A New York City Housing Authority retiree ticked off his running tally: an ex-wife sick, a daughter sick, and three old friends dead. In Queens, a young poet learned a friend’s parents are in the hospital, one on a ventilator.

And Qtina Parson of Parkchester, the Bronx, gave a grim reversal of the cheerful family updates one expects from the proud mother, sister and aunt that she used to sound like just a couple of weeks — a lifetime — ago.

“My nephew — sick, he’s 28,” she said. “Him and his girlfriend. My sister-in-law, she’s 46, she had it.” Her son, Marcus, 18, is with relatives in South Carolina, where he has developed a fever and a cough. “But he’s out there cutting grass,” she added, as if saying this aloud would make it true: “I’m telling him it’s his allergies.”

New Yorkers have watched in helpless fear as the coronavirus, with dizzying speed and ferocity, truly took hold of the city in recent days. With more than 1,500 dead, many have already lost someone in their circle — a co-worker, an old friend from high school, the parent of a child’s classmate. The parish priest, the elderly neighbor upstairs. A mother, a father.