Economic disparity has been killing many New Yorkers
all along—the coronavirus just brings it into
horrifying perspective.
By Peter Van
Buren
April 15, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" -
The talk in New York
is about when to return to normal. But that misses
the point; normal never really left, it just changed
clothes. We traded economic disparity expressed
through poverty for economic disparity expressed
through viral death. The real problem isn’t when
we’ll return to normal, it is that we will.
All
the energy that made this city more than livable,
made it desirable, is gone. It’s just a big, empty
place now, all the seams showing. The closed stores
still have St Patrick’s Day decorations. Time
stopped in March. I am a native New Yorker by birth,
seven years now returned. I don’t know how many
times we can all stand on the ledge and not jump.
9/11, the 2008 financial crisis, Super Storm Sandy,
and now this. Today the city feels more like the
gray of post-war East Germany than the white hot
panic of late WWII Berlin.
New
York state
has more corona
cases
than any other
country
in the world. About half of all U.S. deaths are here
in the broader New York area. Sure, there are other
hot pockets but while NYC counts the bodies in the
thousands there are some
states
still in single figures and most others in the
hundreds. The stars may soon again hold benefit
concerts for us, echoing
post-9/11’s
“ferocious tenderness of how desperately America
loves New York.” When the city talks in its sleep
what many remember most is the kindness people
showed toward one another that blue September,
little courtesies of holding doors and allowing
someone to cut the line, half smiles from total
strangers in a place where such vulnerability could
have made you prey just days earlier.
Not
with the virus. We snap at each other, enemies now,
each a potential carrier. This is a not a city which
lends itself to personal space without a flash of
aggressive eye contact. Walk without a mask and
someone will snap at you. Two guys hissing something
in Spanish at an Asian woman. Lines to enter the
food store with everyone watching like North Korean
border guards for sneaks. SNL and late night never
mocked Bush in the immediate 9/11 aftermath. If we
ever were One we are not now. Because we are for
certain not all in this together as Governor Andrew
Cuomo
said:
“Everyone is subject to this virus. I don’t care how
smart, how rich, how powerful you think you are.”
That
is not true. The virus is highly
concentrated
in the poorest Hispanic and black neighborhoods of
Queens and the Bronx. The viral death rate for
Hispanics is 22 people per 100,000; for blacks 20
per 100,000 while the rate for whites is 10 per
100,000. For whites even that is deceptive, given
the hot spots in the isolated
Hasidic Jewish
enclaves of Brooklyn versus the lack of white deaths
in high-income areas. Poorer people are more likely
to die at home than in a hospital, and so the
surge
in
at-home
deaths, most never tested, suggests the death rate
for the virus is being under-counted. Overall the
virus is
twice
as deadly for Hispanics and blacks than whites in
NYC.