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Tag: early months

  • Why the National Guard Won’t Make the Subways Safer

    Why the National Guard Won’t Make the Subways Safer

    The millions of people who crowd into New York City’s busiest subway stations every day have recently encountered a sight reminiscent of a frightening, bygone era: National Guard troops with long guns patrolling platforms and checking bags.

    After 9/11 and at moments of high alert in the years since, New York deployed soldiers in the subway to deter would-be terrorists and reassure the public that the transit system was safe from attack. The National Guard is now there for a different reason. Earlier this week, Governor Kathy Hochul sent 1,000 state police officers and National Guard troops into the city’s underground labyrinth not to scour for bombs but to combat far more ordinary crime—a recent spate of assaults, thefts, and stabbings, including against transit workers.

    The order, which Hochul issued independently of the city’s mayor, Eric Adams, prompted immediate criticism. Progressives accused her of militarizing the subways and validating Republican exaggerations about a spike in crime, potentially making people even more fearful of using public transit. Law-enforcement advocates, a group that typically supports a robust show of force, didn’t like the idea either.

    “I would describe it as the equivalent of putting a Band-Aid on a hemorrhage,” William Bratton, who led the police departments of New York, Boston, and Los Angeles, told me. “It will actually do nothing to stop the flow of blood, because it’s not going to the source of where the blood is coming from.”

    David A. Graham: The subway-crime death spiral

    Bratton’s success in reducing subway crime as the chief of New York City’s transit police in the early 1990s led then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani to appoint him as NYPD commissioner. He returned to the post under a much different mayor, Democrat Bill de Blasio, nearly two decades later. During a 40-minute phone interview yesterday, Bratton acknowledged that many New Yorkers perceive subway crime to be more pervasive than it really is; rates of violent crime in New York City (and many other urban centers) have come down since the early months of pandemic and are much lower than they were in 1990, when he took over the transit police.

    Bratton is most famous—and, in the minds of many, notorious—as a practitioner of the “broken windows” theory of policing, which calls for aggressive enforcement of minor crime as a precondition for tackling more serious offenses. The idea has been widely criticized for being racially discriminatory and contributing to mass incarceration. But Bratton remains a strong proponent.

    He blamed the fact that crime remains unacceptably high for many people—and for politicians in an election year—on a culture of leniency brought on by well-intentioned criminal-justice reformers. Changes to the bail system that were enacted in 2019—some of which have been scaled back—have made it harder to keep convicted criminals off the streets, Bratton said, while city leaders are more reluctant to forcibly remove homeless people who resist intervention due to mental illness. Bratton said that police officers are less likely to arrest people for fare evasion, which leads to more serious infractions. “We are not punishing people for inappropriate behavior,” Bratton said.

    The subways need more police officers, Bratton said, and Adams had already announced a deployment of an additional 1,000 last month. But an influx of National Guard troops won’t be as effective, he argued. They can’t arrest people, and the items they are looking for in bags—explosive devices and guns, mainly—aren’t the source of most subway crime. The highest-profile incidents have involved small knives or assailants who pushed people onto the subway tracks. “What are the bag checks actually going to accomplish?” he asked. “The deterrence really is not there.”

    Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

    Russell Berman: What did you think of the governor’s decision to send the National Guard and the state police into the subways?

    William Bratton: I would describe it basically as a public-relations initiative that is the equivalent of putting a Band-Aid on a hemorrhage. It will actually do nothing to stop the flow of blood, because it’s not going to the source of where the blood is coming from.

    The problem with crime in the subways, as with crime in the streets, is the idea that we are not punishing people for inappropriate behavior, whether it’s as simple as a fare evasion or something more significant—assaults and robberies and, in some instances, murders.

    The presence of the National Guard in the subway system is not needed, not necessary; nor are, for that matter, state troopers. The NYPD and the MTA are fully capable of policing the subways and the train systems.

