Covid-19’s Impact in the U.S. Image The normally busy Columbus Drive in Chicago was nearly empty on Monday, days after Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois announced a shelter-in-place order. Credit... Charles Rex Arbogast/Associated Press The coronavirus is changing how we live our daily lives. Taking a look at how the global pandemic has affected various aspects of life in the United States reveals the unique nature of this crisis. For the latest on how the coronavirus is changing lives in the U.S., read Tuesday’s live updates.

A soirée in Connecticut is a story of how, in the Gilded Age of money, social connectedness and air travel, a pandemic has spread at lightning speed.

Coronavirus is one of the biggest stories most publications will ever cover. But it has left many of them struggling to stay solvent.

In the sporting world, athletes are overwhelmingly in favor of delaying the Summer Olympics. Two of basketball’s biggest stars, LeBron James and Giannis Antetokounmpo, are trying to find ways to pass the time.

The uncertainty about how long this will last and what will happen next leaves many of us mourning current losses as well as ones we haven’t experienced yet. Here’s how to cope.

March 23, 2020, 9:00 p.m. ET March 23, 2020, 9:00 p.m. ET By Elizabeth Williamson and An upscale party in Connecticut became a ‘super spreader.’ Here’s how. Image Businesses have in Westport, Conn., where a surge in coronavirus cases has been reported. Credit... Dave Sanders for The New York Times About 50 guests gathered on March 5 at a home in the stately suburb of Westport, Conn., to toast the hostess on her 40th birthday and greet old friends, including one visiting from South Africa. They shared reminiscences, a lavish buffet and, unknown to anyone, the coronavirus. Then they scattered. The Westport soirée — Party Zero in southwestern Connecticut and beyond — is a story of how, in the Gilded Age of money, social connectedness and air travel, a pandemic has spread at lightning speed. The partygoers — more than half of whom are now infected — left that evening for Johannesburg, New York City and other parts of Connecticut and the United States, all seeding infections on the way. The party “may be an example of the kind of thing we call a super-spreading event,” said William Hanage, an associate professor of epidemiology at Harvard, especially since some of the partygoers later attended large social events in the New York metropolitan area, where cases of the virus are high. Worry, rumors and recriminations engulfed the town. Political leaders fielded hundreds of emails and phone calls from residents terrified that their children or vulnerable family members had been exposed. Who threw the party, and who attended? They wanted to know. Rumors flew that some residents were telling health officials they had attended the party so they could obtain a scarce test. As the disease spread, many residents kept mum, worried about being ostracized by their neighbors and that their children would be kicked off coveted sports teams or miss school events. One local woman compared going public with a Covid-19 diagnosis to “having an S.T.D.” “I don’t think that’s a crazy comparison,” said Will Haskell, the state senator who represents Westport. He has been fielding frantic phone calls from constituents. “This is life or death,” he said in an interview. “Westport really is a cautionary tale of what we’re soon to see.” Sheila Kaplan contributed reporting from Washington. Kitty Bennett contributed research. Read more

