Midday News: State of Emergency After Long Island Wildfires, NJ Hospital Redevelopment Faces Pushback, and NYC Still Feeling COVID’s Long-Term Effects

Janae Pierre: Welcome to NYC NOW, your source for local news in and around New York City from WNYC. It's Monday, March 10th. Here's the midday news from Michael Hill.

Michael Hill: New York is under a state of emergency after weekend wildfires burned the Pine Barrens region of Long Island. WNYC's Tiffany Hanssen has more.

Tiffany Hanssen: The fires started on Saturday, prompting the closure of Sunrise Highway, a major thoroughfare to the island's east end. Thanks in part to four National Guard helicopters dropping more than 20,000 gallons of water, the fires are now largely contained. Those helicopters remain on standby as Governor Hochul warns that strong winds and dry weather will continue through today. State police drone teams are providing live monitoring of the fires, and a burn ban is in place for Long Island, New York City and parts of the Hudson Valley through March 16th.

Michael Hill: Orange, New Jersey has plans to turn a historic shuttered hospital into apartments and more, but WNYC's Mike Hayes reports the idea has opponents.

Mike Hayes: Orange Memorial Hospital opened in 1906 and was once home to Thomas Edison's lab, but it closed in 2005 and has fallen into disrepair. Now the city has approved the developer's $350 million plan to create a gated community with 1,000 apartments, but some locals say the plan is wrong for a city where one in five people live in poverty, according to census data. A coalition of faith-based groups and tenant associations are pushing the developer to add locally-owned businesses and affordable housing to the plan.

Michael Hill: Developer Terrence Murray says he's open to community input. 57 and sunny right now, sunny and 62 for a high, very spring-like today, the same tomorrow, then Wednesday and Thursday we'll see a slight cooling off in the low 50s.

Janae Pierre: Stick around. There's more to come.

Announcer: NYC NOW.

David Furst: On WNYC, I'm David Furst. The New York City area is still grappling with the effects of the COVID pandemic five years after it first shut down the city. While many are back at their jobs five days a week, some things haven't returned to what we once called normal. WNYC's Arun Venugopal joins us to talk about the ways our lives have been permanently altered, sometimes in ways that are maybe not so obvious. Five years later, Arun, how do you make sense of the pandemic?

Arun Venugopal: I can't say that I have. 40,000 New Yorkers, David, died from the virus, many of them without their loved ones by their side. Also think of all the New Yorkers who just kept going to work because they had to. The emergency room physicians, the nurses, the orderlies.

David Furst: A term that suddenly popped into use early in the pandemic was essential workers. What did this mean for the city's labor force?

Arun Venugopal: I think it was a term that we hadn't necessarily used. It wasn't in wide usage prior to the pandemic. I put this question to Michael Morris, a professor at Columbia Business School. He's the author of the 2024 book Tribal. He called it an ennobling category for a wide variety of hardworking people.

Michael Morris: It's a unifying frame, a resonant frame that brings together groups like emergency room physicians and EMTs that we are used to thinking of as glorified heroes with supermarket stalkers and food delivery folks from restaurants who weren't ever before put into that category of frontline workers or workers helping to keep the vulnerable alive.

Arun Venugopal: Morris says he doesn't think the term essential workers has the same power as it did at the height of the pandemic, but one of the legacies of that moment can still be seen with the city's delivery workers. The pandemic prompted them to start organizing and to start demanding better wages, better working conditions, and they have really achieved significant results. There's been a whole raft of city laws. They recently secured this $17 million settlement from DoorDash.

The head of Los Deliveristas Unidos, he told me he's really proud of what they've achieved and all that began in the first months of the pandemic.

David Furst: One of the most visible and profound effects of the pandemic was on the city's school system. Five years later, what's the legacy of the pandemic on young New Yorkers?

Arun Venugopal: This was the first big city in America to reopen its schools, but it's been a struggle. You have kids who have returned to classrooms. At the same time, there are high rates of chronic absenteeism, anxiety, depression. Teachers say they're dealing with behavioral challenges that they didn't have to deal with prior to the pandemic. Dan Weisberg is the city's deputy schools chancellor, and he says, as a city, as a country, we haven't really taken the time to fully process the trauma of the pandemic and specifically how it affected young people.

Dan Weisberg: The kids, even if they were young, they knew that somebody close to them had passed away due to COVID. They knew that their parents were very, very stressed out over a long period of time. Our kids are amazingly resilient, and they have recovered to a great extent, but those impacts on learning, those impacts on social development, we probably won't fully understand them for quite some time.

David Furst: How has the pandemic affected our mental health?

Arun Venugopal: It created a really deep sense of social isolation for a lot of people, a sense of loss. Nearly 40% of New Yorkers reported feelings of anxiety and depression in that spring of 2020, according to a survey by the US Census Bureau. That figure has since dropped to less than 20%, but for many New Yorkers, the pandemic became a time to take advantage of online therapy. The CEO of a mental health nonprofit called the Jewish Board, his name is Dr. Jeffrey Brenner, he says prior to the pandemic, all of their work was done in person, and today, three quarters of the therapy visits are done remotely.

A big, huge change there. The jury is still out on results of in-person versus online therapy, although there have been studies that have found pretty comparable outcomes, David.

David Furst: What about remote work? Many people found themselves working from home who never expected to. For some now, the idea of going back into the office full time may feel daunting.

Arun Venugopal: Yes. The city completely emptied out early in the pandemic, but even with congestion pricing that's recently been introduced, you could say the city's really bounced back in a big way. New York, now leads the nation in terms of workers who head into their office. That's because of companies like JP Morgan and Amazon, which require their workers to come back in. I spoke to Anat Lechner, she's a professor at NYU Stern.

She says she doesn't expect that trend to continue indefinitely, but she says the big question is not whether more workers will return to their office settings, but how corporations will adapt given the growth of artificial intelligence, AI. she says in 2020, we did not have ChatGPT, for instance, but in 2022, we did. Now all those workers, millions of workers who are working remotely, that work isn't happening face to face. It's not happening with just conversations in a conference room. It's happening over machines. Those machines, they're studying and they're learning.

Anat Lechner: Once the machine learns, then we become not as essential, shall I say it mildly.

Arun Venugopal: Lechner says the implication of this shift is pretty significant in ways that all those millions of people who do prefer a work-from-home lifestyle don't necessarily recognize.

David Furst: Arun, you're saying Zoom has seen enough David Furst at this point, and I can be replaced.

Arun Venugopal: Not in my heart.

David Furst: Thank you for that. Arun Venugopal, thanks for joining us today.

Arun Venugopal: Thank you so much, David.

David Furst: You can read more reporting from Arun and our colleagues Caroline Lewis, David Brand and Jessica Gould on how COVID-related trends continue to affect health, education and the workplace on our news site, Gothamist.

Janae Pierre: Thanks for listening. This is NYC NOW from WNYC. Check us out for updates every weekday, three times a day, for the latest news, headlines and occasional deep dives, and subscribe wherever you get your podcast.

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