sian dinner uptown. Outside a teriyaki
place, a man blew his nose loudly. Ceron
flinched. Even on a good day, delivery
is a tough job. "I heard this mornllig that
de Blasio is going to go easy on us," he
said. "I have three tickets. They want me
to pay a thousand dollars!" He has also
been in three accidents--scrapes, a
cracked collarbone. "It's much easier now
that the streets are empty."
The virus has added new complica-
tions. At around eight o'clock, Ccr6n
cradled an order of Dallas BBQnear a
housingprojectoff AvenueD. "We don'.t
usually go upstairs at this building," he
said. •But in this situation, we need to."
On the fuurtec:nth 8ooi; more bad news:
for this order, Ceron needed the cus-
tomer's signature.. He slathered his phone
and her hands with sanifu.er. The woman
wiggled a hesitant pinkie and signed.
The deJivery yielded six dollars, fifty-
nine cenu----worth it.
The night was slower than normal.
Tippers were skimping. "The city that
never sleeps is sleeping," Ceron said.
He had thirty-five dollars. By this time
on a regular night, he'd have sixty or
seventy. "People are scared. Delivery
guys touch too many things," he said.
"I understand."
Three pizu orders came in. The hast
customer wanted to pay in C2Sh. "I don't
w.mt to talcc cash right now, but I gotta
take it," Ceron said. In the lobby was a
dispenser of sanitizer. Ceron took a
squirt, and then another. On the eighth
floor was George, retired photographer,
former "dogmatic commie"; plain pie
with tomatoes.They exchanged the cash
without touching fingers. Ou1slde, Ccr6n
put on new gloves.
He stopped for a final pickup, at a
kebab joint. Emerging, he was excited.
"Sec, my people are running New York!"
he said. Delivery guys? "No," he said,
pointjng to the store. "Mexicans! Thq1re
making the food!"
The last delivery arrived safely, in
NoHo, conveyed with no ekin contact,
but with a slight scent of rubbing alco-
hol CenSn hopped back on his bike. He
had made seventy dollars and seven-
ty-one cents. It was almost an hour's
ride home through empty streets back
to the Bronx. "In one of the most hum-
ble jobs, I'm helping," he said, as he set
o:ff. "I feel 0.1(."
-Zach He!fand
EXTl\AOJJ\RIQJLAR.
TEEN Tl\ACKEI\L
ast week. as cities across the coun-
try shut down in an effort to slow
thespreadofCOVID-19,PresidentTrump
said, "We have a problem that, a month
ago, nobody thought about. 'Well, some-
body did. On December 29th, as Trump
vacationed with his family at Mar-a-
Lago,Avi Schiffinann, a sevcntccn-ycar-
old from Washington State, lawu:hcd a
homemade Web site to track the move-
ment of the coronavirus. Since then, the
site, ncov2019.live, has had more than a
hundred million visitors. "I wanted to
just make the data easily accessible, but
I never thought it would end up being
this big," the high-school junior said last
week over FaceT'une. Schiffinann,gap-
toothed and bespectacled, was sitting
on his bed wearing a blue T-shirt and
baggy pajama bottoms. ltwas late morn-
ing. He was at his mother's house, on
Mercer Island, outside Seattle. Some-
where in the room his cat, Louic,m.cvvcd.
Behind him hung a Ferrari poster.
Using a coding tactic known as
"web-scraping," Schiffinamis site col-
lates dat-a from different sources around
the globe-the W.H.O., the C.D.C.,
Yonhap News Agency in South Korea--
and displays the Jatest number of COVlD-
19 cases. It features simple graphics and
easy-to-read tables divided by nation,
continent, and state. Data automatically
updates every minute. In a politicized
pandemic, where rumor and panic run
amok, the site has become a reputable,
if unlikely, watchdog.
Schiffmann goes to Mercer Island
High School (Its mascot Herbert the
Snail.) He began teaching himself to
code when he was seven, mainly by
watching YauTube videos, and has made
more than thirty Web sites. "Program-
ming is a great creative medium," he
said. "Instead of using a paintbrush or
something, you can just type a bunch of
funky words and make a coronavirus
site." One of his first projects, in ele-
mentary school, was what he calls "a
stick-figure animation hub." Later sitescollated the scores for his county's high-
school sports games, aggregated. news
of global protests, and displayed the
weather forecast on Mars. "His brain is
constantly going from one thing to an-
other, which is good, but I also try to
focus him in," his mother, Nathalie
Acher, said. "I'm not techy at all mysel£
I see it as just really boring. He sees it
as an art form."
Schiffinann created the virus project
during a family ski weekend in Sno-
qualmie Pass. Acher, who is a prima-
ry-care doctor, said that, when he had
finished building it (he'd skipped a ski
day), "he was beaming as though he'd
discovered the cure for cancer." Flatten-
ing the curve has been an isolating ex-
perience for many, but Schiffinann hasAvi Schiffmann
never had so much attention. "I'm get-
ting e-mail after e-mail,"he said. "Every
couple of seconds it's a new one." Some
people suggest changes to the site.
"They're,like, 'Great Web site!'"he said.
"And then they send a massive list of
demands, and rm just, like, 'O.K., later.'"
While his twelfth-grade mends woay
about whether the prom will be can-
celled, Sc.hiffinann is navigating global
fame."! literally see myself on, like, Af-
rican news Web sites, Thailand, Tai-
wan-like, everywhere, "he said. He had
two pod.cast interviews scheduled for
that day. Then he was o:ff to a photo
shoot. "I want more professional pho-
tos, because I don't like the ones that the
news places use." ("I look weird,"he said.)
A few days earlier, his school had shut
down. But he had already skipped the