March 23, 2020, 8:30 p.m. ET March 23, 2020, 8:30 p.m. ET By When handling loss, let each person do it their own way. There is collective anxiety surrounding Covid-19, but there’s also collective loss. Here are some ways to help navigate through our losses. 1. Acknowledge the grief Although anxiety is unpleasant, it can be easier to acknowledge anxiety than to acknowledge grief. That’s because there are two kinds of anxiety: productive anxiety and unproductive anxiety. Grieving, on the other hand, is a much quieter process. It requires us to sit with our pain, to feel a kind of sadness that makes many of us so uncomfortable that we try to get rid of it. In the age of coronavirus, a child might say: “I’m so sad that I’m missing seeing my friends every day” and the parent, trying to lessen the child’s pain, might say: “But honey, we’re so lucky that we’re not sick and you’ll get to see your friends soon!” A more helpful response might be: “I know how sad you are about this. You miss being with your friends so much. It’s a big loss not to have that.” Just as our kids need to have their grief acknowledged, we need to acknowledge our own. The more we can say to ourselves and the people around us, “Yes, these are meaningful losses,” the more seen and soothed we will feel. 2. Stay in the present There’s a term to describe the kind of loss many of us are experiencing: ambiguous grief. In ambiguous grief, there’s a murkiness to the loss. With Covid-19, on top of the tangible losses, there’s the uncertainty about how long this will last and what will happen next that leaves us mourning our current losses as well as ones we haven’t experienced yet. (No Easter, no prom, and what if this means we can’t go on summer vacation?) Ambiguous grief can leave us in a state of ongoing mourning, so it’s important for us to stay grounded in the present. Instead of futurizing or catastrophizing — ruminating about losses that haven’t actually happened yet (and may never happen) — we can focus on the present by adopting a concept I call “both/and.” Both/and means that we can feel loss in the present and also feel safe exactly where we are — snuggled up with a good book, eating lunch with our kids who are home from school, taking a walk with a family member, and even celebrating a birthday via FaceTime. We may have lost our sense of normalcy, but we can still stay present for the ordinary right in front of us. 3. Let people experience loss in their own way Although loss is universal, the ways in which we grieve are deeply personal. For some, the loss of stability leads to a reckoning with mortality, while for others, it leads to a rehaul of one’s closet or stress-baking. In other words, there’s no one-size-fits-all for grief. Even Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s familiar stages of grieving — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance — aren’t meant to be linear. Everyone moves through loss in a unique way, so it’s important to let people do their grieving in whatever way works for them without diminishing their losses or pressuring them to grieve the way you are. A good rule of thumb: you do you (and let others do them). Lori Gottlieb is a therapist and the author of “Maybe You Should Talk to Someone.” Read more

Advertisement Continue reading the main story

March 23, 2020, 8:15 p.m. ET March 23, 2020, 8:15 p.m. ET By A city meeting in Florida grows tense. A screenshot from a video shows the interaction between Pam Triolo, the mayor of Lake Worth Beach, and a city commissioner, Omari Hardy. Credit... Screenshot from YouTube HOLLYWOOD, Fla. — The mayor of Lake Worth Beach, Fla., and a city commissioner had an exchange last week, captured in a two-minute-and-17-second video clip, that provided a glimpse into the high-stakes tension facing local government officials across the country amid the coronavirus outbreak. Debates over shutdowns and containment measures and their economic impact are boiling over as stakes rise. The city commissioner, Omari Hardy, had watched the news as the coronavirus transformed from a distant outbreak to a threat to local lives. Mr. Hardy thought the city of about 38,000, which stretches seven square miles not far from President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, needed to act quickly to blunt the spread of the coronavirus and to protect the city’s most vulnerable. He wanted officials to immediately ban large public gatherings, stop shutting off delinquent electric and water accounts, establish more protections for city workers and find out who had lawful emergency powers. Mr. Hardy said that he had tried to arrange a special commission meeting for a week as cases in Florida multiplied, but that at every turn, his requests were dismissed by the city manager, Michael Bornstein, who at one point told him to “calm down.” So by the time the five-member commission met on Thursday, Mr. Hardy was seething. And it would not be long before everybody knew it. At the end of a fraught two-hour meeting, Mr. Hardy unleashed his exasperation on Mayor Pam Triolo and Mr. Bornstein in a fiery speech that would be alternatively characterized on social media as heroic and disrespectful after it was posted online last week by The Palm Beach Post. “This is a banana republic is what you’re turning this place into with your so-called leadership,” Mr. Hardy shouted at Ms. Triolo in the meeting, his voice booming. “We should have been talking about this last week. We cut off people’s utilities this week and made them pay what could have been their last check — to us — to turn their lights on in a global health pandemic. But you don’t care about that. You didn’t want to meet.” Ms. Triolo did not sit idly by. She repeatedly slammed the gavel to recess the meeting and quiet Mr. Hardy. And she yelled right back at him. Ms. Triolo, in her fourth term as mayor, suggested that Mr. Hardy’s rant was intentional grandstanding for attention — he is running for a Florida State House seat. Mr. Bornstein acknowledged that service to dozens of residents had been suspended earlier, but he said no utility disconnections had taken place since a moratorium was announced on Wednesday, the day before the explosive meeting. Those customers had already had their service restored, he said, and fines had been reversed. Read more

