designed for patients who don’t require
intensive care, had been put together
in six days, its five floors filled with
equipment and staffed with doctors,
nurses, soldiers, contractors, and clean-
ers. Every bed needed an I.V. pole. Every
room needed a surge protector. Every
pod of rooms needed five shower chairs.
There were access cards, computers,
and Internet to set up, operating pro-
cedures to establish. A new hundred-
car parking lot had been paved outside.
Rose is short, with a shaved head,
square shoulders, and a drill sergeant’s
voice. From the windows of the new
facility, he could see Staten Island Uni-
versity Hospital, which had been over-
whelmed by COVID-19 patients. Staten
Island is a borough of essential work-
ers: nurses, bus drivers, cops, firemen,
sanitation workers. Rose lives nearby,
but had been spending his nights in a
hotel, to protect his wife from expo-
sure. National Guard soldiers were on
duty at the ambulance station, coördi-
nating food deliveries and distributing
equipment. It was Rose’s last day of de-
ployment before returning to politics.
He still had to do a clothes drop in the
parking garage of his apartment build-
ing. His work with the “Fighting 69th,”
as Robert E. Lee supposedly dubbed
the unit during the Civil War, had been
“strictly operational.” At one point, he
had driven to Pennsylvania to pick up
a supply of garbage cans. “That’s not
normally the way a member of Con-
gress thinks,” he said. “It’d be nice if
Congress were thinking a little more
like that. Operational intensity.”- Between five and six-thirty in the eve-
ning, parents arrived to pick up their
kids at Bronx Collaborative High
School, on the southern edge of Van
Cortlandt Park. Brett Schneider, the
founding principal, had been there since
seven that morning. Although his
school is closed, the Department of
Education had chosen the building to
be one of its fifty-seven Regional En-
richment Centers. The sites, which
serve three meals and function as a
kind of quarantine day camp, are for
students whose parents are essential
workers. Schneider had volunteered
immediately to supervise his school’s
program. He knew how to get the class-
rooms ready for social distancing: “It’s
a natural extension of prepping for the
SATs.” At both ends of the day, a nurse
takes every kid’s temperature. One of
the site’s volunteers had been teaching
step dance, emphasizing the distance
between each child. They had six-feet-
apart rock-paper-scissors competitions
that morning, and six-feet-apart speed-
walking relay races (no baton passing)
that afternoon.
Schneider, who has shoulder-length
black hair, was standing in a marble ro-
tunda, just inside the school’s main en-
trance, holding a walkie-talkie. Two of
the borough’s major hospitals—North
Central and Montefiore—are within
walking distance. One mother had just
got off a ten-hour shift administer-
ing non-stop dialysis in an acute-care
unit. “Lots of young people that had
no previous kidney issues are needing
dialysis now,” she told Schneider. “The
problem is these folks, if they survive,
are going to have kidney damage for
the rest of their lives.” A woman ar-
rived who was working a night shift in
the emergency room in two hours. She
had used the day to get some sleep—
“so I can go to my shift energized,” she
said. Her son handed her a gift from
his crafts class—a paper rose.- In Central Park, the runners along the
cinder track on the perimeter of what
is officially called the Jacqueline Ken-
nedy Onassis Reservoir—Mrs. Onas-
sis lived not far from it, on Fifth Ave-
nue, and jogged around it, too—formed
a single file of dread-in-motion, appro-
priately watchful and spaced. Early on
in the pandemic, they had moved with
an almost infuriating disregard for the
new reality, running, most of them
maskless, in that eternal clockwork way
of city runners, seeming to believe that,
once started, they were on an unbreak-
able internal drive, like so many windup
mechanical bunnies, unable to slow
down, much less stop. Some small effort
at social distancing had gone on, but,
when a runner ahead had been going
too slowly, the others, rather than ad-
just their pace to maintain the spacing,
still tended to come zooming along, as
though their legs were self-governing.
This, runners will tell you, is essential
to sustaining the aerobic benefits, and,
generally, to being a runner.
Over time, the pace slowed. They
began self-organizing, finding an en-
tirely new way to run. The runners still
wore their usual garb—the tight-fitting
lower half and the loose-fitting upper
“It’s my weekend with the kids.” half, the ugly, expensive sneakers—but