FINAL WORD “
Other photos circulated of refrigerated trucks outside a number of hospitals around the city. With hospital intensive care units overrun already with COVID-19 patients, the expectation is that morgue capacity will also soon reach its limit. The trucks are a stopgap measure to preserve the dead. Hopefully, the circumstances won’t become so desperate as what we saw in Spain, where an ice skating rink was converted into a mass morgue. A Navy hospital ship, the USNS Comfort, sailed within clear view of my window. There were helicopters above and a small armada of tugboats and support craft around the impressive vessel. Part of me immediately felt a surge of confidence, knowing that the finest military in the world was called into action to help in the war against this virus.
Restaurants were supposed to stay open for takeout and delivery, but few have. Some of the more sophisticated establishments have signs near their entrance claiming the closure is “out of concern for the health of our customers.” Smaller, mom-and-pop places have hand-drawn signs that talk of “staying safe now and coming back together soon!” Nobody knows if they will ever open their doors again... or if they do, when that will be. Out in the street, almost everyone now seems to be taking some visible measures for self- protection from the virus. Masks and rubber gloves have been common for weeks. Now, Out in the street, almost everyone now seems to be taking some visible measures for self-protection from the virus. they are ubiquitous. Given the recent change in guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) – masks, it turns out, do work – there are now many New Yorkers walking around with homemade masks, bandanas, or scarves pulled over their mouths to give some protection against the coronavirus plague. A friend recently sent me photos taken
from his window of a field hospital as it was being built in Central Park.
Large white tents were erected on fields that I had played baseball and soccer on for many years as a kid. Now, they were covered in the overflow capacity facilities of Mount Sinai hospital on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, all in preparation for a flood of the gravely ill.
But it also reinforced the gravity of the situation around me... A floating military hospital with a thousand- bed capacity is now necessary in the largest city in the United States precisely because
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April 2020
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