One opinion in the NY Times:
The very features that make New York attractive to businesses, workers and tourists — Broadway, the subway system, world-class restaurants, and innumerable cultural institutions — were among the hardest-hit in the pandemic. And they will take the longest to come back. Half of the hotels in the city are not operating, and with no reliable forecast for when tourists might return, many may stay shut. Nearly the same portion of the city’s smallest businesses — some 186,000 shops employing fewer than 10 people — could fail, city officials fear.
A lot of people hate New York and would say “good riddance.” I have a much more personal stake – many of my relatives and friends still live there. It’s my home town, although for reasons that remain somewhat mysterious to me I knew in my gut early on that I probably wouldn’t settle there for my adult life.
And yet I still enjoy – enjoyed? – visiting, which I usually do several times a year. I understand why so many people I know still live there. It’s the energy, the availability of almost every world-class cultural thing you might want, and the “if you can make it there you’ll make it anywhere” mentality. Quite a few people from my youth have “made it” there, and from where I sit they’ve led rich full lives loaded with activities (work and play), family, culture, and friends.
Will it continue? The first line of the article is:
It took just a matter of days to shut down New York City, once the coronavirus took hold. Restarting it will take much, much longer.
Well, duhhh. Of course it will. But the question no one can answer is: how long? The article contains this quote:
“I don’t think the New York that we left will be back for some years,” said Gregg Bishop, the commissioner of the city’s small businesses agency. “I don’t know if we’ll ever get it back.”
I don’t know either. And you may not care, but New York is part of this country’s lifeblood and if it falls into some sort of ruin I think you may come to care more.
But here’s my guess. I don’t think anything ever comes back in exactly the same form. So there will be changes, and certainly some businesses will die. But I also believe that the following will happen within the next year: several treatments will be found to be quite effective and this will decrease fear of the disease, more people will become immune (particularly in a city as hard hit as NY) and the disease’s incidence will die down, and a vaccine will be developed (see this for a discussion of the slow pace of the mutation rate and the fact that it is unlikely to impede vaccine production).
And I believe that when that happens there will be huge burst of renewed energy, and New York will be one of the beneficiaries. People will be happy to congregate again, and they will be unafraid – until the next frightening pandemic. If that comes soon, all bets are off. But chances are nothing big will come for quite a while, and perhaps (accept on the “perhaps”) we’ll be more ready.
I’m basing my opinion on what I called – in 2005 – “the forgetting”:
Stranger still is the lack of common knowledge about the 1918-9 influenza epidemic that disrupted most of the world (with the exception of Africa and South America) at the same time WWI was ravaging Western Europe. It was an event medieval or even Biblical in its apocalyptic scope. How many people died worldwide? Estimates vary, but the most conservative state that the death toll was 25 million. Other estimates go much higher, up to 70 million or even 100 million. And, as this transcript from a fascinating PBS documentary on the pandemic relates, “As soon as the dying stopped, the forgetting began.”
“The forgetting;” yes. Virtually forgotten by all but scholars or epidemiologists, although it happened within the lifetime of many people still living today: more US soldiers dead from flu than were killed in WWI, many US cities running out of coffins and burying the dead in mass graves, homeless orphans wandering through the streets, schools and factories closed, wild rumors (“the Germans started it”) and familiar theologic explanations (“it’s a punishment for sin”). Read the links to get an idea of the all-encompassing horror of the thing and then tell me, if you can, why my history courses (and perhaps yours?) failed to even mention it.
Since I wrote that fifteen years ago, we’ve had our memories “refreshed,” as they say in the law biz. But the forgetting still happened, and people and cities not only recovered but stopped talking about it. I grew up among people who had been alive then; my mother was a young child in 1918 and my grandparents and great-aunt and uncle were in their 30s, which was a prime target age for the worst of the 1918 flu. They lived in New York and a large city in New Jersey. And yet, although my mother and grandmother in particular used to talk to me at some length about the past, they never once even mentioned the 1918 flu pandemic. And as I wrote in 2005, I never learned a thing about it in my history courses, either. I don’t think my grandparents literally forgot, but the experience simply was not a focus at all.
I learned about it on my own long ago, however. I had an interest in epidemiology even when I was young, so I became far more familiar with the facts of the 1918 pandemic than most people. Many cities were devastated. Here’s a description of Philadelphia, a major city at the time that was one of the worst off [emphasis mine – and note also the very significant amount of social distancing that was practiced]:
Philadelphia had one of the highest death rates in the country, 4 times higher than Boston. The daily death toll from influenza alone in Philadelphia [population at the time: 1.7 million] would exceed the city’s average weekly death toll from all causes. In a single day, 759 people died from the pandemic alone. In an average week, 485 died from all causes. Within 10 days the city went from 2 deaths and hundreds ill to hundreds dead each day and hundreds of thousands ill. Every hospital bed in 31 hospitals were filled. People who were healthy a couple days ago were fighting for their lives, some dying within a day of contracting influenza. For over three weeks, influenza paralyzed the city. Schools were closed. Public meeting banned. Yet the population continued to get sick. Despite declarations on October 4th and 5th, the peak of pandemic didn’t happen until the week of the 19th when 4,597 died from influenza or pneumonia. Despite the numerous deaths though, many more survived and recovered from the illness.
As influenza spread, so too did fear. People isolated themselves, not speaking to anyone, avoiding crowds, not having anywhere to go but stay at home, where there may be people sick or dead. The rapid rate of death, and the fact there were so many dying, meant the city and its undertakers and morgue couldn’t keep up with dead bodies. The city morgue was designed to hold 36 bodies. It was quickly overrun, with nearly 200 bodies crammed into every available space. Exacerbating the overload, besides the rapid influx of the dead, was the lack of available undertakers and grave diggers. For some families, it was easier for them to dig a grave themselves than wait for someone else.
During the height of the flu the city established 5 additional temporary morgues, but even that wasn’t enough. Bodies piled up in hospitals, on porches, on the streets, and in the home. Rooms, if there were any to spare, were sectioned off when family members couldn’t arrange for or find someone to take care of the body. Without embalming, the bodies began to decay; bodies oozed and blood would flow out. The smell was everywhere. Philadelphians could walk down the street seeing and smelling dozens and dozens of bodies. Death was everywhere.
It seems to me that people were much tougher then (and recall, they were fighting a world war overseas at the same time). They were used to disease. There were no antibiotics. Child mortality was still high. TB took a huge toll. And yet the 1918 flu was absolutely catastrophic, and killed not just the old and young but a huge number of people in the prime of life.
But I think that afterwards, that generation just put it behind them and moved on. By the time I came around, they’d gone through that, World Wars I and II, and the Depression. They were happy to forget about it, or at least not to place the heavy burden of its memory on me and other young people.
And although we’re far less resilient today, I still think that the forgetting will happen as soon as the fear is reduced. People are eager to go back to business as usual, or as close to usual as we can get.
[NOTE: I’m leaving out the political for the purposes of this post, although I believe that a recovery also depends, at the national level, on who is elected in November.]