March 23, 2020, 8:00 p.m. ET March 23, 2020, 8:00 p.m. ET By Tiffany Hsu and It is the story of a lifetime, and it’s crippling some publications. Copies of Riverfront Times, a local weekly, stacked inside a closed coffee shop in St. Louis. Credit... Whitney Curtis for The New York Times The coronavirus pandemic is one of the biggest stories most publications will ever cover. But it has left many of them struggling to stay solvent. Alternative weeklies and daily papers in small and midsize cities across the United States were already suffering because of the recession last decade, the migration of readers from print to online and the decline of the advertising business. Since 2004, roughly one-fourth of American newspapers — more than 2,000 — have been lost to mergers or shutdowns, according to researchers at the University of North Carolina. Most were weeklies. The arrival of the coronavirus shook the industry’s already weakened economic foundation. As ad revenue and the money generated by events sponsored by small publications started to evaporate, many papers have canceled print editions, laid off workers or asked readers for donations. Among those affected: Metro Weekly, a magazine about gay issues in Washington, D.C.; First Touch, a soccer publication in New York; and Gaming Today, a gambling newspaper in Las Vegas. “One of the big problems with all of this is you don’t know when this is going to end,” said Doyle Murphy, the editor in chief of Riverfront Times. “Even when people can go out of their houses again, it’s going to take a long time for business to come back to what it was.” Read more

March 23, 2020, 7:30 p.m. ET March 23, 2020, 7:30 p.m. ET By On March 11, Loretta Dionisio became a data point. This is her story. Loretta and Rodrigo Dionisio, center, with, from left, their son-in-law, Chris Connelly, daughter, Rowena Dionisio-Connelly, daughter-in-law, Cathrina Dionisio, and son, Rembert Dionisio. Her name was Loretta, but they called her Lettie. She stood 4 feet 10 inches tall. She was outrageously friendly, the kind of person liable to invite the sales clerk at T-Mobile to join the family for dinner. This made her children cringe but was also something they loved. Pure Lettie. She was tough. At work, she could stare down colleagues who were hairy, blustery and taller than her by a foot or two. And it was true of her husband, Roddy. He could not say no to her. Roddy had not wanted to go on their February trip to the Philippines. He was watching the early news about the coronavirus, and worried it would put his wife, a cancer survivor, in danger. But she was adamant. There was something she needed to finish. On March 11, Loretta Dionisio became a data point. In the ongoing tally of fatalities associated with the coronavirus, hers was the 37th death in the United States, the first in Los Angeles County. After she tested positive for the virus, the family was occupied with crisis management, five or six hours a day of phone calls to public health officials, the crematory, hospital staff. Not only their father, but also their aunt and uncle, and another aunt and cousin, have been ordered to self-quarantine. A memorial gathering, for now, is out of the question. “We don’t want to put any other family members in harm’s way,” Ms. Dionisio’s son, Rembert, said. “That’s what makes everything really rough right now. It’s almost taken away from what is happening with my mother.” Sarah Mervosh contributed reporting from New York, Amy Qin from Beijing and Jason Horowitz from Rome. Kitty Bennett contributed research from New York. Read more

