In New York, confined, sick and dead, between silence and sirens

New York

There are these usually crowded sidewalks, now deserted. The homeless, whom we barely discerned a few days ago in the anthill of Manhattan, and who impose themselves on the eye, reigning on a piece of macadam on the fringes of a society attacked by a killer virus. And then there are the sirens. These hoots of FDNY vehicles (firefighters) and ambulances, a familiar link in New York DNA, no longer have anything to do with the American dream. Each tornado reminds the cloistered residents, the unconscious joggers and walkers who continue to claim a normal life, that at the back of the vehicle, a patient fights for his life, in a state of acute respiratory distress.

Read also: Coronavirus: in the United States, "a decentralized and unequal health system"

Even a semblance of normal life no longer exists around the Elmhurst Hospital in Queens - the neighborhood most exposed to the pandemic. As the tabloid New York Post notes on its front page, a patient now dies every seventeen minutes, and no longer at the rate of one per hour,

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