Thursday is Day 7 of physical distancing. People on the Brooklyn streets seem more pulled in, less engaged. “Dour,” The Kid says, a word of which she’s newly fond. Brittle, I think.
The number of Covid-19 patients is spiking; the nation is finally testing in larger numbers. (1,374 cases in New York State on Tuesday; 2,480, up 80 percent, on Wednesday; 5,711, up 130 percent, on Thursday.) We still don’t have enough tests. Doctors nationwide face shortages of masks, gloves, gowns, gear; hospitals don’t have enough ICU beds or ventilators. President Trump said meeting those needs is up to governors. He said he won’t activate the Defense Production Act to re-tool industries to churn out N95 masks or ventilators. Of using the DPA this way, he said, “We hope we are not going to need it.” Of the federal government, he said, “We’re not a shipping clerk.”
Dr. Howard Mell of the American College of Emergency Physicians, which has been receiving pleas from across the country, drove to a Target and found 10 boxes of construction-worker respirator masks, sending half to a Bronx hospital that had none. “Why on God’s green earth can I go to Target and buy these items when so many hospitals are running out?” he asked a Times reporter. “If they’re at Target, they are certainly more sitting at a distribution center somewhere. We need these in our hospitals right now.”
A poll says more than half the country thinks Trump is doing a good job handling the crisis.
The GOP-led Senate passed a bill to inject $1 trillion into the economy, most of it directed to corporations. While it would send $1,200 to every adult making less than $100,000 a year, most of the aid would come through the tax code, meaning it’s skewed against the poor, whose tax bills are already at or near zero. Meanwhile two Republican senators, Richard Burr of North Carolina and Kelly Loeffler of Georgia, who in January got confidential briefings on the outbreak’s seriousness, in February dumped up to $1.5 million (Burr) and $3.1 million (Loeffler) in stocks, shortly before markets plummeted. Loeffler, whose husband is CEO of the New York Stock Exchange, also used those weeks to buy stock in a company that makes teleworking software, which has seen its stock rise as millions began working from home.
I can stay online or with my newspaper for 15 minutes before rage demands I stop.
The Girlfriend, who’s sleeping at my house, has been deejaying on my laptop. Yesterday she put Neil Young on random play: that worked. This morning she puts on Van Morrison, which she finds soothing but whose mytho-poetical musings today I find irksome. When she leaves, to help her son pick up his bicycle from his Hoboken dorm, I switch to Bob Dylan, then Fiona Apple: spiky and bitter suits.
The bicycle shop calls: my bike is tuned up and ready. On the shop door a sign warns “STOP!” The store is practicing social distancing; if more than three customers are inside, the signs says, wait. I see none, walk in. The previous weekend I walked to the back to watch a staffer run my dusty bike through its paces; now red tape on the floor reads “STOP.” I stand a few feet from the counter, then run my credit card, signing the electronic pad with my finger before I see the pen, hidden along with its coiled wire beneath the pad. Damn.
Yesterday afternoon The Girlfriend and I stepped off a curb on a green light and narrowly avoided a bicyclist turning right; when we yelled, startled, she yelled back, “Fuck off!” Later, as I jogged, I saw a man dancing in the middle of Fulton Street, still reasonably trafficked (two narrow lanes on a commercial east-west thoroughfare with lots of double-parked trucks: pharmacies and bodegas and markets are still getting deliveries). The man, in his 20s, shirtless, oblivious to cars and trucks eddying around him, moved like liquid, to no music. A few blocks later I watched a man in his 40s, in an army jacket and battered work boots, weaving along Fulton Street’s double-yellow center line, failing his impromptu sobriety test as cars braked and honked, belting out a song I didn’t know.
Today people avoid my eyes: runners stay focused, pedestrians gaze into phones. About the same number of cars as earlier in the week, but fewer pedestrians. Lots of rich folks must be at their second homes, barricaded in Long Island or upstate or Connecticut or down the shore or out the Cape. The quiet means I can hear birdsong. Also lots of sirens: fire trucks and ambulances, mostly. Lots of police out, but I see none rushing to calls. One industry seems little affected: construction. Trucks rumble by — drivers speed on the empty streets — and many of the borough’s hundreds of building sites remain active.
It’s nice to get on a bike. I ride into Prospect Park through chilled air. Fewer people are in the park today. The children look intensely focused on their activities (bike-riding lessons, a game of long-distance catch, a few 5-year-olds running up and digging into a huge pile of dirt), as if they’ve been encouraged to use every second of outdoor time to its fullest potential.
I pick up The Kid and we bike back through the park. It’s her first day of online school. She says four teachers gave assignments, each saying they moved fast because no one else would likely give work on the first day. I’m happy she has projects, but I’m with the “Kids don’t need to be productive in a pandemic” crowd. Will her 7th-grade class get grades in the third trimester? How will that affect her placement in high schools, which many in NYC base on 7th-grade results? (The DOE has already said attendance, which normally weighs heavily, won’t be counted.) Standardized tests scheduled for Spring are canceled. Who knows how any schools will be functioning next month, much less in the fall?
This kind of uncertainty can drive the kid’s mother and The Girlfriend crazy, like productive sheepdogs who’ve been sidelined, unchanneled energy overloading their circuits. Me? I’ve always liked travel days — airports, planes, hotels — because I’m happy controlling the things I can control (suitcases, identification), then happy to cede control to outside forces (weather, pilots) while I read in the airport lounge or my middle seat. I’m not sure where the kid falls on that spectrum.
The Girlfriend, it turns out, has work to do at her son’s dorm, where his college informed him that day he had to remove everything within a week. He’s in a fifth-floor room with no elevator. They make three trips hauling boxes to a storage unit, staffed by a single person shunning Hoboken’s shelter-in-place lockdown. His bicycle, locked to itself in a basement room, has been stolen, doubtless by someone who knew the building was vacant. They make one last trip, pack the car, return his key, their quick Jersey jaunt having taken eight hours.
Before bed I tell The Girlfriend of my day’s nicest interaction. Prospect Park’s inner loop road is 3.3 miles, with a steep-ish climb on the east side and a long, lovely downhill slope on the west. As we hit the western hill we pass a bicyclist in his 30s, rasta beanie and braids and a wide patch of boxers showing yellow smiley faces, coasting ahead of his 15-pound dog, unleashed, running fast behind him. The hill is long, at least a half-mile, and I watch the mutt for long seconds: the running is comfortable, concentrated, purposeful.
“Your dog is great,” I call.
“Power to the little creatures!” he calls back.
“Amen to that!” yell I, a man who fell short of 5’5” in my prime. It’s the closest I’ve felt to joy in days.
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