Advertisement Continue reading the main story

March 23, 2020, 7:00 p.m. ET March 23, 2020, 7:00 p.m. ET By Stacy Cowley and Small businesses seek a lifeline beyond loans. “We’re not that profitable,” said Donna Benefiel, who owns grocery stores in Oregon. “How do we borrow a year’s worth of money and then have to pay it back?” Credit... Amanda Lucier for The New York Times The Federal Reserve on Monday resurrected an asset-purchase facility from the 2008 financial crisis intended to encourage banks and financiers to make loans to small businesses and households. It also plans to announce a new Main Street Business Lending Program designed to support lending to “eligible small and medium-sized businesses” but offered few details. A disaster loan program is already up and running. Congress authorized up to $7 billion early this month for small business disaster loans through the Small Business Administration. Unlike the agency’s flagship loans, which are made by banks, disaster loans are issued directly by the government. But the main federal lifeline offered so far — low-interest disaster loans — is unappealing to many small business owners running on thin margins and leery of taking on debt they can’t afford to repay as they’ve been forced to close and lay off employees. “All we do is make enough money to make it through the off-season,” said Donna Benefiel, who owns the Sunset Produce Market in Banks, Ore., and a grocery store on the Oregon coast. “We’re not that profitable. We don’t have any reserves. How do we borrow a year’s worth of money and then have to pay it back?” Borrowers who own their homes often risk losing the property if they can’t repay what they borrowed. Terms like that spook business owners, especially now, when there is little clarity around when and how the coronavirus pandemic will subside, and whether mom-and-pop shops will ever recover. The Trump administration and lawmakers have discussed plans for a bailout that could top $2 trillion, including direct payments to individuals and aid for battered industries like the airlines. A memo circulated on Wednesday by the Treasury Department proposed $300 billion for small business “interruption” loans. That would be a vastly larger program than anything the government has previously run. Last year, the Small Business Administration backed $28 billion in loans issued by banks; its disaster program lent out just over $2 billion. The agency is used to ramping up quickly to disburse loans after natural disasters like floods and earthquakes — after Hurricane Harvey in 2017, it processed most loan applications in less than three weeks — but its track record with large economic disasters is troubled. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, Congress ordered the S.B.A. to partner with banks on zero-interest loans of up to $35,000 to “viable” small companies hurt by the recession. The program was laden with complex rules, and fewer than 9,000 companies took the loans. Nearly half of the applications approved did not meet all of the agency’s rules, auditors estimated. And many vulnerable businesses cannot afford to wait weeks for a cash infusion. The median small company takes in $381 a day and spends $374, a 2016 analysis by the JPMorgan Chase Institute found. The typical business has enough savings to survive just 27 days. Read more

March 23, 2020, 6:30 p.m. ET March 23, 2020, 6:30 p.m. ET By Remote locations worry about a rash of ‘crisis tourists.’ Khara Tapay Jabola-Carolus was recently at a Target in Honolulu and noticed an influx of “crisis tourists,” people who’ve traveled from the contiguous United States to Hawaii seeking more isolation amid the coronavirus pandemic. “We have a weak social safety net and an economy overly dependent on tourism,” she wrote to The New York Times’s Dilemmas column. “These outsiders could push us over the edge, especially because tourists are often prioritized at the expense of local residents.” It’s an instant national ethical dilemma, exacerbating already-tense relationships between rich and poor, urban and rural, and, in the case of Hawaii, largely white outsiders and more diverse locals. Who gets to shelter where? Or take the last sack of flour at a small supermarket? Destinations known for welcoming visitors are now closing themselves off. After Ms. Jabola-Carolus wrote, Hawaii announced a mandatory 14-day quarantine for all incoming travelers. Southeast Utah has prohibited lodging for nonessential visitors, and Colorado has announced it doesn’t want tourists either. The Outer Banks of North Carolina are shut to nonresidents. The Maine island of North Haven went even further, barring all visitors, including seasonal residents. History shows that may be the correct call. During the 1918 influenza pandemic, Gunnison, Colo., erected barricades over its highways (“against the world,” in the words of a county physician) and quarantined anyone who entered. Neighboring towns were decimated, but Gunnison’s losses were low. Yerba Buena, an island in San Francisco Bay with a military base and a population of 5,000, locked down for two months with similar results. Projections of the virus’s spread show the brutal truth: Fellow city dwellers, we pose a threat to everyone else. But these remote locations are already flooded with visitors who may not be going home for months. Some sort of compact will be necessary, according to interviews with officials in rural and resort towns, second-home owners and coronavirus expatriates. So, before relocating, consider whether farther truly equals safer, especially if you’ll be far from the kind of vast medical corps found in major cities, as well as friends and neighbors to count on in an emergency. Grace Ashford contributed research. The Times’s new Dilemmas column offers guidance on how to navigate daily life during the coronavirus. Whether or not the virus has reached your neighborhood, what’s swept into everyone’s lives is a set of confounding dilemmas. So send yours to dilemmas@nytimes.com. There’s a saying in journalism: The solution is always more reporting. And that’s what we’ll do here. Read more

