By Collin Taylor ’21
As I entered the neighborhood coffee shop in Tribeca, I immediately noticed a change. The normally cozy cafe vibe was gone. Instead an unwelcoming and almost cringe-worthy energy was present. It wasn't until after I received my food and headed for the door that I noticed the lack of tables or chairs.
Due to spring break college tours, I was in New York right before the city went into quarantine. When I first arrived I could tell something was off. The feeling of impending doom lay on everyone walking the streets like a weighted blanket, and I could clearly see it through the backseat window of my Uber. Suddenly, my phone was barraged with notifications from Twitter and Apple news that the stock market had just crashed, that feeling of impending doom had just become a reality.
The next day I woke up eager for my college tour only to see news stations announcing that campus visits and classes were cancelling.
I was able to take what the last college tour offered at Fordham University and then took an Uber downtown to eat at my favorite French restaurant in SOHO. When I entered, I got my first dose of what was to follow during this transition into quarantine. Every other table in the restaurant was missing, my first introduction into “social distancing. When walking on the streets of SOHO it almost seemed like a mask and gloves was a part of a uniform for the city’s people. Each storefront had an employee frantically wiping down door handles and shelves.
The next morning I decided to cut my trip short and head home. As soon as I got back to Richmond I realized that New York was not an isolated incident, and that my hometown and
most cities in our country would experience the same thing, although probably not to that magnitude.
A couple of days after I left New York's confirmed cases skyrocketed, they now have more cases than all of Italy. On April 2 New York experienced 731 Coronavirus related deaths. Experts predicted a peak much later and much more catastrophic. Their early peak is a direct result of their communities effort with social distancing and self isolation.
The following weeks I saw how New York's preemptive measures were successful in flattening the curve, and it gave me hope that we may see the same thing here and across the rest of our country.