In recent weeks, calls to 212-684-3264, the phone number for the National Alliance on Mental Illness in New York, have skyrocketed by 60 percent, where a legion of psychologists and volunteers serve thousands of New Yorkers every day for help dealing with stress and anxiety.
The fears and questions are almost always the same: I don’t want to leave the house, but I can’t stand being locked up; I can’t go to work, but I don’t know how to pay the rent; I think I already have the coronavirus, but I don’t dare to go to the hospital; Is everything that is happening real? Are there so many corpses? …
A small islet in the Long Island Sound, off the beach of Orchard Beach in it Bronx, has been placed on the maps again because it is the site chosen to bury the victims of the covid-19 who have not been claimed by their families for two weeks. “Before 25 bodies were buried per week, now there are 25 per day,” revealed this week the spokesman for the City Council, Freddi Goldstein. A spooky place that New York knows well why it has been the final destination of the nameless for 150 years, or of those whose families cannot afford a funeral.
A satellite image shows New York’s Orchard Beach, City Island and Hart Island, while New York City officials have hired contract workers to bury the dead in the Hart Island potters field amid coronavirus disease. (Reuters).
“The images of New Yorkers being buried on Hart Island are devastating, but we want everyone to know what’s going on “the mayor lamented Bill de Blasio from the Billie Jean King Center, where the United States Tennis Open is held every year, now converted into a field hospital with 470 beds to transfer patients from the two public hospitals in Queens, saturated like the others that are scattered around the city.
The one that impacts the most is the one installed in one of the Central Park meadows, in front of an overflowing Mount Sinai, which It hurts even more because it is one of the best hospitals in the world and it does not have the capacity to house so many patients. Almost a dozen makeshift hospitals in different parts of the New York geography, such as the imposing neo-Gothic cathedral of San Juan el Divino or the modern glass building that houses the Javits Convention Center, along the Hudson River, just 15 blocks south of the pier 90, where the hospital ship USNS Comfort is docked.
A field hospital, equipped with a respiratory unit in New York’s Central Park across from Mount Sinai Hospital (AP).
When a month has passed since the WHO declared the coronavirus a pandemic, The United States has already become the country with the highest death toll in the world, more than 19,600, the first to count more than 2 thousand deaths in a single day and in exceed half a million infections.
The state of New York concentrates more than 160 thousand positives and this weekend reached 7 thousand deaths, the vast majority in the Big Apple, a city that has become, once again, Ground Zero of a tragedy that this time, unlike September 11, 2001, is not national but planetary.
Since the first case was announced on March 1, the city is about to double the deaths it suffered almost two decades ago after the terrorist blow of 9/11. Now the authorities are juggling to, on the one hand, make the population aware of the seriousness of the situation. “We all know someone who is suffering from this and more and more of us know of someone who has died,” according to De Blasio. And on the other, send some hope to the citizens. “We are cautiously optimistic,” says the governor Andrew Cuomo, who acknowledged yesterday that “we all want to get back to normal”, but the worst thing now would be to take a wrong step “guided by emotions.”
New York hides in its five counties a world of small cities that each face the ravages of the coronavirus in their own way. It is not the same to stay at home in the apartments of the Upper East Side, where foot traffic has declined at the same rate that food delivery orders have multiplied, that having to pass the quarantine confined in the beehives of Southridge, in Jackson Heights.
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