A lot of people have reached out to me over the past month or so to check in how my family and I are faring, having moved to New York City just over two years ago.  A lot has changed in the last month!

Approximately two million people live in Manhattan and approximately eight million people used to come in every day – on public transport – office workers, retailers, tourists….Like many people I haven’t been on the subway for the last month, having used it multiple times a day for the last two years to get around.  The streets of Manhattan have become a ghost town as all the bars, the 27,000 restaurants and most of the stores have shut down.

The New York healthcare system has been under a huge amount of pressure.  Tents have been set up in Central Park and beds in other public places established to take care of the patient overflow.  We walk past refrigerated trucks outside hospitals, being employed to handle the unmanageable spike in deaths. Late April, over 300 people a day are still dying from Coronavirus and total deaths in NYC has hit 8,000 people.  It is very close to home when you hear parents of kids at school have died from the virus.

We are hunkered down, working from home and kids schooling from home.  We take the social distancing seriously, everyone wears face masks and the focus on hand washing is intense.  Amazon has struggled to keep up with the demand for home grocery deliveries.  Healthcare workers, and people who must be in a public facing role, are at the real coal face of this crisis.  Over 50 public transport workers have died (keeping the trains and buses running), 20% of the emergency responders (police, fire and ambulance) are off sick. 

Things are on the improve, at the peak there were 6,000 emergency call outs a day – that’s 250 people an hour getting put in an ambulance – and all day you heard sirens.  That has been replaced with a city wide, nightly 7.00pm cheer for medical workers from apartment windows.  But with 30 million people losing their jobs in the US over the past six weeks, I think the economic recovery will be patchy and slow.  The density of living in NYC will make any return to normal challenging.  Perth seems like a very nice place to be right now. 

Charlie Perkins (’87)