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The New Yorker Radio Hour
A City at the Peak of Crisis
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Experts predicted that Wednesday, April 15th would be a peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City, its epicenter. On that day, a crew of New Yorker writers talked with people all over the city, in every circumstance and walk of life, to form a portrait of a city in crisis. A group-station manager for the subway talks about keeping the transit system running for those who can’t live without it; a respiratory therapist copes with break-time conversations about death and dying; a graduating class of medical students get up the courage to confront the worst crisis in generations; and a new mother talks about giving birth on a day marked by tragedy for so many families. The hour includes contributions from writers including William Finnegan, Helen Rosner, Jia Tolentino, Kelefa Sanneh, and Adam Gopnik, who says, “One never knows whether to applaud the human insistence on continuing with some form of normal life, or look aghast at the human insistence on continuing with some form of ...
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Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I don't even know if this thing is working. Well, I guess it is. Seems to be showing my voice there. Yeah. So it's really quiet and it is 5:38am A guy rides his bicycle down here and is at a bench and is doing some kind of leg exercises, and he's the only human around on the boardwalk besides me. Ian Fraser was out before dawn recently on Brighton Beach. He watched the sunrise over the Atlantic Ocean. It was April 15, 2020. As of that morning, the New York City Health Department reported more than 110,000 people diagnosed with COVID 19 and nearly 7,000 dead. The actual number may be much higher. We're in an epicenter of a disease. The reason that this is an epicenter is that nature made this as a perfect place for things to come together. I mean, the way the salt water and the fresh water combine, the way, you know, the sound and New York harbor and the Hudson river coming in, and then these islands, this archipelago, and it's just such a perfect combination. I really feel like you just see God here because you see massive things happen. That's, I think Rockaway Point, and that is Sandy Hook. And those two points funneled the surge during the hurricane, during Sandy, and it just sent water, like, just blasting over to Staten Island. I mean, it just, it's. It's like God just saying, pay attention, you know, like, here's a revelation of what the future is going to be like. You're going to get slapped upside the head by nature like you've never seen. The day that was dawning, April 15th was a day that experts had predicted the pandemic would be at its height in New York, or I guess you could say its worst. There were refrigerated trucks parked near hospitals to handle the bodies. And yet the city persevered with a particular kind of resolve that it's always had. I came from a small town, and I would have friends visit me and. And they would say, you know, oh, God, I was so scared on the subway. You know, I thought everybody was going to mug me. And I say to them, if you're in a reasonably full subway car, you can be reasonably sure that there are a couple people in that car who could save your life if you fell down with a heart attack. There are people that could do cpr. There's probably doctors, you know, there's nurses. The resources of the people. You know, it just makes us all New York City patriots. So today on the New Yorker Radio Hour, our entire program Tells the story of one day in the city, the epicenter of the pandemic at its apex. Now it's really quite light. The sun has been up for three minutes and you would have no idea where I think it's like, right. I think it's over in there. Not long after sunrise, Jermaine Jackson, a group station manager for the subway system, was, was heading to work. William Finnegan called her a while later. Hello? Yeah, I can hear you. I can hear you now. How you doing? Jermaine Jackson is a group station manager on NYC Transit, the subway system. She's responsible for 13 stations in Midtown, SoHo on the lower east side. I'm actually, after I get off the phone with you, I'm going to head out and meet up with the contractor I spoke to you about yesterday. They're cleaning out some rooms for me at Delancey Attics Complex. I'll be delivering supplies, some ppe, masks and gloves, hand sanitizer. You know, I'll carry that in a little trolley and I'll usually drop it off to the agent. It's amazing to me that you guys are, that you are going forward with, you know, renovations, cleaning out rooms that you want to do something with while all this is going on. You're just carrying on. Yeah, I mean it's, it's, I won't say it's business as usual, but you know, we still have responsibilities and we are handling everything. But you know, I'm not going to let Covid beat me. Jermaine lives in queens and her 81 year old mother lives with