one of the big challenges in the wake of a pandemic is not to overload the health system. Should the people who turn up in such a large number in the hospitals get the feeling that they cannot be taken care of, panic would break out and public order would collapse.
“Social distancing” also aims in New York to spread the virus infection over time so that hospitals have enough beds and equipment and not, as is feared in Italy, people over 80 years of age due to a lack of resources Have to send home and not be able to treat. There have been enough movies about the outbreak of a disease and the total lockdown of New York. The city has never been so close to this science fiction becoming a reality.
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