    Berman: This is going to remind people of what New York was like in the months and years after 9/11, when you routinely saw National Guard troops doing bag checks in busy stations. Was it more effective to do that then, because people were worried about what was in those bags? Now they are more worried about other things.

    Bratton: That was appropriate then. People understood that what the National Guard was looking for in that era were bombs. So the bag checks made sense. It wasn’t so much the level of crime in the subways. What they were fearful of was terrorists, so the use of the National Guard for that purpose was appropriate at that time.

    What is the problem in terms of crime in the subway? It is the actions of the mentally ill, who have been involved in assaults and shoving people onto the tracks. It is the actions of a relatively small number of repeat criminals. And what are the bag checks actually going to accomplish? If you are carrying a gun, if you’re carrying a knife, you walk downstairs and see a bag check, you’re going to walk back up the stairs and down the block and go in another entrance and go right on through. So the deterrence is really not there.

    William Bratton: Police reform needs to come from within

    Berman: Did those bag checks back then after 9/11 ever find anything significant, or was it mostly for making people feel like someone was watching?

    Bratton: I’m not aware that anything was ever detected. Might something have been deterred? Possibly somebody who was coming into the subway with a device and decides, Well, I’m not going to do it after all. But I can’t say with any certainty or knowledge.

    Berman: Governor Hochul is also proposing a bill that would allow judges to ban anyone from the public-transit system who has been convicted of assault within the system. What do you make of that?

    Bratton: It would be difficult to enforce. They’d be banned from the system, but if they’re on the system behaving themselves, who’s going to know?

    Berman: Earlier you mentioned that law enforcement should be punishing fare evasion more than they do. When people hear that, they might think of the “broken windows” theory of policing. These people aren’t necessarily violent; they’re just jumping the gate. Is your argument that you’re trying to address higher-level crime by prosecuting lower-level crime?

    Bratton: “Broken windows” is correcting the behavior when it’s at a minor stage before it becomes more serious. Somebody who’s not paying their fare might be coming into the subway system with some type of weapon. Oftentimes they’re coming into the system to commit a crime—or, if they encounter a situation in the subway, out comes a box cutter, out comes the knife, out comes the gun. The situation escalates.

    Russell Berman

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  • Long-Haulers Are Trying to Define Themselves

    Long-Haulers Are Trying to Define Themselves

    Imagine you need to send a letter. The mailbox is only two blocks away, but the task feels insurmountable. Air hunger seizes you whenever you walk, you’re plagued by dizziness and headaches, and anyway, you keep blanking on your zip code for the return address. So you sit in the kitchen, disheartened by the letter you can’t send, the deadlines you’ve missed, the commitments you’ve canceled. Months have passed since you got COVID. Weren’t you supposed to feel better by now?

    Long COVID is a diverse and confusing condition, a new disease with an unclear prognosis, often-fluctuating symptoms, and a definition people still can’t agree on. And in many cases, it is disabling. In a recent survey, 1.6 percent of American adults said post-COVID symptoms limit their daily activities “a lot.” That degree of upheaval aligns with the Americans With Disabilities Act’s definition of disability: “a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities.”

    But for many people experiencing long COVID who were able-bodied before, describing themselves as “disabled” is proving to be a complicated decision. This country is not kind to disabled people: American culture and institutions tend to operate on the belief that a person’s worth derives from their productivity and physical or cognitive abilities. That ableism was particularly stark in the early months of the pandemic, when some states explicitly de-prioritized certain groups of disabled people for ventilators. Despite the passage of the ADA in 1990, disabled people still confront barriers accessing things such as jobs and health care, and even a meal with friends at a restaurant. Most of our cultural narratives cast disability as either a tribulation to overcome or a tragedy.

    Consequently, incorporating disability into your identity can require a lot of reflection. Lizzie Jones, who finished her doctoral research in disability studies last year and now works for an educational consultancy, suffered a 30-foot fall that shattered half of her body a week before her college graduation. She told me that her accident prompted “radical identity shifts” as she transitioned from trying to get the life she’d imagined back on track to envisioning a new one.