March 23, 2020, 6:00 p.m. ET March 23, 2020, 6:00 p.m. ET By Rosie O’Donnell hosts a fund-raiser with Broadway’s stars. Rosie O’Donnell, left, and Adrienne Warren, right, during Sunday night’s fund-raiser. Credit... Screengrab from The Rosie O'Donnell Show A lot happened during the just-this-once edition of “The Rosie O’Donnell Show” that streamed live Sunday night — that would be expected with an event lasting three and a half hours. But it will be hard to top Adrienne Warren, the star of “Tina: The Tina Turner Musical,” singing “Simply the Best” in a bathtub, clad in a bathing suit worthy of a 1970s Bond girl. At the end of the song, she whipped out a tiny toy saxophone. What made this surreal scene even more memorable was that by then a beaming Warren had already attempted the song twice, each time foiled by her audio feed. As a running gag, it was sheer perfection, and the obvious accidental nature just made it more endearing. This was not the only time technical difficulties hampered the online “The Rosie O’Donnell Show,” in which the participants — the vast majority of them from the Broadway or Broadway-adjacent community — called in from their homes. But these glitches only added to the D.I.Y. charm of the evening, a benefit for the Actors Fund (an organization that supports a wide range of professionals in film, theater, television, music, opera, radio and dance). It felt like a hybrid talk show, Jerry Lewis telethon and the entertainment the United Service Organizations provided during World War II. Hosting “from the comfort of my garage-slash-art studio” and wearing a “Hamilton” hoodie, O’Donnell eased back into the role she held on daytime from 1996 to 2002, years during which she established herself as one of Broadway’s most devoted superfans. The community repaid the affection by turning up in droves for the virtual shindig, most of them live and some on video message. The star-studded lineup — first names are not necessary with the likes of Chenoweth, Benanti, LuPone, Menzel, McDonald, Fierstein, Salonga — included performers who, in normal times, could rarely be free on the same evening. This sudden availability was a bittersweet reminder that these are not normal times. Read more

Advertisement Continue reading the main story

March 23, 2020, 5:30 p.m. ET March 23, 2020, 5:30 p.m. ET By Penina Krieger and Medical students, largely sidelined, are finding creative ways to help out. Image Georgetown University School of Medicine students volunteering at the Capitol Area Food Bank in Washington on Thursday after their rounds were canceled. Credit... Carolyn Kaster/Associated Press As hospitals around the United States brace for an ongoing surge in coronavirus cases, one question they are grappling with is whether medical students should be deployed to help care for patients infected with the virus. For now, the nation’s 90,000 medical students have been largely sidelined from patient care during the crisis. The reasoning is that sending medical students home helps conserve scarce personal protective equipment — including masks, gloves and gowns. It also gives schools time to educate students on Covid-19 should the students eventually be needed for patient care. Disappointed by the abrupt halt to their training, medical students around the country have responded with grass-roots efforts to secure masks, staff patient call centers and even provide child care for beleaguered doctors. “I thought I’d be learning to listen to the heart and lungs or conduct an outpatient interview, but that’s not what is needed right now,” said Elyse Berlinberg, a second-year medical student at N.Y.U. “Part of the role of being a physician is being part of the community and knowing their needs and responding to them. I think the service we are doing now is part of forming our professional identity.” Read more

March 23, 2020, 5:00 p.m. ET March 23, 2020, 5:00 p.m. ET By Missing the fine arts? We’ve got you covered. Image The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is offering a virtual 360-degree tour of its spiraling rotunda. Patrick Stewart reads Shakespeare on Twitter, Ballet Hispánico is on Instagram and art galleries are expanding online offerings. If you’re stuck at home and hankering for the fine arts, there’s plenty online. Since the coronavirus pandemic began temporarily shutting down performing arts venues and museums around the world, cultural organizations have been finding ways to share their work digitally. Performances are being live-streamed, archival material is being resurfaced and social media platforms like Instagram, YouTube and Facebook are serving as makeshift stages, concert halls and gallery spaces. Here’s a list of some of what’s streaming and otherwise available on the internet. The offerings are increasing by the day, so be sure to check in with your favorite arts institutions to see what they’re providing as things develop. And check back here for updates. Read more

