This coming week will mark one year since the #coronavirus #pandemic reached #LongIsland. Here’s my #LIHerald.com editorial to mark this grim anniversary:
The coronavirus pandemic reached Long Island a year ago next week, at first bringing a handful of cases before it dug in and exploded, wreaking havoc. We failed to see it coming until it was too late. We failed to imagine its destructive power.
Nassau County’s first reported case was a 42-year-old Uniondale man who worked at Mercy Medical Center in Rockville Centre and was treated at NYU Winthrop Hospital in Mineola, now NYU Langone.
His case was reported last March 3. Three days later, Uniondale Schools Superintendent Dr. William Lloyd said in a statement, “The district has been in close contact with Nassau County and New York state health officials, and we have been told that at the current time, there is no reason to take any additional precautionary or preventive measures than those we already have in place.”
By mid-March, schools had shut down. Nassau County Executive Laura Curran gave the order to close them for two weeks. Students didn’t return to their school buildings until September, learning, as best as they could, virtually, using new and unfamiliar online platforms like Zoom and Google Classroom.
Businesses shuttered, some never to return. Hospitals — and the brave women and men who staff them — were quickly overwhelmed by the coronavirus case-load. So were funeral homes. Death, it seemed, was everywhere.
And so here we are, a year later, battered and bruised, many of us filled with anxiety because of a job loss, economic issues or simply the uncertainty that the coronavirus has brought to all of our lives.
“Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” the saying goes. After a full year of coping with a relentless disease, watching too many family members and friends fall prey to it, we are tired, ready for this nightmare to be over. We need to feel normal again.
We are wiser, however.
To read the full editorial, click here.