her. Said she's just on lockdown. She hasn't been allowed out of the house since the beginning of March and they won't even let her go out and collect the mail. They, they collect the mail and they wipe it down. Jermaine says that while she's been lucky that she nonetheless recognizes that she's the hazard. I didn't see my mom this morning because I leave so early to head out. I catch the 6:15 train, so about 5:45, 5:50 I'm going. She's asleep. But I usually set up stuff for her the night before. What she should eat. When I come home, I always take her temperature to check to see how she's doing with my mask on. After I wash my hands and everything and then of prepare myself and take a shower, I do the steaming of my lungs to just kind of like clear away the outside world, if you will. Oh, that's in the bathroom. You steam up the room. No I actually do it in the kitchen. I boil water, lemon peel, garlic, and salt and stuff like that. And I just inhale and just kind of really work the lungs and kind of clear out my system. So I went down on the subway on Wednesday, first time in a few weeks, ever since it's become, you know, essential workers only. And I went into 34th Street, Herald Square station, huge station, and it was pretty much deserted. I mean, they're supposed to only see essential workers. But she did say there actually another group that is still taking the subway, which is the elderly. You know, I really have a soft heart for them. I'm going to tell you, they're still out there. And I look at them and they have on their masks. But you got to remember, you know, people that live in Manhattan, the city, these are where my stations are at. They don't drive. They rely on public transportation. So when they're out there, they're going to a doctor's appointment. You still have cancer patients, you still have people that's on dialysis. They may not can afford a Uber or a yellow taxi, so they have to come into the station. And when I look at them, I do look at them with empathic eye because I think of my mom. I watch them as if they're my own parents. And once I see them, they don't even sometimes see me. I just make sure they get on the train and they're okay. And then I'll walk on. I'll keep my inspection going or something like that. So, wow, it's a whole world down there. How many people are on board right now? Is it just you and the. And the mate or what's, what's, what's your situation? No, you have a mate. You have a captain, a mate, an engineer, deckhand. Okay. Across New York Harbor, Jack Benton is starting his workday with a call from our writer, Burkhard Bilger. Tugboats like Jack Benton's are absolutely crucial in the harbor. The big container ships can't make it to Doc without them. So what's it like? I mean, right now? Are you guys practicing social distancing on board the tug? How are you guys dealing with this thing we're living on here? No different than, I don't know, if you have a wife and kids. Yeah. So it's no different than you at your house. How much did you and your wife. Social distance. Yeah, right, right, right. And mainly what we're doing is we're making sure everything stays clean, wiped down, especially all your high touch areas. Sinks Toilet handles, showers. Believe it or not, the. The control units up here that you steer, we're basically not leaving the vessel. We don't even go to the store to grocery shop. Our company, I'll give them that, they've really went out of their way. They have a ship handler that's delivering the groceries. And then as far as the vessels go, they don't want our crew over on another vessel. Right. Now, when you're in harbor, do you usually. Do you have an apartment you go to and spend the night, or do you always stay on the boat for. No, we live on the boat. Yeah, we're on the bus 24 hours a day. And that's true whether you have the disease, the virus or not? That's correct. Yes. We were social distancing before it was cool and quarantining. Right, right. Yeah, actually, it's true. We've been practicing quarantine. That's what me and my wife were talking about for years. How does it work with your wife? I assume she can't come on board. She's got it way worse than me right now. Does she? Well, I mean, you think about it. I'm here, she's working from home and homeschooling three kids. So I got it pretty easy. Yeah, she. That's what I said. My wife told me last week, by the time I got home, we were definitely going to be at least one child short. And I told her, I said, honey, I said, don't do that. I said, tax write off. Remember? That's the whole reason we had them. I mean, the other thing about quarantine, I think for most people is they're just not used to being. Even if they love their family, they're not used to being cooped up with them for that long. You know, it's funny you brought that up because I seen a thing on Facebook that said all the divorce lawyers are just sitting at home waiting for the quarantine to be over. Well, I mean, for one, you have to be around people that you kind of have common interest in. And for me, I prefer happier