The strange U.S. Covid clock stops
Desolation, even at the ‘end.’
Journalism is too opaque and misunderstood. Chills gives a behind-the-scenes look at how dangerous investigative journalism gets made.
It was night. There was no noise but that of a soft wind. Traffic lights changed colors for no reason above the spindly shadows of branches. I stood in the middle of a Brooklyn street without fear of being hit by a car, because there were no cars.
Gone were the impatient horns, the laughter of late-night crowds, the rolling sounds of skateboards, the yelling of mad men. Left in their place was a kind of swallowing silence.
It was March 2020.
While the entire country was grappling with the new disease in our midst, in those first few months, we in New York City were struggling to understand how to live as our neighbors died at an unheard-of rate. The average number of coronavirus-related deaths per day (based on data for seven days) in the city on April 13, 2020, was 978, according to New York Times data. The average number of Covid-related deaths in the entire country on April 14, 2020, was 2,103. (The Times data skips certain days in this period, hence the one-day-apart comparison. I would soon go on to become deeply familiar with the ever-changing figures when I went to work on the Times’s live Covid coverage.)
So while everyone in the U.S. may have been scared, we in New York were watching up close what felt like the end of the world. Pair the extraordinary number of people dying with the soundtrack of siren wails day and night, and some of us who’d lived through 9/11 were experiencing PTSD.
Then we all began to know some of the dead.
A friend lost her father. Another lost his son. I lost a friend who lived halfway around the world. The list kept expanding, as did the horrifying pileup of bodies in refrigerated trucks on the streets, and the uncertain future of whether we would survive.
I keep pausing as I write because writing this down is hollowing me out. My brain has slowed and I feel an emptiness in my chest. Time has turned back to the unreliable clock of the past three years.
From March 2020 until now, it’s as if there has been an absence of time. Lost time. Frozen in some ways, yet unfathomably speeded up in others. Sometimes I marvel at my age because I don’t know how I got so old so quickly. And I find myself writing this across the country from my home, wondering whether I moved because of the desolation of these years.
Today, the U.S. Covid health emergency declaration ends. But grappling with what we’ve been through, at least for me, is just beginning.
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Thank you for sharing this. Seems we’re still learning what the generational ripple effects were from the 1918 “Kansas” flu. I sense the shared trauma this time is greater because we have much greater global awareness, and it’s possible the effects may be even greater over time.
You are not alone. I don’t live in New York but everything else is similar. Time is weird, sped up in some ways, and not moving in others. and the anxiety and fear are still there. I still keep a mask at the ready and will willingly put my arm out for all vaccines. Thank you for sharing your reality.