By Forum Staff
Mayor Eric Adams on Friday honored City health care workers, first responders, essential workers, and those who lost their lives to COVID-19 on the fifth anniversary of the first confirmed death in the five boroughs from the global pandemic that saw Gotham as its epicenter.
“More than 46,000 New Yorkers lost their lives to COVID-19 in the past five years — first responders, health care workers, teachers, essential workers, and more — but all of them left a whole were someone’s family,” Adams said. “Today, and every March 14 we will remember them. We will remember how the city came together to mask up, social distance, open up outdoor dining, test and trace, roll out vaccines, pivot to online learning, and work together in countless other ways to keep each other safe from the virus that took one too many of our fellow New Yorkers. Our administration’s mission is to make New York City a safe and affordable city, and we continue to re-commit to ensuring that New Yorkers are healthy and that we are prepared for any future crises.”
Since the pandemic was declared in the City in 2020, there have been more than 3 million cases of COVID-19 across the five boroughs, more than 240,000 hospitalizations, and more than 46,825 people have died from the virus. NYC Health + Hospitals/Elmhurst became the epicenter of the pandemic, and as emergency departments flooded with sick patients across all five boroughs, health care heroes sprang into action, Adams noted, rushing to the frontlines to provide care for their patients and fight back against an unknown virus that, at the time, left the world wondering about its infectivity, diagnosis, and treatment.
Adams praised City agencies for working to create initiatives to keep New Yorkers healthy and protect them from the virus five years ago. The City gave out more than 300 million pieces of personal protective equipment, using a whole-of-government approach to reach all corners of the city, including City Housing Authority residents and people with disabilities.
In an unprecedented move, New York City Public Schools administrators, teachers, and staff closed all schools and moved every classroom to remote learning to ensure that the city’s more than 1 million public school students could continue to learn. The city also opened Regional Enrichment Centers to serve as child care centers for first responders, health care workers, and transit workers while schools were closed to ensure health care and other essential services could continue uninterrupted. Schools stayed open through several additional waves of spiking COVID-19 rates thanks to a robust test kit distribution strategy by the city.
New York City restaurants also pivoted to outdoor dining to help reduce the spread of COVID-19, and by doing so saved nearly 100,000 jobs for working-class New Yorkers. Today, thanks to the Adams administration, New York City has broken the total jobs record high for the 10th time since Mayor Adams took office with 4.86 million jobs. And since the pandemic, the outdoor dining program, now entitled “Dining Out NYC,” has become permanent — giving New Yorkers access to the largest permanent outdoor dining program in the country.
The led the largest municipal testing and contact tracing program in the country. At the peak of its operations, Test & Trace maintained a network of over 250 community-based and mobile testing sites, ensuring testing for COVID-19 was provided in neighborhoods with the least access to testing resources. Test & Trace was able to track more than 3 million cases of COVID-19 and close contacts of positive patients through its innovative program. Its contact tracing effort created millions of opportunities to break chains of transmission and provided those exposed the resources they needed to safely quarantine or isolate, including by providing 2.2 million free meals and over 600,000 care packages to those in isolation or quarantine. Test & Trace also created a Hotel Isolation program that helped over 33,000 people safely quarantine or recover from COVID-19 without unnecessarily exposing others.
Over the course of the pandemic, NYC Health + Hospitals, including Test & Trace, DOHMH, and hundreds of city and community partners administered more than 14.5 million COVID-19 tests and provided over 150 million free COVID-19 rapid antigen at-home tests.
Once COVID-19 vaccines became available, the city rolled out its efforts to vaccinate every New Yorker. The city’s vaccine campaign prevented an estimated 48,000 deaths, 300,000 hospitalizations, and 1.9 million cases of COVID-19. The Vaccine Command Center spearheaded the city’s fight against COVID-19 by providing real-time troubleshooting and rapid response across public and private providers, including urgent care centers, private pharmacies, hospitals, and community vaccination sites. The Vaccine Command Center established a fleet of mobile and traveling vaccination teams that ensured at least 90 percent of residents in the
DOHMH data shows that more than 7.5 million New Yorkers received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, a 91 percent citywide vaccination rate. Additionally, DOHMH’s Public Health Corps worked to close the vaccination gap and increase vaccination rates among Black and Latino New Yorkers. Their efforts resulted in linking and referring more than 1.1 million residents from priority communities to vaccination sites.
“Five years after a state of emergency because of COVID-19 was declared in our city, New York City Emergency Management’s commitment to 24/7 readiness endures,” said City Emergency Management Commissioner Zach Iscol. “We carry with us the memory of lives lost, countless families forever changed, and the personal impact this crisis had on each of us as New Yorkers. During the pandemic, together with our city agency partners, we transformed vacant spaces into alternate care sites, delivered millions of meals to our neighbors, and surged medical personnel. We built isolation hotels, translated critical messages into 25 languages, and forged deep partnerships with community leaders, all while innovating by establishing ‘cascading impacts’ planning and remote emergency operations center activations to navigate the overlapping crises. Our city’s density, diverse communities, and the ever-evolving landscape of emergencies mean that our agency must remain dynamically adaptive. As we mark this somber anniversary, we reaffirm our dedication to ensuring that our agency remains the bedrock of New York City’s preparedness and resilience, honoring the memory of those we lost by building a safer future for all.”
