View from the epicenter

When former Creston News Advertiser staff member Mike Falco left Iowa in 2006 to pursue a master’s degree in media studies at The New School, a private research university in New York City, he was lured by the hustle and bustle of the Big Apple.

“It’s very surreal here now,” said Falco, 38-year-old native of the Kansas City suburb of Overland Park, Kansas. “I am a social person. You don’t live in New York to be isolated. You’re used to being around people, going to shows, enjoying the city and the park. All those things are gone.”

Falco joined the News Advertiser as sports editor in June 2004 after graduating from Creighton University in Omaha. He also served as assistant managing editor under editor Stephani Finley for the last six months of his stay, before moving to New York in December 2006.

Fourteen years later, he remains a New Yorker as associate director of Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics (INCITE) at Columbia University. He and his partner reside in a high-rise apartment building on the upper west side of Manhattan, north of Central Park and Times Square. He can walk to work at Columbia, just a few blocks away.

That is, he used to walk to work regularly. Like so many Americans now, Falco has been working at home since March 10 under social distancing since the spread of the coronavirus. As associate director of the grant-funded research organization, he checks in once a week at the office to monitor operations there.

Falco restricts his outside time to his dog’s daily walks, or trips to the market for essentials. He has noticed that social distancing has become a way of life even on the crowded streets and sidewalks of Manhattan.

“I have to leave the building to take the dog on walks,” Falco said. “It’s almost a little harrowing. There are 240 apartments in our building. There are people around, but everybody is being respectful of personal space, not getting on the elevator if you’re already on it. As you’re walking, unless they’re not paying attention, they maintain distance from you. You don’t have large numbers of people congregating at the intersections waiting for the (traffic) light to change.”

The number of fatal cases in New York City rose 25% in 24 hours Wednesday, pushing the city’s death toll to nearly 2,000. Gov. Andrew Cuomo warns of a pandemic surge that is still two weeks away, at least.

The transmission rate in the tri-state area has been relatively high as the virus moved rapidly through the region’s dense population. The death toll in New York state is pacing to eclipse that of 9/11 by next week.

The city has become noticeably quiet during the past three weeks. From his apartment building, he watches a scene more resembling his second-floor apartment view on West Montgomery Street in Creston, than the nation’s largest metropolitan center.

“I’m on the 19th floor of our building looking down on the street outside, and there is no traffic,” Falco said during a phone conversation at 8 p.m. Tuesday. “But, I’ve seen five ambulances go by in the 20 minutes we’ve been talking. There’s no traffic and hardly any people on the sidewalks, so there’s nothing to absorb the sound of the ambulances. That’s the sound you hear all day.”

From above, Falco watched the construction of a field hospital in Central Park’s East Meadow.

Trip cancelled

Falco and others in his organization have been anticipating an outbreak of COVID-19 domestically since January, when his annual trip to China for an ongoing project was cancelled by the university.

“We run a program in China and Korea, and three days before we were scheduled to leave in early February, the university asked that we cancel those plans because (the virus) was there,” Falco said. “At that time we started to feel something similar was imminent in the city, and by the first week of March we made contingency plans for moving our operations remote instead of at our physical plant. It seemed obvious. People (only American citizens) were still coming back from China without any testing or checking of their temperatures. New York is too international for it not to be obvious it would happen here, after it swept through China and Italy.”

New York is primed for a rapid outbreak, he noted.

“There are just so many people in such a small area,” Falco said. “Our building is almost as populated as some of the towns around Creston. There are probably over 1,000 people in this one building, and on this block alone there are another 20 buildings like it. The subways were operating as usual with 300 people jammed into a car. We’re used to having people up in our space here, shoulder to shoulder. That’s life here.”

Behavior changes

As Falco and colleagues had observed how behaviors changed in China after dealing with the 2002 SARS epidemic, Falco predicts the lasting effects of COVID-19 in this country will be noticeable in society.

“I’ve spent enough time in China that I can see the legacy of SARS that went through there,” Falco said. “People were being respectful about space, they were wearing masks, washing frequently with good hygiene. It was a scaring and a scary thing. I really think this situation now will transform how American people think about public spaces. It could be a radical transformation. I can see 14 restaurants in a three-block radius from our apartment, all shuttered now. Many are not coming back, I’d predict. Some things, like delivery services, are thriving. The shift could stay in that direction.”

INCITE has embarked on many large-scale research projects, including a compilation of the oral history of the Obama presidency that will be preserved as a national archive. The company’s most recent development is designing a project for the National Science Foundation on an oral history of the COVID-19 outbreak. Numerous interviews will be conducted in the same manner as a similar project after 9/11.

Meanwhile, Falco is living day to day in his apartment, trying to avoid contracting the virus.

“We live very close to St. Luke’s Hospital and I can look out over Central Park and see the field hospital they’ve constructed there,” Falco said. “We know people who work in the health care industry and they’re trying to brace for the expected peak in about two weeks. It’s like we’re living in a never-ending feeling of anxiety. A co-worker who is pregnant was advised to leave the city to have her baby, because it would be hard to rely on the hospital system at that point. She went out of state with family.”

Falco tries to remain optimistic.

“The city will bounce back,” Falco said. “But, I would predict we might still be living this way to mid-June or so. Until they can test people quickly and get it under control by tracing who they’ve been around after a positive test, and the new cases are low enough, we won’t really be released to the lifestyle we had before.”