Coronavirus: New York faces its Pearl Harbor

New Yorkers never imagined they could suffer a tragedy greater than when the World Trade Centre towers crumbled before them.

Medical workers take in a coronavirus patient at Maimonides Medical Centre in Borough Park, New York. Picture: AFP

The streets are silent but for the wailing of sirens.

Those who can do so have locked themselves away in their apartments, fearful of what lurks outside.

New York’s grand avenues are all but empty. Its shop windows are shuttered. The museum and gallery doors are bolted.

Even the buskers and hotdog sellers have vanished.

In Times Square, the neon lights are still flickering. But no one is there to see them.

Broadway? It no longer exists.

New York, perhaps the most vibrant city on Earth — the famed “city that never sleeps” — looks suddenly like a giant tomb, bereft of life yet full of fear.

New Yorkers never imagined their city could suffer a tragedy greater than when the towers of the World Trade Centre crumbled before them in 2001, swallowing almost 3000 lives.

Until the coronavirus.

This silent killer is now taking the lives of New Yorkers in numbers Osama bin Laden could only have dreamt of.

In New York state, 600 people are now dying each day — a 9/11 death toll every five days. More than 4000 have already died and projections are that at least 16,000 New Yorkers will lose their lives in the weeks ahead.

“It’s like a fire spreading,” says Governor Andrew Cuomo.

The fear in the city is palpable. As The New Yorker put it: “You wait awhile before you see a single scurrying soul, her arms full of groceries.

“She’s wearing a mask and walking with the urgency of a thief. She crosses Broadway … she quickens her step … like all of us, she is trying to outrun the thing she cannot see.”

The fear of New Yorkers is not just because there is no cure for the coronavirus. It is because if you catch the virus now, you will be taken to overcrowded hospitals that look more like war zones than medical facilities.

The hospitals of New York have become a shameful symbol of the failure of the US — the world’s economic and military superpower — to deal with this horrific pandemic.

Frustrated medical workers share unauthorised vision on their phones of lines of beds in the corridors of hospitals where the regular wards are already full.

Frantic nurses and doctors run from patient to patient, resuscitation to resuscitation, playing “whack-a-mole” to keep people alive.

Those who die usually die alone. Their loved ones cannot be with them to say goodbye because of the risk of contagion.

The dead are either wheeled to the hospital morgue or, more likely, to a refrigerated trailer that sits outside the hospital to hold the numerous bagged bodies until they can be collected.

The city’s funeral homes are struggling to collect them. There is just too big a backlog. Families have to wait up to a week before a crematorium can hold a service. They’re all booked solid.

Even then, families are advised to place the bodies of their loved ones in a cardboard box rather than a dignified wooden coffin so their corpses can burn faster, allowing more services that day.

Incredibly, things are likely to get even worse.

Governor Cuomo says it is only days before he runs out of ventilators to keep patients alive. His nurses and doctors are falling like flies, catching the virus and evacuating the battlefield.

The US Surgeon General, Jerome Adams, warned on Monday (AEST) that the US would face its “Pearl Harbor” moment this week as the nation braced for another frightening surge of coronavirus deaths.

“The next week is going to be our Pearl Harbor moment,” Adams said. “It’s going to be our 9/11 moment.”

But for New Yorkers, the coronavirus is not going to be their “9/11 moment”.

It’s already so much worse.