The Searing Memories of the Pandemic’s Early Days

Good morning. It’s Tuesday. Today we’ll look at the pandemic, five years after it exploded in New York. We’ll also look at a contest to make a Manhattan, a cocktail with a history.

We knew it was coming. Five years later, we are still trying to make sense of it.

I remember spending almost a week in late January 2020 reporting a story that we published under the headline “Coronavirus in N.Y.: Without Chinese Tourists, Business Sags.” This was before the first cases in New York had surfaced.

The article said that demand for hotel rooms in tourist destinations like New York was already dropping. “It’s all stopped — zero,” said a travel agent in Flushing, Queens, who arranged tours of Manhattan, mainly for visitors from China. “No Times Square, no Empire State Building, no Metropolitan Museum, no Wall Street, no United Nations.”

The first confirmed case in New York City was reported on March 1. Then, in a prelude of what was to come, part of New Rochelle, N.Y., just north of the city, was sealed off as a “containment zone.” A lawyer who lived there and worked in Manhattan had contracted the virus. The neighbor who had driven him to a hospital had come down with it. More than 100 people with whom he had come in contact at his synagogue were told to go into quarantine at home.

The lawyer recovered. Many did not. In New Jersey, a family had dinner together, as they often did. Within days, four were dead, and an aunt died soon afterward.