people. Yeah. It's funny, misery seems to spread much faster than happiness. So if you get one guy that's like always glass half empty, if you're around somebody like that, it's very. It's much harder to bring them up than it is to bring you down. Right, right. Most people that are like that, they don't make it out here. Right, right. They usually leave on their own. Has there any be change in your. In the kind of stuff you're hauling, or has a Covid affected that at all? Or is it just business as usual, going to pick up regular? It's still the same. Yeah. They're loaded with, you know, some of them, 12,000 containers. Right. There's no telling what is in them. You're about. I mean, you're almost as essential as it gets. Right. Because if you aren't helping those container ships in, everything grinds to a halt. Right. All the food deliveries, the equipment deliveries. And I agree with you. But I also know I'm perfectly safe right here. Right, right, right. I think there's a lot difference when you know, you're walking into hell. These nurses, doctors and stuff, those people know every day they're going into a building that people are positive with this. Right, right. You only think that you possibly could come into contact. Yeah. When you're out and about working, those people know. Jack Benton's talking here about people like Julie Eason. She's the director of respiratory therapy at the State University Hospital in Brooklyn, which is known as downstate. She oversees the technicians who run those absolutely crucial ventilators. You know, you try and watch them for signs of that. They've just had too much, you know, that exhaustion. Yeah. Everybody is tired, and you got to push people a little bit. But you also got to know when somebody's done too many days in a row. You know, you have your little group that you kind of spend a little time with to shake off the day or whatever. Where would you go? Even cafeteria is pretty much shut down. In fact, if you walk through there, it's filled with beds. Okay. The just in case beds. Okay. So we were sitting in the supervisor's office, and there were four of us, I think, in there. And then somebody else stopped in. In the doorway, and it was just kind of this routine conversation of, oh, did you hear about, you know, who passed away last week? You know, did you hear about the guy? Oh, and his wife, too. And did you hear about this one? Oh, God, I hadn't heard about that one yet. And then one of the supervisors going, just stop. Just don't talk about this anymore. I don't want to know their names. It's hard. Yeah. And I know there's a lot more that I don't know about. Yeah. You know, I don't. You can't internalize all of them. Yeah. And still function. Yeah. And you know. You know that your staff have family members are worried about. Yeah. Have you had staff members who have come down with COVID you have? Yeah, I had to put another one out yesterday. Oh, really? It seems like the latest guidelines are you. If you're only out for eight days right now, if you're asymptomatic, you're coming to work. You know, we're kind of in this trench together. You know, when people are talking about the lack of toilet paper and the fact that they're bored in their house and those things, you know, I spent 15 minutes this morning just sitting on the edge of my bed going, God, I would give anything to be quarantined today. You know, I'm tired. We're all tired. Yeah. Yeah. None of us are going to be the same. In what ways, do you think? Well, hopefully some good ways. You know, maybe there'll be some things we'll take less for granted. You know, that. That people that you see in the hallway are gonna be there tomorrow. You know, a lot of the people we lost are at Downstate, aren't people that I was super close to, but I would see on a regular basis. Yeah. You know, hello, hi. How you doing in the hallway? And you just kind of expect that every day you're gonna see that person kind of have your routines, you know, it can. You can't take for granted that they're all going to be there tomorrow. Yeah. This hospital's been hit hard. Yeah. A lot of people who work here from the neighborhood. Yeah. Julie Eason is the director of respiratory therapy at SUNY Downstate Medical center in Brooklyn, and she spoke with Robert Baird. We'll continue in a moment with a city at the peak of crisis, a special episode of the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Good afternoon. So I like to start with just the facts. Just give me the facts. And that's what we do in this presentation. Here are the facts. No opinion, no filter. And then I'll give you an opinion. But I'll tell you what. Every day around noon, an often deeply depressing but essential thing happens on television. Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, sitting in Albany, presents the state's figures for the day of the COVID 19 pandemic. Total hospitalizations, click down. Still in the 18,000, but it clicked down. Good news. That's a fact. It is a fact that it's good news. Not my opinion. You see, flattening of the curve, all these new expressions that we never used before. Plateau, flattening, rounding. It's as if we're all tuning into a morbid lottery. Where we wait for today's numbers, and we all ask if this is our lucky day, the day we flatten the curve. Lives lost yesterday, 752, which is the painful news of our reality day after day, and they are in our thoughts and prayers. Our entire program today was recorded on April 15, around the peak of the crisis, as it played out in New York City, the epicenter. Hello? Hey, how are you doing? Just give me one second. Do you have an order? Russ and Daughters on Houston street is one of those stores that people call an institution. You go there for lox, whitefish, sturgeon, everything smoked and delicious. This is the biggest challenge right now. So we're open, but we're not letting customers in the store. And customers want to roll up and come in and shop, so we have to tell them they have to call and place an order. There was a couple. I said, oh, you need to call. She's like, oh, great, I'll call right now. I was like, okay, but we may not have it ready right now. And then her boyfriend or husband or whoever it was said, come on, let's go. Did she seem upset or like. No, she was fine. We're all stressed out and freaked out and. And sometimes you just want a sandwich, and if you can't get it, it's annoying. When Helen Rosner got on a video call with Josh Rustupper, the co owner, he was wearing a blue medical mask secured to a cap by elastic bands. Have you guys ever closed like this before? No. During Sandy, we were open. A friend of mine brought a generator back here and got our refrigerator reflect. Refrigerator's running. And the blackout. We were open as well. Yeah. So this is unprecedented. This is the first for us. So you can call us and pick up an order, but we're not letting anyone in. Okay. And give us some time. Okay. Well, it's. It's a small order. How you doing? All right. You know, we're hanging in. Hi, do you have an order? Yes, I have. What's the name? Ruffini is here to pick up. What's in your order? 2/4 pounds of fish, quarter pound of cream cheese, maybe a bagel or two. So like a small little order? Yeah, we're taking the orders we can. And then someone wanted a quarter pound of white fish salad. We're doing whatever we can. Yeah. Is that quarter pound of wafer salad means a lot to someone right now? Picking up. You have to call in an order. Yeah, but it might not be immediate. It might be a little while. But we're not letting any customers in. And we'll bring it out to you when it's ready, okay, sure. Josh's cousin, the co owner of Russ and Daughters, is Nikki Russ Federman. That day she had delivered 200 donated meals to the Brooklyn Hospital Center. So how did the delivery go? It went great. We were met by this guy Mohammed who's usually like involved in business affairs for the hospital, but there's no business, you know, so he's one of their porn people for receiving donations like ours. So he was really nice and they were very grateful. It's a weird contrast because it's such a beautiful day out, crystal like skies there. The hospital had like all these beautiful like cherry blossoms in bloom and tulips. And for a moment you could be like, what's the big deal? And then all you need to do is like look to your left and you would see two 18 wheeler tractor trailer, refrigerated trucks that, you know, makeshift morgues on the street. The first time I saw it was, was pretty shocking. But when was the first time you saw it? They popped up like, it's probably been like four days now. Did you know what they were when you saw them? Yeah, yeah, yeah. When we spin through. What's the deal? We caught an op at like 308. What's up? How you doing? How you doing? Tutu? Congratulations on, on growth and development. Mixtape. Thank you. I appreciate it. Is right now supposed to be a time when you were supposed to be on tour nationwide? I mean, how much did you have? Dates booked everywhere. What was this spring supposed to be like? I probably rolling out shows, interviews. Hell yeah. We gave back 20,000 in deposits. We just gave back 20,000 in deposits. Oh, shit. Tutu, GZ is a hip hop artist who's gotten pretty big these days and like musicians all over the country and the world. His spring tour is canceled. He's riding out the quarantine in Flatbush in Brooklyn where Kelefasane caught up with him. Man, I love that video you threw up on Instagram of 308. You got the can of Lysol that kind of blew matching your sweatshirt trying to stay Corona free right now. Can you get it out there or is there a Lysol drought in the streets? Yeah, it might be a Lysol enhanced sanitizer drought right now. So how do you think about your days? All you can do is just eat, sleep, get high. I don't even got a schedule, bro. Are you someone who's accustomed to being up till 2 3, 4 in the morning, 5, 6, 7, 8 in the morning. Then go to sleep, wake back up at 2, stay up again. It's crazy. So you're just waking up right now? Yeah, almost. I mean, it's funny, cause it was always such, you know, New York and I