FDNY paramedics wheel a patient into the emergency room at NewYork-Presbyterian Lower Manhattan Hospital | AP Photo Scores of NYC workers have died on the front lines of the coronavirus fight

NEW YORK — Linda Pope was a Harlem school worker with a passion for her church, her husband of four decades and her stylish accessories. Gregory Hodge was a 24-year emergency medical technician who worked on the pile of rubble where the Twin Towers once stood. Quinsey Simpson was a guard at Rikers Island who rooted for the Georgetown Hoyas, loved race cars and his 7-year-old son Ayden.

They are among the scores of New York City civil servants who have died from Covid-19.


At least 138 municipal workers have succumbed to the highly-contagious virus, according to a POLITICO survey this week of the city’s uniformed agencies and some of its largest unions. The tally, which rose by the hour, provides a glimpse into the toll the illness has taken on some of the lowest-paid employees whose jobs demand their presence at a time when most New Yorkers have retreated to their homes.

They are safety agents who protected students before schools closed on March 16, maintenance crews who tidy up public housing apartments and social service workers who provide food stamps to the neediest residents.

New Yorkers don’t gather outside their jobs to cheer for them, as they faithfully do every night at 7 p.m. for hospital workers treating coronavirus patients. But their work is nevertheless essential for the city to slog along as the weight of the global pandemic bears down.

“City workers are overlooked, but in these trying times we realize how much we are needed. We rose to the occasion and some people gave some, and some gave all,” Gregory Floyd, president of the 24,000-member Teamsters Local 237, said on Thursday. “We must remember the sacrifices that were made.”

Hours earlier he updated the tally he is keeping of his members to 16. “Just lost a maintenance man [at] Fulton Houses in his 30s. Passed away this morning from Covid-19,” Floyd wrote in a text message, referring to a public housing development in Manhattan.

“Everyone recognizes the lead singer, but there’s a band playing behind them,” he said. “The band is our members.”

The deadly virus attacked Sidney Castiblanco, a 49-year-old paramedic, on two fronts.

First his 70-year-old father, Eresmildo Castiblanco, died in New York Presbyterian’s Queens hospital on March 27, nine days after complaining of chest pains. He had been receiving medicine and was in “great spirits” just two days before his kidneys failed him, his blood pressure shot up and his heart gave out, his son recalled.

His father, who moved from Colombia in 1986, worked as a janitor cleaning a medical clinic in Brooklyn. Two weeks before he died, a patient who had been infected with the coronavirus had been in the facility. “His manager told him that he had to clean the room really, really well,” Sidney said. “They didn’t give him anything — just a pair of gloves."

His immediate family held a five-minute ceremony outside a church in Queens before driving his body to the crematory — an unsatisfying memorial to his father's life, Castiblanco said.

“I spoke to him right before he went into being intubated. I told him, ‘Don’t worry, dad, they’re going to do everything they can to try to save your life,’” Sidney said. “He told me, pretty much, ‘I’m not coming back from this.’”

A few weeks later, Castiblanco responded to a call for a 57-year-old man in Queens whom he realized was the father of one of his partners on the squad. As he and his team tried to revive the dying man, his colleague paced around the house.

“I saw my dad there. It was like I was waking my father up,” Castiblanco said. The man was pronounced dead by the time the ambulance reached the hospital.

POLITICO’s tally of workers who have fallen to the virus includes 27 in the police department, seven in the Department of Correction, one sanitation worker and five members of the fire department — including a mix of emergency medical technicians, fire inspectors and an auto mechanic, according to spokespeople for each of the agencies.

The United Federation of Teachers reported another 44 active members who have died; the principals union lost two members and the largest municipal union, DC37, reported losing 43 additional workers beyond those already counted by the uniformed agencies.

But the death toll is likely higher.

It doesn't include the 59 workers for the MTA who died of the virus, many of whom work for the city’s sprawling transit system but are state employees. It also leaves out grocery store clerks and construction workers. A spokesperson for 32BJ SEIU, which represents building service workers, said 58 of its members have died from the virus nationwide, the majority of whom were located in New York City.

And it leaves out people who may have died from Covid-19, but were never tested.

