38 THENEWYORKER,M AY4, 2020
tarp and furnished with computer carts,
which had been set up in the hospital’s
ambulance bay. It was cold, and Baez
wore a hospital sheet wrapped around
her neck as a scarf, an accessory to her
layers of personal protective gear.
Patients drifted in, usually accom-
panied by friends or family members.
Baez assessed how sick they looked
and asked a round of COVID-specific
questions: “Any fever, chills, or cough?”
(Or, if they spoke Spanish, “Tiene fiebre?
Escalofríos? Tos?”) Then she gave them
a wristband—orange for suspected
COVID, green for non-COVID—and
directed them to another station, for
triage. People sometimes arrived in
such bad shape that Baez had to drop
what she was doing and rush them into
the E.R. to be intubated.
On the worst days, patients had died
by the dozen—in the I.C.U., which
had tripled its capacity; in the hospi-
tal beds outside the emergency depart-
ment; and on stretchers in the E.R.
Baez once counted five white morgue
trucks parked by the hospital’s loading
dock. Urgent codes rang out on the
P.A. system: “Rapid response,” for when
a patient can’t breathe; “C.A.C.,” for
cardiac arrest. One day, there were four
or five codes by 10 a.m. She had turned
to her best friend, also a nurse, and
said, “They’re dropping like flies.”
Recently, though, a new tradition
had begun. Whenever a COVID patient
was taken off a ventilator or was dis-
charged, hospital staff played a snip-
pet of “Empire State of Mind,” by Jay-Z
and Alicia Keys. This was known as
the “happy code.” Shortly after Baez
arrived at work, she heard the song.
“Well, maybe some people are making
it out of here,” she thought. “Maybe
COVID’s loosening its grip a little bit.”
It’s not unusual for Carolyn Riccar-
delli, a conservator at the Metropoli-
tan Museum of Art, to see the build-
ing’s vast limestone entrance hall devoid
of visitors; witnessing the museum’s
private life is one of the privileges of
being on staff. What’s strange is to see
it without flowers. Lila Acheson Wal-
lace, the co-founder of the Reader’s Di-
gest, permanently endowed the hall’s
stone urns in 1967; since then, the Met
has received a delivery of flowers every
Tuesday, which the Dutch master florist
Remco van Vliet shapes into towering
arrangements up to twelve feet tall.
But, that morning, as daffodils bloomed
and cherry trees shed pink petals onto
sidewalks all over the city, the urns
stood empty.
Riccardelli wore a face mask deco-
rated with cartoon owls, and round-
framed glasses that made her look a
little like an owl herself. For the past
month, she has come in every few days
as a member of the collections moni-
toring team, a volunteer unit of cura-
tors, conservators, and collections man-
agers who take turns checking on the
dormant galleries and storerooms. From
a human point of view, the pandemic
has been disastrous beyond measure,
but, from the perspective of the paint-
ings and sculptures and pottery and
tapestry and all manner of other pre-
cious objects that make their home at
the Met, it’s had a weirdly salutary effect.
No people means no lights and no dust.
The Astor Chinese Garden Court
features a pond full of koi, which Ric-
cardelli fed with a scooper of orange
pellets. Next, she stopped by the Vene-
tian Sculpture Gallery to visit Tullio
Lombardo’s lissome Adam, the first life-
size marble nude in the classical style
made during the Renaissance. In 2002,
the pedestal supporting it collapsed, and
the sculpture shattered on the ground.
Riccardelli spent the better part of a
decade leading the team that put it—
“him,” she’d say—back together, so
seamlessly that you’d never be able to
tell there had been significant damage.
His manhood modestly covered with a
fig leaf, he stands as he once did in Ven-
ice, in a niche, unbitten apple in hand,
as if he had never fallen.- At 11:46 a.m., a call came over the
radio. “O.K.,” Maddy Wetterhall, a
twenty-four-year-old emergency med-
ical technician, told the dispatcher.
“We’re clear and we’re en route.” A
few weeks earlier, Wetterhall, who
works for a private ambulance com-
pany based in Atlanta, had driven to
New York City in her ambulance,
with a caravan of out-of-state E.M.S.
workers sent by FEMA to help with
the crisis there. She’d been respond-
ing to 911 calls, “running Brooklyn,”
working ten-to-ten shifts every day
since she arrived. It was her first time
in the city. “It’s crazy,” she said. “There’s
no traffic here.”
An elderly woman met Wetterhall
and her partner at the door, and ex-
plained that her husband, who has
severe memory problems, had been
acting strangely for several days, not
eating, not responding when spoken
to. The woman led the E.M.T.s into
a back bedroom. The shades were
drawn. When Wetterhall’s eyes ad-
justed to the dark, she could see that
the man was lying in bed, fully dressed,
with his arms crossed over his chest
and his eyes closed. A framed, black-
and-white picture of the couple at their
wedding was hanging above the bed.
“We’ve been married for over sixty
years,” the woman said.
The team brought the man down-
stairs and guided him toward the am-
bulance. Wetterhall noticed that the
woman called her husband Buddy:
“She goes, ‘O.K., Buddy, they’re going
to help you.’” Because of the risks as-
sociated with the coronavirus, the man’s
wife couldn’t accompany him to the
hospital. Before handing him off to the
E.M.T.s, she gave Wetterhall a note
with her phone number and a list of
his medications and dosages. “That’s
a super important piece of paper,” the
woman said. Her husband was anxious
and disoriented, rocking back and forth
in the stair chair. Wetterhall used a
go-to calming strategy. “You explain
everything to the patient as you’re doing
it,” she said. “It’s a way you can get a
better connection with them.” She used
his nickname: “This is an ambulance,
Buddy. We’re going to see the doctors,
so you can feel better. Buddy, we’re
going to get you help.”- In Flatbush, at around midday, the rap-
per known as 22Gz, who had recently
rolled out of bed, was shooting his lat-
est music video. 22Gz is twenty-t wo,
although he looks younger: skinny,
with a bright smile and strikingly big
eyes. Raised in the neighborhood, he
grew up playing basketball in the parks
and sometimes dancing on subway
trains for tips. He is a big name in his
home town and far beyond, but his
videos tend not to require extravagant