On April 5, 2020, New York City was quiet enough to hear birdsong.
That day we recorded 8,122 new cases and 800 deaths from COVID-19. We were two days away from breaching 1,000 deaths in a single day.
While news reports focused on the phantasmagoria of mobile hospitals and makeshift morgues, what also struck me was the silence, and what sounds filled the silence, since the world is never at rest.
I am writing this in December 2020, and in the United States, the virus no longer has an epicenter. It is everywhere. Perhaps these case and death numbers are no longer shocking. But they were experienced with a ferocity and terror in New York last spring. In late March, we became the epicenter. First Wuhan, then Bergamo and Veneto in Northern Italy, Iran, and then it his us. It spread undetected those first few weeks of March, on trains, in crowded spaces where we met and on streets where passionate arguments about the Knicks were volleyed back and forth, like it mattered.
The death and sickness overtook the city. It was experienced intensely because of our density. You can’t just ignore the bodies piling up. I walked by the refrigerated trucks when we ventured out for our daily family walks. We live between two hospitals, and we are used to sirens, but I woke up one night and heard a layering of sirens, each street for miles had their own tragedy unfolding, all at once. It was a symphony.
But during the day, the streets were empty enough to really wonder what in the hell someone was doing out there, wandering around at a time like this. This was a place where everyone was in everyone else’s face, and not always by choice. These interactions defined our city, made it what it was. Suddenly, it all stopped.
New York City was silenced, but not completely.