The de Blasio administration estimates that at least 160 people on the city workforce have died. The mayor only recently disclosed that 50 Department of Education employees have died after facing backlash for withholding the numbers.

The city’s count includes employees from the police, correction, education, hospitals and homeless services agencies. A city spokesperson declined to provide figures for agencies where fewer than five people died.

Union leaders and employees have lamented the working conditions their members are made to endure — low pay for paramedics, insufficient protective gear for jail guards, unclear guidelines for maintenance workers in the city’s public housing authority.

One 33-year-old correction officer who contracted the virus said gloves were “non-existent” and masks were in such short supply that he only wore them sporadically. In an interview, for which he declined to be named, he discussed the difficulty he had obtaining protective gear before he headed to his job on Rikers Island.

“They were not prepared for it,” he said of the agency. “I don’t think they still are.”

Britton Alston, a retired correction officer who worked with Quinsey Simpson for more than 15 years, recalled his friend as someone who was calm under pressure and always answered his phone calls. Simpson used to coach varsity men’s basketball at Wyandanch High School, but still made time to drive to see his son Ayden in North Carolina every month.

“Simpson used to always tell me, ‘I’m going to retire and the next day, I’m moving to North Carolina,'” Alston said.

The correction officers union has sued the city over allegations it failed to adequately protect employees by not regularly sanitizing work areas and providing masks.

Vincent Variale, president of the Uniformed EMS Officers Union, expressed a similar concern.

“They were rationing masks for quite a while. We still are actually,” he said.

He said paramedics are responding to nearly double the number of daily 911 calls, all while making less money than firefighters. “I may have signed up for risks, but my family didn’t and that’s not right for the department to not give me the equipment I need to do my job,” he said.

At its peak, the absence rate from the FDNY due to the virus neared 25 percent, but is now around 16 percent — more than double the pre-virus rate, he said.

The police department reported 20 percent of its uniformed force out in recent weeks, but on Thursday Commissioner Dermot Shea said it had slowly crept down to 16.7 percent. So far 4,190 officers have tested positive and nearly 1,500 have returned to work.

“The good news is it’s going down every single day, the uniformed members who are out sick,” he said in a video posted on Twitter.

Henry Garrido, executive director of DC37, said three emergency medical technicians represented by his union quit on Thursday because of the difficult working conditions.

“They did that because they’re overworked, overwhelmed — and one of them was due to a promotion,” he said.

And Carl Giles, director of the housing division in the Teamsters, said New York City Housing Authority executives waited about three weeks to provide his team with adequate instructions for maintenance crews who work inside individual apartments. If they skip work, he said, they risk losing their jobs.

“I can’t say what I really feel because you’re not allowed to print profanity, but it hurt my heart,” Giles said in an interview. “It broke my heart to tears when I hear members who are terrified about going in a building because they have no gloves, they have no masks.”

The teachers union has launched a memorial website with pictures, biographies and comments to honor its members lost to the virus. Customary grief counseling sessions have been replaced with virtual gatherings on Zoom. And students don’t necessarily know when their teacher has died.

“They can’t be together in a school, they can’t teach together, they can't prep together,” Tina Puccio, director of the UFT’s member assistance program, said in an interview. “They want to mourn together.”

Deborah Morgan, a teacher of 35 years at P.S. 55 in the Bronx, is hoping to have an in-person memorial service for her 47-year-old colleague David Behrhom — a gym teacher at the school who had recently begun chemotherapy for a treatable type of leukemia. “Then he got Covid and the Lord just took him,” Morgan said.

Mike Greco, vice president of the EMS workers union, said he’s concerned about the psychological toll this will take on his members after the virus subsides.

Paramedics are responding to a flood of calls with less time to make life-or-death decisions. They have to leave scenes faster than they used to, given the volume of people in dire condition. And they are often left to wonder whether they could have done more to save a life, Greco said.

“There’s going to be a long-term effect of this for what we’re seeing out there that we’ve never seen before — the change in protocols, the amount of death that, under normal circumstances, we’re very good at disassociating from,” he said.

Now, he added, “it’s constant death.”