For the most part, the concerned phone calls have stopped. “You’re leaving right? You’re going to…” and then they name some theoretically safer suburb or vacation community that I am not going to go to. But the calls have stopped because it’s too late to leave now. A few days ago, Dr. Deborah Birx, the response coordinator for the White House task force on the coronavirus, said that 60 percent of all the new cases in the United States are coming out of the New York City metro area, adding, “Everybody who was in New York should be self-quarantining for the next 14 days to ensure the virus doesn’t spread to others no matter where they have gone.”

If I wanted to leave, I should have left a month ago. But I have no intention of leaving.

I’m always enraged by the assumption that I would leave my city—the only place I've ever lived—in her hour of need. I am not leaving New York. Not that a smart person would stay. My apartment building is almost empty. And I can’t blame them. New York City isn’t normal. New York isn’t even post-9/11 New York. No, pandemic New York is completely different than any New York I’ve ever experienced in my 41 years of New York.

I’ve never left New York. I’m not one of those people who went to seek their fortunes elsewhere. I grew up in New York; both of my parents grew up in New York. My children are growing up in New York. This is not a phase for us; it’s a pathology. We are more New Yorkers than we are Americans. But the New York of right now is not the New York that we have known for all our respective lives. It’s more like post-nuclear-explosion Chernobyl.

We’re the epicenter of a pandemic. We’re Milan. We’re Wuhan. We’re a cautionary tale. Every day around 11 or so, Governor Andrew Cuomo tells us what’s happening in our broken city: “New York is your future. New York is a warning.” The warning is that other cities could soon drown in a sea of bodies, the way we are. Our morgues are almost at capacity. Our hospitals have lines that snake around the block. Our doctors are on TV every night begging for 99-cent masks to shield their faces. “The apex is higher than we thought, and the apex is sooner than we thought,” Cuomo told us on Wednesday. “New York is the canary in the coal mine. New York is going first.… What is happening to New York will happen to California and Illinois—it is just a matter of time.”