think all throughout hip hop, it was always such an insult to call someone like an Internet gangster, right? This idea that, you know, people that weren't out on the block that were just, you know, talking tough on the computer. Yeah, that's not something that's cool. But now everyone's on the computer. Do you have plans for what your next video is gonna be? You looking around to see what props you have in the apartment? Come on. We got Deluxe. We got Deluxe. Henny in the spot. Let me show y' all what's going. That's some Hennessy right there. Some elite brand. Some elite brand Hennessy. Yes, sir. You got enough bottles to last you about how long until Corona's over? Entertainers of every kind are trying to figure out what to do with themselves. You might have seen NBA and WNBA stars recently playing horse in their driveways on espn. That was a pandemic thrill. And at NBC Studios in Midtown, the famous 30 Rock studio 8G is dark. On any normal afternoon, Seth Meyers would be rehearsing his late night show with a live audience. But on April 15, his desk is just gathering dusk. There's no crew, no audience, and Seth's at home in his attic. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the attic crawl space. On Monday, we answered a question many viewers had been wondering about. What's behind that tiny little door back there when my kids escaped at the end of our closer look. Now, a lot of people online have said they were adorable and too cute for words, and I assure you, they are in nine second chunks. Hi, Seth. How are you? Good, how are you? Good, thanks. That's Michael Shulman. Can you just tell me how it feels to be writing and performing your show from your ad at Crawlspace? The performing part is just weird, you know, not ever having any feedback as far as whether or not a joke is working. Do you hear these deafening silences where, you know, laughter would normally be? I mean, how do you reassure yourself that any of this is working? I mean, you just. It really is like just a leap of faith. And mostly you just try to, you know, find happiness and the fact that you're getting to do it at all, as opposed to what we thought when this started that we weren't going to be able to do the show as soon as we left the studio. So to have a solution in any way, shape, or form, you're willing to make concessions, and the biggest one is no feedback. What has been the biggest logistical challenge for you? In the beginning? It was just figuring out how to do it. You know, there were some people on Twitter who immediately were like, oh, buddy, you got to get a lav mic. You sound terrible. You can't use the sound from an iPad. And I just was engaged with them and said, which one? And they would say, this one. And then I would buy it, and then I'd write it back and say, is it better? And they'd say, it is getting better. You have to move it higher up. And it was really great to sort of crowdsource the process. And then it was, you know, it was just basic things, like, you know, I downloaded a teleprompter app and figuring out, you know, how fast to set it so that I could read it. A natural speed that didn't seem like it was dragging or racing. You know, in the regular show in the studio, our cue card guy, Wally Fairston, who's been doing my cards since Weekend Update, he knows exactly my rhythms and when to slow down and when to speed up. And, you know, with an app, you obviously don't have that luxury. So it's just little things like that that, you know, with all things, repetition is made a little bit easier. Right. Some of you might be looking at me right now wondering, does Seth know he's already worn that shirt? And. Yeah, I know. I promise you, I know. And I do wish I had a deeper roster of shirts, but in my defense, no one warned me multiple times about the possibility of a pandemic, because I'm not the president. That's a segue. Is there anything kind of invasive about having America see your attic crawl space? Do you feel weird about that? I feel like a lot of people feel weird about Zoom calls now, and everyone's seeing their homes. I've come to terms with letting them see that corner. Or the other side of the room. Yeah, exactly. That's the thing. Just the other day, someone's like, hey, we should show the other side of the room. And I will admit, I'm not. There's nothing bad, but I'm happier with a smaller amount of my home on the camera. You know, it's funny. People always talk about when they're children, they, like, pretend to do their own talk show in their bedroom. And I just. I feel like you've gone full circle and now we're actually doing that. Yeah. It is also just. I can't get past that. I feel like a liar every time I tell my kids I'm going upstairs to do a show. It just. It seems dumber than anything they would ever try to get by me. Sporting events likely won't return until fall 2021 at the earliest in a Harvard study said yesterday some social distancing measures may be needed until 2022. So, yeah, I'm gonna have to rewatch every episode of island with the director's commentary on Seth Meyers