Alison Stewart: This is All of It, on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. This week marks the five-year anniversary of the week the World Health Organization declared COVID 19 a pandemic. It was March 11th, 2020. Soon after, New York began shutting down. Then New York governor, and yes, current mayoral candidate, Andrew Cuomo, spoke about it on March 12th, 2020, announcing a ban on large gatherings.

Andrew Cuomo: This is going to get much worse before it gets better. That was always the fact.

Alison Stewart: Just a few days after that warning, the city's mayor, Bill de Blasio, announced he was closing schools.

Bill de Blasio: This is a decision that I have taken with no joy whatsoever, with a lot of pain, honestly, because it's something I could not in a million years have imagined having to do, but we are dealing with a challenge and a crisis that we have never seen in our lifetimes, and has only just begun.

Alison Stewart: That was just the start of the pandemic closures. Bars and restaurants soon followed, and then all non-essential workers were ordered to stay home. At the time, I don't think any of us knew how long the shutdown would go on for. We didn't even know when or if the vaccine would be developed. We certainly didn't know that the virus and its impacts would be a myriad and difficult to quantify, even five years later.

We didn't know that more than 40,000 New York City residents would die from it. 80,000 New Yorkers in total. This is a tough week for a lot of us, so we ask you to be kind to yourselves and others. All this week on All of It, we're going to be talking about how COVID has changed us, from personal relationships, to our work culture, to the lessons learned. Today, we're going to start at the beginning. Where were you when the city shut down? What was your experience like?

What was the last thing you remember doing before everything closed? Call or text us at 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC, we want to hear what you were doing five years ago this week. What are your memories of that time? While you're screening your calls, I wanted to bring in my colleague, WNYC and Gothamist's reporter, Arun Venugopal. He was covering the impact of the pandemic, and he joins us now to talk about it and to take your calls. Nice to see you, Arun.

Arun Venugopal: Same. Hi, Alison.

Alison Stewart: What was your reporting beat in 2020 and how did it shift to the pandemic?

Arun Venugopal: I was doing the same kind of work then as I had been for several years and since, which was reporting on race and immigration issues, occasionally sitting in, guest-hosting some of the shows here at WNYC, and for that reason, I was occasionally talking to people who were reporting out of China, going back to December of 2019, so for me, all of this felt like this slow-moving train that was slowly approaching.

Still couldn't conceive how much would change, but it was not something that just parachuted into my life in March of 2020.

Alison Stewart: Gosh, how did you decide how to cover the pandemic? It's something none of us had ever done before. How do you decide who to talk to? Where would you go? What would you talk to them about?

Arun Venugopal: God, so much of it is a complete blur, Alison. I can't even really recover the day-to-day of that moment or remember the details of it. There's some things that really stand out, certainly, like the eeriness of that time. I remember staying here, being one of the last people who worked physically in the newsroom, because they were saying, "We need people to train just in case somebody gets sick, so they can be the backup for that person in case a host gets sick," or whatever.

The eeriness of being handed a laptop and equipment that would allow us to work remotely, thinking, "Oh, will this be seven days? Will it be 10 days? How long is this going to happen," before all of us went into this complete new darkness.

Alison Stewart: What did people want to talk to you about when you first went out and started reporting?

Arun Venugopal: We weren't really going out that much. We were really told our leadership, I guess, was very sensitive to the risks that we're taking on, so a lot of it was remote. It was by phone. We felt like we were just feeling our way through this new thing, not quite sure what we were living in. I remember only after many weeks, or even months, encountering somebody out on the street corner, who I had arranged.

Being that I live in a part of Queens where I know so many people in the neighborhood, some of whom were on the front lines of what was happening, actually meeting with somebody, wondering, "How close is too close?" You're backing off of them, trying to stay-- All these weird things about encountering people in person, and also, just at the same time, trying to understand who are the people who are falling through the cracks that we need to be hearing from.

Those are the moments that, actually, now, I still do really remember, is realizing that the social safety net is-- that there are huge gaps in it, people are falling through.

Alison Stewart: You live in Queens. Tell me about living in Queens, and what that was like, to work remotely from Queens.

Arun Venugopal: I can see Elmhurst Hospital out my window. It was very unsettling, for weeks on end, where you just heard the sound of sirens constantly, and you had the sense-- All my memories are of dark nights, empty streets. Even when I try to think of the daytime, it's hard to recover, like, daylight. It's almost like everything was just really eerie, and those sirens were really unsettling. You just tried to stay in. I had a dog, though. You got to take the dog out. You want to also just recover some semblance of normal.