Advertisement Continue reading the main story

March 23, 2020, 4:00 p.m. ET March 23, 2020, 4:00 p.m. ET By A close family copes with social distancing after their mother’s cancer diagnosis. The Wilkinson family — two parents and four teenage-to-20-something children — all live in the same house in California. They’re so close that, ordinarily, their idea of fun is to all pile onto Mom and Dad’s bed to watch “The Bachelor.” But in late January, Diana, a 56-year-old math teacher, learned she had a rare, aggressive form of endometrial cancer and a 50 percent chance of survival. Her husband and children have been told to keep their distance, because chemotherapy has left her vulnerable to infection. The family is especially jittery because one daughter recently returned from Italy after her study abroad program skidded to a halt. Another is a U.S. Marine who spends weekdays on a base where others have tested positive for the novel coronavirus. Meagan Wilkerson has become the enforcer, telling her mother to separate herself. Mrs. Wilkinson feels hurt. Meagan feels guilty. So the Wilkinsons are living a more acute version of our collective dilemma: longing for connections they once took for granted, terrified of making mistakes and unsure how to get through the coming months. “I break the rules sometimes,” Mrs. Wilkinson confessed, choking back tears. “‘Just put on some clean clothes and lie down next to me,’” she said she tells her children when she can no longer bear being several feet away. Image The Wilkinsons are living a more acute version of America’s collective dilemma, trying to abide by seemingly impossible new rules. Credit... Anna Wilkinson To seek help for the Wilkinsons, and the rest of us, I turned to authorities on how to cope with social distancing: therapists who advise cancer patients and their families, including during treatments like stem-cell transplants, which can involve prolonged isolation and other measures to guard against infection. Ian Sadler, a psychologist at Columbia University Medical Center, gently dismissed Meagan Wilkinson’s fear that she would damage her mother by not hugging her. Distancing can be an act of care, he said. A lack of embrace is now an embrace. Allison Applebaum, a psychologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan, worried about the burden on the Wilkinson children. Maintaining complete distance and cleanliness, monitoring contact and food, is “an enormous source of anxiety,” she said, for them and now everyone else. “You can’t do it perfectly a hundred percent of the time.” Note to everyone who is wiping, washing and Clorox-ing these days: in some cancer caregivers, the responsibility of constantly trying to eliminate germs contributes to post-traumatic stress symptoms, she said. To find a substitute for cuddling, Dr. Applebaum suggested an exercise she does with her patients. If a father longs to play ball outside with his son, she asks him: “What was it about playing ball in the backyard that was meaningful? Was it about the ball, or was it connecting with him?” The goal is to find an alternate activity that delivers similar satisfaction. Grace Ashford contributed research. The Times’s new Dilemmas column offers guidance on how to navigate daily life during the coronavirus. Whether or not the virus has reached your neighborhood, what’s swept into everyone’s lives is a set of confounding dilemmas. So send yours to dilemmas@nytimes.com. There’s a saying in journalism: The solution is always more reporting. And that’s what we’ll do here. Read more

March 23, 2020, 3:30 p.m. ET March 23, 2020, 3:30 p.m. ET By A group challenges Washington’s plans for disabled people with the coronavirus. A 200-bed field hospital was erected on a soccer field in Shoreline, Wash., as officials prepared for an influx of coronavirus patients. Credit... Jason Redmond/Reuters In what could prove to be a hot topic nationwide, groups representing people with disabilities on Monday challenged a plan that would guide hospitals in Washington State dealing with the coronavirus in the event that they do not have enough lifesaving resources for all the patients who need them. The triage care plan could result in end-of-life decisions that disadvantage those with disabilities, said David Carlson, the director of advocacy at Disability Rights Washington. The group’s complaint calls for the federal government to quickly intervene to investigate, issue findings and make sure that doctors and hospitals do not discriminate against people with disabilities when making treatment decisions. “Washington’s rationing scheme places the lives of disabled people at serious risk,” the advocacy groups wrote in the complaint to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Service’s Office of Civil Rights. The complaint in Washington State was the first to be filed, but advocates for the disabled said they expect to scrutinize similar triage plans around the country to see if they provide equal access to lifesaving care to people with disabilities. The federal government “has a very brief moment to intercede,” the complaint said. If it does not, it said, “there will be no way to undo the lethal outcome of the discriminatory plans that have been formulated without O.C.R.’s guidance.” Read more