talking with Michael Shulman. Throughout this hour, we've heard the New Yorker's writers documenting life in the city on April 15, a day at roughly the peak of the coronavirus pandemic. And that day, Adam Gopnik went outside and headed towards Central park, appropriately protected, of course. All right, I'm just in Central park on 89th and 5th Avenue, watching all the runners go around the reservoir. I'm speaking to you through a mask, of course, and I am somewhat indignant that not all of my fellow New Yorkers are masked as Governor Cuomo and common sense have asked them to be. It's the strangest thing, especially on the part of runners. They just don't feel they want to or they need to or something of that kind. It reflects a certain kind. Kind of what looks like arrogance on the part of a lot of people going around the reservoir. There is better social distancing going on now than there was say, a week ago when I would come out, but not adequate now. A lady just pulled her bandana up when she saw me looking at her reproachfully. My children accuse me regularly of being unduly coercive about these things, but back in the days when you could travel, we would go to Rome, and there was a tiny police corps right at the Trevi Fountain whose only job was to keep Americans from putting their feet in the water. And I loved their efficiency and their officiousness. And my children always claimed that my ideal job would be to be a member of the fountain police. So I feel like lecturing all of these. Non participant, non, excuse me. This is an innocent cough caused by the presence of this mask. But people are running around the reservoir but are not too much on top of one another. And one never knows, looking at these scenes these days, whether to applaud the human insistence on continuing with some version of normal life or look aghast at the human insistence on continuing with some form of normal life. That's the mystery of the pandemic. I'm coming to you from my kitchen in Oakbrook with a nice top on and my sweatpants on the bottom. Really sad that we're not together in person, but either way, I feel so grateful and humbled to be graduating with all of you guys. Our class is really full of the type of people that I would want to be my doctor or to be the doctor of my mom or my dad. We're celebrating in circumstances that were beyond our imagining a few weeks ago, and still we've held ourselves with grace, compassion, and courage to uplift and serve our communities. I will miss our class. Please remember that we will always be a family. A very brilliant attending once told me that tough times don't build character, they reveal character. The reason I wanted to study medicine is, I think, not different from many of you. I wanted to be a protector, someone whose job it was to shield others from harm. It's difficult. Some of us may be moving across the country. There is some small sense of sadness to this, but overall, a great sense of pride in what we. Congratulations. Today is our day. We're graduating in our pajamas. So glad to be here with all of you. Congratulations, first generation doctors. Salud. Congrats. Heck, yeah. We did it. Go get them, lions. Congrats. Y' all do good work. Congratulations, everyone. We're coming for you. Coronavirus. I love you guys. I wish I could thank everyone. That's the graduating class of the Columbia University Medical School on April 15 on a very big zoom call. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. We're doing something today that we've never done before. On April 15, our writers and photographers fanned out across New York, some in the real world, some virtually, to document life on a single day. You can find our team's writing and images in a multimedia presentation that we put together@newyorker.com and a version will appear in the print issue of the magazine as well. And it's our entire program today on the New Yorker Radio Hour. We didn't pick April 15th at random. That day was more or less the peak of the coronavirus pandemic. Here in what we call the epicenter of all cities, New York has been the hardest hit. But the pandemic and the attempt to stop it has taken its toll in all kinds of ways in every city, every town and rural place in this nation. We'll continue now, as evening fell in New York. Hey. Hey. What's up? How are ya? Good. Are you ready for me? I'm ready, yeah. Are you ready? Sarah Larson went over to her neighbor's apartment just before 7pm when people all over the city lean out their windows to cheer and clap or make some kind of noise for the hospital staff and all the city's essential workers. Their building is in the East Village, the old heart of the counterculture in New York. The clap was just starting in the East Village, and it was really sad. The first couple times we would see these videos on, on Instagram of, like, Italy and stuff and France, and it was. It was amazing. And even the Upper west and Upper east, we saw Instagram stories up there, and it was awesome. So Carly and I, kind of. Sarah's neighbors, John Fredericks and Carly Grahan, wanted