You might walk several feet away from a friend who decided to meet with you. You're walking parallel paths, and hoping that you don't do something bad. Maybe you met in the garden of your building, sitting far apart, hoping that you don't do something bad there, and just thankful that you live in a community with people you have relationships with, that you can be going through this thing together, but also not sure--

If you're dropping off food for somebody who gets sick, if by going to the foyer of their building, "Am I going to get infected by something," or whatever it is. I think it was just scary for all of us.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to George, who's calling in from Sunnyside, Queens. Hi, George. Thank you so much for calling All of It. You're on the air.

George: Sure. Thank you. Good day to both of you. In December of 2019, I was diagnosed with prostate cancer. By the time I had my complete workup and was ready for treatment, I had the option of radiation or surgery. This was at the very beginning of the pandemic. It was unclear to me what the risk were of riding the train, because if I'd gone for radiation, it would have meant five days a week, twice a day, on the trains in and out of Manhattan.

I was fearful of COVID, so my option was to have surgery. The surgery was scheduled for the end of March, but Governor Cuomo put March 23rd as the last date for elective surgeries in New York State. My surgeon did a marathon session of prostate cancer surgery, starting at something like 8:00 in the morning, and working through the day, on all of his patients that were at high-risk metastasis, until 3:00 in the morning. That's my story.

Alison Stewart: Wow. Thank you for sharing it. Another person wrote in, "I broke my ankle as soon as Covid happened. I told my husband to bring me to the hospital, and he said he couldn't, because I could die. I found an orthopedist that had emergency hours and scheduled an emergency surgery right then."

Arun Venugopal: Wow.

Alison Stewart: It's amazing. I was thinking about all of the women who had to give birth by themselves.

Arun Venugopal: I know, I know. I shattered my wrist a couple months into it. The weirdness of going and coming out alone, and waiting, hoping that somebody who's supposed to pick you up would pick you up. Everything felt different, but there are people still showing up, going to those hospitals, and working, and just how heroic they were.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Arun Venugopal, WNYC and Gothamist reporter. We are talking about the 5th anniversary of the COVID pandemic in April. You spoke to a man named Eric. At this point, 10,000 New Yorkers had died from COVID in just that month alone. Probably more, if we really think about the months earlier. Tell us a little bit about Eric, what he was doing, what job he had.

Arun Venugopal: Eric was somebody who I think had friended me on Facebook in the months prior, and reached out to me. I'd had, I don't think, any contact with him, but he wrote me very eloquently about this experience into which he'd entered. Someone who had been a custom framist, who did fancy art frames, and who no longer had that work, because the pandemic, and had become an emergency-- he was handling COVID corpses in these emergency trailers, and thought that we needed to know about it.

At the time, I guess the city was not aware of how brutal this was and what was happening behind the scenes. Over the course of a few weeks, he and I talked a number of times, again, remotely from each other. He'd FaceTimed me into these COVID morgue trailers and whatnot. Really macabre, really scary, but I'm very thankful to him because it brought a story. I think that story was perhaps, for me, my most visceral and powerful glimpse into what was happening around us.

Alison Stewart: Yes. Let's listen to a short clip from your feature, which is about seven minutes long. It's definitely worth checking out. Here's Eric describing how he came to take the job.

Eric: I lurched. I said yes, without knowing why I was doing it, without knowing if I was at risk, without knowing what the cost would be.

Alison Stewart: We have Eric on the phone with us right now. Hi, Eric. How are you doing today?

Eric: I'm fine, thank you. Alison. Hello, Arun. Thank you for these moments, looking back at this collective tragedy.

Alison Stewart: When you think about it, how did that experience, working in the morgue, how did that change you?

Eric: That's a really powerful question. I think I'm still answering that question. A wise psychologist, who fell into my circle after I worked in the trailers, told me that trauma is a shape shifter and doesn't have a schedule, when it will appear, or what form it will take, and to be mindful that it travels with you. I don't think I was traumatized by this experience. I'd like to say that with that cautionary bit of advice, I'm still very, very grateful that I did it.

More than that, feel profoundly that it was a privilege to see what the pandemic really meant on the human scale in a neighborhood of neighbors, a neighborhood of aunts, uncles, cousins, and people at the bodega. I thought it connected me to the environment that makes New York City a fabric, in a way that was both incredibly hopeful, empowering, and compassionate, but also truly and viscerally expressed the danger of what the virus meant, and what the threat to society as a whole would emerge to mean.

Alison Stewart: Eric, thank you so much for your time and for making the effort to call. Did you want to respond, Arun?

