The coronavirus pandemic has earned the adjective “biblical” in its own right. And, as in the Bible, the great Babylon of our time, New York, passes through one of the most difficult moments in its history: the number of confirmed cases already exceeds 100,000 in the state and nearly 3,000 people have died. A test that is especially noticeable in the most humble neighborhoods of the city: where the virus has struck with more force, both in the health and in the pockets of its inhabitants.
“We’ve had a huge increase in activity,” Melony Samuels, president of The Campaign Against Hunger (TCAH), an NGO that has been providing food to those who need it most since 1998, told El Confidencial. “We usually serve food at 250 people per day. Right now we are trying to serve 4,500 people ”.
Samuels’ strategy had to adapt in haste. Before, they set up food distribution points. Now, given the physical distance required by the circumstances, they deliver food to homes, especially to the elderly. “We are aggressively fundraising, recruiting volunteers, looking for bags to put food in,” Samuels says. We have never seen anything like it. Not even during Hurricane Sandy.
The 2012 hurricane, which destroyed 70,000 homes in New York, has been recorded in the collective memory of the city, as the September 11 attacks During the previous decade: a challenge which required the joint mobilization of neighbors and authorities, and which helped NGOs to refine their instruments and operate in a more flexible manner.
New York, epicenter of the epidemic
“After Hurricane Sandy, we distributed emergency meals to 64,000 older New Yorkers who had been trapped in their homes across town,” recalls Beth Shapiro, executive director of Citymeals on Wheels, an NGO that feeds the children. The old people of New York. But Sandy only affected parts of town. Now each neighborhood is affected, New York, the country, the whole world ”, Add. “We have already distributed 200,000 meals and we will distribute 300,000 more in the coming days.”
Shapiro says that watching the news of the pandemic in China and then in Europe, Citymeals began to prepare in February “for what could happen”. They collected food and developed response plans. In recent days, they have doubled the warehouse staff and divided the volunteers into groups which alternate weekly. A way to better observe the symptoms if one of the delivery people gets sick. “It must also be said that, even with all this planning, no one could have imagined the scale and gravity of the emergency.
Slums are also particularly susceptible for volunteers and social workers, as they have the highest proportion of infections. The Queens Postal District, just south of La Guardia Airport, for example, has four times more sick people than Park Slope, the white and central part of Brooklyn where Mayor Bill de Blasio lives.
“We know that many families in Queens, because of their poverty, live together in tight spaces,” Dr Mitchell Katz, managing director of the public hospital system, told Fox News. “So even though we practice social distancing as a city, we have several families who live together in a very small apartment. So it is very easy to understand where many Covid transmissions are occurring. The most affected households in the city are those of ultra-Orthodox Jewish families, who have the highest number of children per capita and who have been the most reluctant to follow physical distancing recommendations.
Well-off households can also last longer in lockdown and order food from Amazon or FreshDirect: they need less exposure to the virus. Professional or corporate professions have also not been hit as hard as working-class jobs in hospitality, entertainment or retail – the first to collapse.
English is not spoken in Babylon
Claire Moodey and her partner, residents of Brooklyn’s Flatbush neighborhood, lost their jobs at the same time and are now struggling to pay their rent. Last week, they invited the residents of their building to seek common solutions. “We wanted to open a dialogue and see if we can get together and help each other navigate right now,” he told El Confidencial.
Moodey, who was already involved in Occupy Sandy in 2012, a left-wing initiative to help people who had been recaptured or deported in the context of the hurricane, proposed to shopping for neighbors in need or helping with paperwork to those who may have language difficulties. “People speak many different languages in our building, and they probably have difficult access to reading materials in those languages,” he says.
A woman wearing a mask leaves a supermarket in Queens, New York. (.)
Solidarity initiatives and organizations operate in the particular fabric of New York: a motley Babylon, with 800 languages compressed in a few neighborhoods. Universes that live together without barely touching each other, with their services and their press and their traditions. TCAH and Citymeals on Wheels have interpreters to access talking homes Spanish, Cantonese, Russian, Hebrew or Creole. Languages that surpass English in many areas of Brooklyn and Queens.
September 11 brought catharsis, Covid did not
Unlike September 11 or Hurricane Sandy, the pandemic added a new element to the challenge. It deprived citizens of the possibility of coming together in a physical space: the magic of the catharsis effect that occurs when thousands of people agree and they celebrate it “in situ”, with all the ritual of mobilization, greetings and hugs. The virus has taken on the comfort of human contact.
“We need to maintain social distancing,” says Melony Samuels of TCAH. “The people we deliver food to know we’re going, they know where to go to get it. For the moment, there is nothing to say, there are no interpreters. It’s very impersonal. And it’s going to stay impersonal for a season.
Past challenges, bombings, hurricanes, recession, they had failed to tear off the element of human warmth that greases the response to the disaster. The victims and the volunteers, in this case, remain in the darkness of their caves; They only come out with gloves and a mask, and any approach to a surface or living thing causes a range of ugly sensations, varying degrees of repulsion.
“Citymeals have always dealt with older, lonely New Yorkers,” says Beth Shapiro. “These are people who outlived their friends, their families and even their children. When food is brought to them, the delivery guy often walks into their house and leaves it in the kitchen. Now they can’t. They leave it hanging on the door. We used to have a visiting program to keep the elderly company, now we can’t. But we called them on the phone. Social distancing has drastically changed things.
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