to add something special to the cheering. So John got out his guitar and put his amplifier on the fire escape. It's seven o'. Clock. Oh, my God. Welcome, sir. Thank you so much, Sam. Clock, with its noise, its joyful cacophony, seems to bring the whole city together in a kind of primal scream. And after that, it gets quiet again. These downtown streets, normally packed into the late hours with people from all over the city, with tourists and college kids who have been partying just a little bit too hard, are now empty. The city that never sleeps seems to turn in a lot earlier than usual. A few blocks to the north, the New Yorker's Paige Williams is near Union Square. She's there to meet with members of a police department unit called the Mobile Crisis Outreach Team, and their goal is to connect the homeless population, particularly the chronic homeless, with city services like health care and mental health assessments. Lately, they've been out talking to as many people as they can find about COVID and about the dangers of the coronavirus and what they can do to protect themselves and other people. So we've been out probably for an hour and a half, maybe two hours, talking to various folks the team had met. These were two uniformed officers and a nurse who is detailed to their unit and their commander, Phyllis Byrne. Inspector Byrne was in the middle of his sentence when suddenly she stopped talking and started running. Wait for a minute. Across the street, she had seen a man who was on fire. What's happening there? I don't know. Want to go? Yeah. So everyone went running after her, and she had stopped a guy who had stuck a lit pipe in his pocket and whose coat had started burning. It's all right. I actually saw the flames coming out of the floor. Yeah, it must have Been the Bircher jacket to the left. I gotta go take this off now. Thanks. Yeah. So. So. Hang on a second. What's your name? Gish. Gish. Hi. How are you? I'm fine. How are you? So do you have a place to stay tonight? I don't. I'm actually homeless. You are? Okay. So are you in the subway? Normally, yeah. Okay. So would you be interested in us trying to find a place? All right. For now, I'm actually getting in touch with a few. With a few friends. And they're going to. They're going to help me get some. And sometimes they're able to help the person get to a place of shelter for the night. Sometimes they know that all they can do is help the person understand how to be safe. Well, how about this? I don't have. I have this. A mask. So you can know about coronavirus, right? Get some hand sanitizer, a couple of masks and some hand wipes. Yeah, that would be great. That was two masks. They gave him the masks. They gave him the hand sanitizer. And beyond that, all they could do was watch him go. We'll be around. And you have the numbers? I do have the number. And if I need anything, I'm going to ask their cops over there. I'm going to ask them for help. Okay. Just in case. Thank you so much. Take care. For ground transportation information and reservations, go to the ground transportation center in the arrivals hall. For taxis, proceed to the taxi stand just outside of the building where a uniformed taxi dispatcher will assist you. Terminal 4 is the busiest terminal ever, I call it. I say there isn't any chill pill for Terminal 4 now. We're chilling full time. How many do you get a day in total, you think? How many what? Passengers? You would have been one for the whole time day, but the maximum is going to be like, you could say 15, 20 per day, if they are that lucky. But most of the time, most of the day we spend doing absolutely nothing. I get boring. Bored, yeah, of course we do. But we get accustomed. Now, we are still happy that we here. We got a job still. That's what's important. But we hope that all of this is going to come to an end soon and civilization is going to come back. Kathy Ann McKenzie, a taxi dispatcher at Kennedy Airport, talking with Zach Helfand. When Laura Colby shows up for her hospital shift, she's given a list of watchers, people she needs to watch. She's an internist, and the watchers are patients at risk of death on a Recent night, all of those patients had COVID 19. Dr. Colby's job is to save their lives, but she spoke with Rachel Leviev about how to help those patients who are just not going to make it. How do you kind of facilitate their goodbyes or like, in what way has that been altered? Yeah, I think one of the greatest fears among patients who come into the hospital really anywhere in America right now is dying alone, not having communication with family, feeling like they would be neglected or ignored by the medical system. Initially, I think things were very ad hoc. I think really lovely nurses and doctors and staff members of all kinds were using their own smartphones and other forms of technology to try to facilitate video chats and phone calls for patients and their families, and just trying to get them to see each other, speak with each other as much as they possibly could. One thing that's really tough about