‘Rats have taken over it’: How COVID-19 has turned New York into a horror show
Residents are riddled with paranoia and fear, streets are empty and more than one million people are out of work. The coronavirus has turned The Big Apple rotten, and it’s a dire warning to the rest of the US.
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Before dawn on a typical cold, wintry Sunday morning, Manhattan still buzzes with sirens, tourists either on their way home or on their way out, and grim-faced workers with their heads down as they make their way to the unglamorous jobs that keep the city running.
But these are not normal days. Now, New York City is just creepy.
“There are some police around but some places are just creepy now,” says photographer Mariya Mova, who lives in Queens.
“It’s like a ghost town … it’s so strange for New York.”
Out in the streets, the city is dead. The life has been sucked out of it. Without people, New York, like any city, is just a collection of buildings, streets and neon lights.
Everything has been shut down for more than 10 days – schools, shops, pubs, restaurants, cafes, cinemas, the theatres, gyms, libraries and office buildings. The subways are still running, but passengers are few and far between.
A million people have lost their jobs. Even in parks there are signs warning people to “please keep your social distance”.
“I hear the rats have taken over the city. There may be less rubbish around, but without people walking around the rats have more courage to come out and walk the streets freely,” says New Yorker Janan Lawless, formerly of Melbourne.
One of the changes that city-dwellers have noticed the most is the strange silence that has descended on a city which is notoriously loud, noisy, brash and boisterous.
“The weird thing is you can hear a pin drop in many places. Barely one emergency siren a day now when it’s usually all the time,” says Alyson Clarke, another former Aussie living in the city.
Manhattanite Casey Cunningham said she went in to her office before the full lockdown came into effect and was stunned by the city’s lack of life.
“I walked though Times Square and the whole area was so quiet it was creepy. I could have crossed 42nd Street without even looking and would not have been hit there were so few cars. Plus there were police everywhere.”
Australian author Greg Truman, who has lived in New York for 25 years and was on the front line reporting on 9/11, said the city’s streets had never before been so empty.
“There are fewer people on the streets now than at any time during 9/11. In that sense, it kind of feels like the last few hours leading up to Hurricane Sandy when everyone was told to either get out or lock themselves away,” said Mr Truman, who’s noticed a different attitude from New Yorkers this time around.
“It’s a bit creepy, that’s for sure. Everything’s emptied out. People have genuine fear on their faces.
“One difference is the way people move on the streets. They glance at you suspiciously. The threat after 9/11 was more ‘from the sky’, fears of perhaps another attack. With this there are sideways glances and little moves away to the edges of the sidewalk as you pass people.”
Indeed, such is the level of paranoia among New Yorkers now that a loud sneeze causes more alarm than a mad person waving a Glock around.
People cross the street when they see someone headed in their direction. In shops, people glance down aisles to see if there’s anyone there before they will enter.
Last week, just before the lockdown, a man on a New York suburban train pulled out a dirty rag and blew his nose in an exaggerated, trumpet-like fashion and people scurried away as fast as they could to other carriages.
He chuckled and called his friend on speakerphone and loudly told him how he’d just “upset all the Wall Street dudes”.
If that same comedian tried to pull that stunt today, he could be charged with terrorism.
“Because coronavirus appears to meet the statutory definition of a ‘biological agent’, such acts could implicate the nation’s terrorism-related statutes,” Deputy Attorney-General Jeffrey Rosen said. “Threats or attempts to use COVID-19 as a weapon could potentially implicate the nation’s terrorism-related statutes.”
There is growing panic in New York.
The wealthy are fleeing to other states, potentially “seeding” the virus in new areas, and Asian students are reportedly begging their parents to buy them $A40,000 air tickets to get them back to China – which says it has no new cases.
In a single day this week, 100 people died in New York as it continues to evolve into a global hotspot for the disease.
It now has about 40,000 infected people and up to 20,000 people are being tested every day. The infection rate here is 10 times higher than the rest of the country. By comparison, New Jersey is a distant second with just 4000 cases.
No one is quite sure why New York has become such a viral hotbed, although most blame it on the city’s density.
A tidal wave of sick and scared New Yorkers has stormed hospital emergency rooms across the city. Giant tents and big refrigerated trucks have been set up outside hospitals to take in the thousands of dead bodies expected in the next few weeks.
The number of cases is doubling every few days. There is a shocking shortage of hospital beds. People who think they have the virus are being turned away from testing stations and it can take a week or more to make an appointment to be checked out.
The Governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, who has become something of a social media rock star thanks to his daily TV updates and is even being mentioned as a possible 11th-hour Democratic choice to take on President Donald Trump, has warned the city will run out of hospital beds.
“Almost any scenario that’s realistic will overwhelm the current capacity of the hospital system. You can’t get the curve down low enough to not overwhelm our hospitals.”
Perhaps most alarming is Mr Cuomo’s warning to the other 49 states: “We are your future.”
And that dreaded curve is only going one way in New York – and that’s north. In a bid to meet expected demand, nine makeshift hospitals with 1000 beds each are being set up in New York City and its neighbouring counties. Hospitals are being ordered to double their number of beds.
Hospitals are running out of basic supplies and Mr Cuomo admitted his government was being dragged into bidding wars around the country and around the globe to try to buy much needed medical equipment.
In one New York hospital, health workers even resorted to wearing garbage bags as protective medical gear to treat patients.
“This is an ‘if moment’,” Mr Cuomo says. “A moment that each of us must deal with in our own way. It’s the sort of moment when you really see what people are made of.
“What does a person do when things aren’t great, when the pressure is on them? That’s when you can see a little crack in a person and when the pressure comes on, that crack can explode.
“I don’t want to sugar-coat the situation. But easy times don’t forge character, tough times forge character and that is what we’re seeing now.”
Originally published as ‘Rats have taken over it’: How COVID-19 has turned New York into a horror show