Arun Venugopal: Well, I'm still, to this day, so grateful for people like Eric, who can so elegantly express these unfathomable experiences, and who are also willing to step forward, to almost betray the rules of social isolation, to go towards the fire. I remember so much about the experience of talking to him, and what it meant. There's someone else whose experience at the time meant a lot to me, who was a neighbor who I only got to know because of this work, and who was isolated severely.

Sharmila, she went hungry for days and days, like 10 or 12 days on end. She told me, on the third or fourth conversation we had, that she'd been eating paper to stay alive, because it's a different kind of social isolation, when we were more familiar with. These are these different sides in New York, people like Eric, who are willing to go towards danger and help out, and people like Sharmila, who fell through the cracks and almost died because of isolation.

I suppose the thing I think about a lot is, are we any better when it comes to taking care of our neighbors, looking out for them, five years later? I think that's something we should be really working on a little more.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Rose, from Wayne, New Jersey. Hi, Rose, thank you so much for calling All of It.

Rose: Hi, thank you for taking the call. Yes, it's heartbreaking to think back to those days. I know so many people were lost, but our particular situation was, we had just been visiting family in the Midwest. My mother, who was living in assisted living, and my husband's mother and father were living in, also, assisted living situation. We started driving back on the 12th, right after visiting with them, and not realizing that would be the last time we'd ever see them. They all passed away.

My husband's parents passed away, both from COVID, and unfortunately, my mom passed away because she was not getting the care she needed in the assisted living facility. They had so little staff, they had cut down to the bare minimum. Then, on the way home, we had gotten a call from our daughter and son-in-law, who were living in Brooklyn, who were just becoming so scared of what was happening around them that they asked if they could come back and stay with us, not knowing for how long.

They wound up being with us for six months. Yes. Until they were able to find a place. They had just put down their security deposits on their apartment and really lost out on all that, because they had to leave. My other daughter, who works in the city, someone died on her floor, so she had to insist to management that they go on a work-from-home situation, which the company was resisting. There were so many stories.

Alison Stewart: So many. Thank you so much for sharing that, Rose. It was interesting to see how companies, corporations, and small businesses, how they shifted so quickly in the city. I found that to be somewhat fascinating, actually.

Arun Venugopal: Yes. Yes. Yes, that's when you realize, these people who you don't necessarily appreciate what they did. Most definitely what they're doing to make your life, your work possible, keep you employed, all those things.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Bridget, from Easton, Connecticut. Hey, Bridget, thanks for calling All of It.

Bridget: Hey, it feels kind of petty after those terrible stories, but we had saved and waited for months and months to see Hamilton. We saw it on March 8th of that infamous week, not knowing, as you look around this damn theater, thousands of people, entertainers, everyone. The next week, it was gone. Everything was gone. It's not the fact of seeing Hamilton. It's just the world shifted, and we came off pretty well.

My sister worked at Mass General, and we didn't see her for two years because she said people were dying left and right, and she refused to come down because she said people came in, 20 years old, healthy as horses, and they were dead the next day. It was terrible. We were very blessed.

Alison Stewart: Yes. Bridget, thank you for calling in. That sort of was how it evolved. Like, "Oh, I can't see this show. I can't see this thing. I can't see this person. This person is ill. This person--" It was like that. It's just like a ball, rolling downhill, I remember.

Arun Venugopal: I really appreciate Bridget's call, just because when you think about something as mundane and typical as going and seeing a show, that's when you can almost understand the swirl of all those mega unfathomable forces around a little better. I think it's almost like you have to rescue those little moments from this fog.

Alison Stewart: And all those people who were in that show were then unemployed, which then led to a huge issue within our community. Before we wrap, has your view on the city changed at all in the past five years? Has one thing changed?

Arun Venugopal: The one thing I try to do or put into practice is, to the point I was making earlier, it's so easy to forget about people who need to be remembered, who need to be checked in on. If there's any one practice I've tried to get better at, it's partly because I was just emulating the example I saw from good friends, colleagues, and all who were good, about checking in. I still feel like it's like one of those things you are always practicing.

That's something I think I realized. People are so easily-- They just kind of recede into the shadows, and if you don't really make an effort, then there's a lot more of those people. I suppose that's the one thing I think I'm just trying to get better at, is checking in on people and thinking, "What's going on with this person," because it's just so many distractions, and if you don't do that, then things can go south.

Alison Stewart: That's good advice. Check in on folks.

Arun Venugopal: Yes.

Alison Stewart: WNYC reporter and Gothamist reporter Arun Venugopal. Thanks for sitting with us, Arun.

Arun Venugopal: Thanks. Sure thing. Thank you, Alison.