profound respiratory diseases is that there is this communication imbalance between the sick and the well. And so you can have loved ones on the other side of the camera kind of desperate to speak, but also to listen to their loved one, to hear the wisdom or love or whatever the last words of their loved one might be. And I think that's kind of one of the things that's lost often for patients who are hypoxic and out of breath and subject to coughing fit. You know, one of my closest friends is actually a palliative care doctor, and I feel like she uses the phrase all the time, like bearing witness. When we talk about bearing witness, like, what does it do for the receiver? I think at the most basic level, the most basic selfish level, it is comforting in the sense of a golden rule that we will all at some point be dying. We will all at some point lose the use of our senses and our ability to speak. And so I think it is incumbent on all of us to bear witness to each other's dying. Then the same grace will be extended to us when we are in our last moments. On April 15th in New York, according to the city's health department, three hundred and thirty five lives were lost from the coronavirus. And some lives, of course, began. Among them, Christopher John Cintron Jr. Born at 9:18pm what does he look like to you? Like, what is he like? What is he frigging perfect? He's got a full head of dark hair. Yeah, he's like dark gray eyes. I think they're going to be blue because me and my husband both have blue eyes. Yeah. And he's just such a good baby. Yeah, he's so good. He hardly cries. But I kind of got him spoiled. Christopher has come into a world that his parents no longer quite understand, that nobody alive really understands fully. But for Christopher, this catastrophe will be a thing that he learns about from family stories and history books. His mother, Lisa Cintron, talked to Gia Tolentino. There's something really particular about giving birth at a time like this, right where our thoughts are thinking about, I don't know, like, danger and, you know, and panic in the future seems so scary, but they have no immune systems. And it sucks because my family, we're very close, and nobody's going to be able to see him for months until this cleared. I have five beautiful nieces that have been FaceTimed. And they're all little, but they're so excited. This is their first cousin. They waited so long for him. Yeah. Oh, yeah. So we've been FaceTiming, like, every day. Oh, wow. Yeah, I know. I don't know, for me personally, you know, I still am very scared of delivery. Like, it seems, like, painful and horrible and. But I think that in the midst of this crisis, I think so much of it has just narrowed my thinking to, like, literally the only thing I hope for is that I don't test positive while, like, when I go into the hospital. I know. So scary. Like, even being on the floor hearing like, that there are some mom that had tested positive. One of the nurses asked if I wanted to put the baby in the nursery. And my first question was, were there any babies that, you know, their mom tested positive? And they said, no, no, they wouldn't be in the nursery. And then I felt okay sending him, but at that rate, I was ready to just be even more sleep deprived and just keep him in here for safety. Yeah, right, Right. But he was delivered at the peak of the crisis in New York City, which is the peak of the global, you know, outbreak. Like, what. What do you think that you'll be telling him that he was a miracle in all of it? Yeah. I mean, look. Look at how much sadness and heartbreak people going through losing their loved ones, and I get to bring this little guy into the world. Yeah. Miracle. Yeah. Lisa Cintron speaking with the New Yorker's Gia Tolentino. This hour, we've been telling the story of New York City, the epicenter of this pandemic on April 15, a Wednesday. It was a very hard day. So many people in New York and all. All across the country got the phone call that nobody ever wants to get. Our writers who had been documenting the city all day, turned in to get some sleep before they had to file their stories in the morning. And on April 16, a new day began. David I'm David Remnick. Look for a version of this chronicle@newyorker.com and in the print magazine as well. I want to thank everyone at the New Yorker who participated and recorded their interviews for this special episode of the program. And thank you for joining us today. And if you think of it, let us know what you thought on Twitter New yorkerradio and please above all, be well and be safe. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Tune Yards with additional music by Alexis Cuadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Botin, Ave Carrillo, Rhiannon Corby Callalea, David Krasnow Goffen and Putubwele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses and Steven Valentino, with help from Alison McAdam, Meng Fei Chen and Emily Mann. Additional help from Crystal duhaim, Micah Hauser and Monica Racik. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.