March 23, 2020, 3:00 p.m. ET March 23, 2020, 3:00 p.m. ET By Doormen are on the front lines of New York City’s crisis. Alberto Ventura is the doorman at 1111 Park Avenue in Manhattan. Credit... John Taggart for The New York Times They are the white-gloved sentries, standing guard at New York City’s better addresses, so signature a feature of life here that we tend to forget that in other metropolitan centers uniformed doormen (and, less often, women) barely exist. They form a small army, some 35,000 residential doormen, concierges, porters, handymen and supers represented by a powerful union, 32BJ. They open doors, of course, load cars, receive packages, pass dogs off to professional walkers and in general make themselves indispensable to an ease of life many in this demanding town take for granted. Yet as protectors of the border between public and private, doormen play a role crucial to the currents of the metropolis, one never more evident than now when the front line of a global pandemic is that threshold. “Yes, it’s a job, but we also try to keep the building as a home,” said Alberto Ventura, 65, who has worked the door at the same Park Avenue building for 42 years. “With the virus, we’re trying to take it a day at a time and be as calm as we can.” It has become the job of those in his line of work not just to swab elevator buttons with Lysol five times daily, but also to restore the psychic equilibrium of those to whom bad things are not supposed to happen. At increased risk to themselves, the staffs at most high-end buildings throughout the five boroughs find themselves scrambling to institute hygienic measures. They are also enforcing daily changing guidelines, establishing ad hoc networks of notification, caring for the old and vulnerable left behind by an exodus that has rendered the Upper East Side a ghost town. “We’re not a hazmat crew but we’re doing what we can,” Jimmy Brennan, 40, the resident manager of a cooperative building on Fifth Avenue, said of his nine-member team. “The trick here is anticipating the needs and problems before they come up.” At Mr. Brennan’s building in the East 70s, that meant appealing to his board of directors — well before the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued stringent updated safety guidelines — for a go-ahead to shut down the gym and common areas, to suspend nonemergency contractors, to seal off floors left vacant by tenants who fled the city and to establish a phone tree and daily wellness check-ins with those that remained. “Our population is mostly aged 60 to 100, 85 is a pretty common number here,” said Mr. Brennan, a third-generation building manager whose extended family oversees 30 separate buildings around New York. “History will judge whether it was better for us to be proactive than reactive. But, for now, I’d rather be effective than popular.” Read more

Advertisement Continue reading the main story

March 23, 2020, 2:30 p.m. ET March 23, 2020, 2:30 p.m. ET By Coronavirus is a unique challenge for doctors who specialize in other things. Dr. Scott Isaacs, an endocrinologist in Atlanta, said he had been barraged with calls from his diabetes patients asking about how to get tested and treated for the coronavirus. Credit... Johnathon Kelso for The New York Times The coronavirus has created an unusual situation for many medical specialists who serve as the primary physicians of patients with particular medical needs. Physicians across every field who are trained to care for very specific medical problems are confronting a surge of patient questions and they are scrambling to keep up with rapid changes in case numbers and advisories from governments and health agencies. “We’re hearing a lot of anxieties from specialists who don’t know what the right thing to do is for their patients,” said Dr. Megan Ranney, an emergency physician in Rhode Island. “Dermatologists, ophthalmologists, we’re even hearing from dentists.” Discussions with some of those doctors reveals a changing world for doctors of all specialties.

March 23, 2020, 2:00 p.m. ET March 23, 2020, 2:00 p.m. ET By Sales of vitamins rise as shoppers look to fortify their immune systems. A convenience store worker organizing a newly-arrived shipment of vitamins and other supplies in New York City earlier this month. Pharmacies across the country have placed limits on the amount of certain supplements people can buy. Credit... Jeenah Moon/Getty Images Dietary supplement sales have surged nationwide as panicked consumers stock up on vitamins, herbs, extracts, and cold and flu remedies. None of these products have been shown to lower the likelihood of contracting the coronavirus or shortening its course, and taking large doses of them can potentially do harm. But experts say that the jump in sales suggests many people are desperate to strengthen their body’s immune defenses and ease their heightened anxiety levels. There are times when taking a supplement can be very useful, like during pregnancy or to address a clear nutrient deficiency. But for healthy adults who are worried about the coronavirus, eating a nutritious diet and getting proper sleep and exercise are the best ways to strengthen your immune system, said Linda Van Horn, chief of nutrition in the department of preventive medicine at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. Whole foods like fruits, vegetables, fish, poultry, nuts, legumes and milk contain a wide range of vitamins, minerals and phytochemicals — including zinc and vitamin D — that work in synergy to protect your health.

