Have We Hit a Plateau?

Jorie Mar
3 min readApr 6, 2020

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Journal Day 15: Life in my little corner of NYC in the Age of the Coronavirus, Sunday, April 5, 2020

NYC before the Coronavirus. Midsummer Night’s Swing, Lincoln Center, July 2018 © 2020 Jorie Mar

I was again talking on the phone during my walk (this is turning into a regular pattern), but I did hang up at one point to take this picture:

Cherry blossom trees all the way down one side of the block, near (but not in) the Forest Hills Gardens © 2020 Jorie Mar

The rest of the pictures are of groups of people in NYC before the Coronavirus.

I woke up this morning to find that my main online hangout — my online “home” for the last 10 years — had been shut down overnight with no advance notice.

On a brighter note, I used Zoom for the first time today, and I can see why it’s catching on. So easy to use.

The Oculus train station, lower Manhattan, on a Saturday in August 2018 © 2020 Jorie Mar

In his daily news conference, my TV boyfriend Cuomo said the number of deaths is going down. It looks like we might have hit a plateau, though it’s too early to tell if it’s the start of a trend or just a statistical blip. The opinion part of his talk was about dealing with cabin fever. He said to remember that this will end at some point — most likely when we have a quick antibody test that can be widely distributed — and that people have gotten through even worse periods of history before. He also said he was going to take up running.

Ice skaters in Central Park, December 2018 © 2020 Jorie Mar

I tried making a face mask from hair ties and a square of fabric cut from a t-shirt, the way I saw on several instructional videos, but it kept on slipping off. I have an order of paper masks that are supposed to come in tomorrow, and a box of gloves came in today. I didn’t go to the farmer’s market this morning.

By the evening, I had got in touch with some of the people from the now-shuttered forum. Tonight, in my building and in the buildings across the street, people were out at 7:00 p.m. on hundreds of balconies, playing music, clapping, banging on pots, and cheering in a nightly ritual to honor the city’s healthcare workers. So the day ended better than it began.

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Jorie Mar

Semi-hopeful New Yawka. Baby boomer. Inactive attorney. Content mill veteran. Aspiring humor writer. semihopeful@gmail.com Twitter: @semihopeful