The New Yorker:

April 15, 2020: Twenty-four hours at the epicenter of the pandemic.

The novel coronavirus is not the first pandemic of the global age, but it is easily the most relentless. In just a matter of months, from the first appearance of respiratory illnesses in a cluster of people associated with the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, in the Chinese city of Wuhan, the virus infected millions of human hosts, killing tens of thousands. The disease it causes, COVID-19, has come to every corner of the earth, except Antarctica. How it first reached New York City, which by late March had become known as the epicenter of the pandemic, is not hard to imagine. John F. Kennedy Airport is the busiest point of arrival for international passengers in North America. Infected people arrived in New York from Italy, from the U.K. and Spain. And, while travel to the city has slowed, the planes keep coming, the travellers disembarking, around the clock.

Soon after midnight on April 15th, the passengers of Delta Flight 1888, from Atlanta, filed into Terminal 4. Hours earlier, Governor Andrew Cuomo had said that the city was at “the apex of the plateau” of the epidemiological curve. The first passenger to reach the baggage claim wore a respirator mask. Three military nurses from Pensacola followed with a quick step. They were heading to work on the U.S.N.S. Comfort, afloat in the Hudson River and operating as a vast supplementary hospital. A man named Henry Vargas paused to catch his breath. He lives in the Little Italy section of the Bronx and has been suffering from lymphoma. When the first COVID-19 case in the United States was confirmed, on January 20th, in the state of Washington, Vargas was in Seattle, undergoing a three-month-long stem-cell treatment, which had laid waste to his immune system. “You have nothing left,” he said. “They have to reintroduce you to all the vaccinations, as if you were a newborn.” He waited for weeks before it was safe for him to travel. When his doctors finally cleared him, the best ticket he could find required two connections—some eleven hours airborne. It was a nerve-racking trip: “The person sitting next to me could sneeze, and that could kill me.” He was relieved to be back in the city. “This is my home,” Vargas said, and shuffled toward the exit.

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