Advertisement Continue reading the main story

March 23, 2020, 1:00 p.m. ET March 23, 2020, 1:00 p.m. ET By Home buying and mortgage refinancing plans face complications. Downtown in Red Bank, N.J. The last few weeks saw a surge in mortgage applications, especially from borrowers seeking to refinance in the face of low interest rates, and many of those loan closings are scheduled now. Credit... Bryan Anselm for The New York Times The last few weeks saw a surge in mortgage applications, especially from borrowers seeking to refinance in the face of low interest rates, and many of those loan closings are scheduled now. But the coronavirus outbreak has snarled many spring home-buying plans, as apartment buildings ban open houses, real estate agents shutter brokerages and quarantines make it tough to even step outside. Now, another obstacle: The closure of government recording offices, as all nonessential employees in New York and other states have been told to stay home. Squirreled away in county buildings, and probably not high on the list of things buyers care about, these offices are nevertheless vital to the buying and refinancing processes, as title searches and deed filings happen inside. Most lenders require a title search for refinancing. “The machine is being overwhelmed at this point,” said Bob Jennings, the chief executive of ClosingCorp, a tech platform involved in a third of the country’s home-loan applications. All told, as of Friday, about 1,000 of the country’s 3,600 recording offices had shut down or curtailed their hours, according to the American Land Title Association, a trade group crowdsourcing a closures list. A lack of staff doesn’t totally derail business. About 2,100 of the 3,600 offices allow electronic filings. But a human being ultimately has to process those filings, known as e-recordings, “so if no one’s there, the pipeline is still blocked at the end,” said Steve Gottheim, a senior counsel with the title association, which is urging officials to leave at least skeleton crews in the offices. If a deed fails to be recorded in a timely manner, lenders can get spooked by the potential for fraud. Without a public record, a devious seller could technically sell a house twice. Read more

March 23, 2020, 12:30 p.m. ET March 23, 2020, 12:30 p.m. ET By If cooking from your pantry, make a vegetarian skillet chili. Credit... Melissa Clark Are you ready for another bean dish? I sure am, which is a good thing considering how many kinds of beans I have on hand. (I’m not hoarding; I’m just extremely well stocked.) Over the weekend, I put a couple of cans of beans to work in a quick vegetarian skillet chili. Like every recipe I’m writing about lately, it’s very adaptable. You can use any kind (or kinds) of beans, swap out the spices, skip the tomatoes — or double them, if your can is bigger than mine. Skillet chili also happens to be fast and easy, good recipe traits whether you’re overwhelmingly busy or anxious, or a little of each. This recipe starts, like many great dishes, by sautéing an onion or shallots or leeks in some oil with a pinch of salt (any kind of oil, any kind of allium). When tender and golden at the edges, add minced garlic and a jalapeño or other chile if you have one. Let it all cook until it starts to smell delicious, then add spices — chili powder, cumin, coriander — and let those toast for a minute to bring out their flavors. Crumble in some dried oregano or marjoram, if you like, and add two 15-ounce cans of drained beans (any kind) and any size can of tomatoes with their liquid. (I used a 15-ounce can of diced tomatoes.) Simmer it all for 15 to 20 minutes, so the flavors can meld. Taste, and add more salt and spices if the chili needs it. I like to serve this with sliced red onions that I’ve soaked in lime juice, and a pinch each of salt and sugar. But jarred pickled peppers are great, too, as are sliced scallions and a nice, fat, optional dollop of sour cream or yogurt. This makes enough for three or four people, or freezes perfectly if you’re by yourself. In this series, Melissa Clark will teach you how to cook with pantry staples. Check back Tuesday for another installment. Last week’s recipes:

Monday: Dried beans.

Tuesday: Baked oats.

Wednesday: Canned tuna pasta.

Thursday: Any-vegetable soup.

Friday: Pantry crumb cake. Read more