Four Years Ago Today, It Was the Beginning of the End: The Pandemic Shuttered Broadway. The Rest of the World Followed
The events of four years ago today are indelibly engraved in my memory like almost no other, except perhaps where I was when the space shuttle exploded, where I was when
And then there was March 12, 2020.
I had arrived back in the States a few days earlier and my closest friend, John, was flying back to New York City that day. We had both gone to theaters in the West End. While John was in the air, Governor Andrew Cuomo announced that events with more than 500 people must be cancelled or postponed, an executive order specifically designed to close Broadway theaters, which all have a minimum of 500 seats.
John arrived and called me once his aircraft was on the ground and it fell to me to tell him the news: ”They shut Broadway down.”
A desolate Grand Central Terminal, the third-busiest train station in North America, during the height of the pandemic
This, of course, was merely the tip of the iceberg. I had been writing about Covid since late December and on a daily basis since mid-January, becoming an armchair epidemiologist in the process.
The rest of the month was no better. The day before, the World Health Organization declared the novel coronavirus outbreak to be a global pandemic. Then, on March 13, then President Trump declared a national emergency and, the following day, the first two deaths from SARS-CoV-2 in New York State occurred. A 65-year-old man from Suffern, in Rockland County northwest of New York City, died on the 13th, county officials said and the following day, an 82-year-old woman who had been one of the first to test positive in New York City for the virus died on the 14th in Brooklyn, Governor Cuomo announced at the time.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended that any gatherings of people in the country be limited to no more than 50 people on March 15, and New York City’s Board of Education announced that the Big Apple’s schools would close the following day.
That news was followed in lockstep on March 17, when all restaurants and bars were told to close, except for delivery, and on March 2, Governor Cuomo Governor Cuomo signed the New York State on Pause executive order, a 10-point policy to assure uniform safety for everyone in the state.
At that point, there had been 7,102 confirmed cases in the state.
The United States became the country with the most reported deaths from the virus, a position that four years later remains the same. There had been 1,300 deaths in the country and the most affected state had been New York, with 38,987 cases and 432 deaths, according to the data the Coronavirus Morning News Brief (now Coronavirus Daily News Brief) maintained from official government sources.
(Photo: Accura Media Group)