    These are the sorts of mindset changes that Ibrahim Rashid struggled with after contracting COVID in November 2020, when he was a graduate student. He dealt with debilitating symptoms for months, but even after applying for disability accommodations to finish his degree, he “was so scared of that word,” he told me. Rashid was afraid of people treating him differently and of losing his internship offer. Most terrifying, calling himself disabled felt like an admission that his long COVID wasn’t going to suddenly resolve.

    Jennifer Senior: What not to ask me about my long COVID

    Aaron Teasdale, an outdoors and travel writer and a mountaineer, has also been wrestling with identity questions since he got COVID in January 2022. For months, he spent most of his time in a remote-controlled bed, gazing out the window at the Montana forests he once skied. Although his fatigue is now slowly improving, he had to take Ritalin to speak with me. He was still figuring out what being disabled meant to him, whether it simply described his current condition or reflected some new, deeper part of himself—a reckoning made more difficult by the unknowability of his prognosis. “Maybe I just need more time before I say I’m a disabled person,“ he said. “When you have your greatest passions completely taken away from you, it does leave you questioning, Well, who am I?”

    Long COVID can wax and wane, leaving people scrambling to adapt. It doesn’t mesh with the stereotype of disability as static, visible, and binary—the wheelchair user cast in opposition to the pedestrian. Nor does the fact that long COVID is often imperceptible in casual interactions, which forces long-haulers to contend with disclosure and the possibility of passing as able-bodied. One such long-hauler is Julia Moore Vogel, a program director at Scripps Research, who initially hesitated at the idea of getting a disabled-parking permit. “My first thought was, I’m not disabled, because I can walk,” she told me. But if she did walk, she’d be drained for days. Taking her daughter to the zoo or the beach was out of the question.

    Once she got over her apprehension, identifying as disabled ended up feeling empowering. Getting that permit was “one of the best things I’ve done for myself,” Vogel told me. She could drive her kid to the playground, park nearby, and then sit and watch her play. After plenty of therapy and conversations with other disabled people, Rashid, too, came to embrace disability as part of his identity, so much so that he now speaks and writes about chronic illness.

    Read: The future of long COVID

    Usually, the community around a disease—including advocacy among those it disables—arises after scientists name it. Long COVID upended that order, because the term first spread through hashtags and support groups in 2020. Instead of doctors informing patients of whether their symptoms fit a certain illness, patients were telling doctors what symptoms their illness entailed. And there were a lot of symptoms: everything from life-altering neurocognitive problems and dizziness to a mild, persistent cough.

    As long-COVID networks blossomed online, members began seeking support from wider disability-rights communities, and contributing fresh energy and resources to those groups. People who’d fought similar battles for decades sometimes bristled at the greater political capital afforded to long-haulers, whose advocacy didn’t universally extend to other disabled people; for the most part, though, long-haulers were welcomed.

    Tapping into conversations among disabled people “has shown me that I’m simply not alone,” Eris Eady, a writer and an artist who works for Planned Parenthood, told me. Eady, who is queer and Black, found that long COVID interplayed with struggles they already faced on account of their identity. So they sought advice from disabled Black women about interdependence, mutual aid, and accessibility, as well as about being dismissed by doctors, an experience more prevalent among women and people of color.

    Disabled communities have years of experience supporting people through identity changes. The writer and disability-justice organizer Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha told me that when she was newly disabled, she was dogged with heavy questions: Am I going to be able to make a living? Am I datable? Her isolation and fear dissipated only when she met other young disabled people, who taught her how to be creative in “hacking the world.”

    For long-haulers navigating these transitions for the first time, the process can be rocky. Rachel Robles, a contributor to The Long COVID Survival Guide, told me she spent her early months with long COVID “waking up every day and thinking, Okay, is this the day it’s left my body?” Conceiving of herself as disabled didn’t take away her long COVID. She didn’t stop seeing doctors and trying treatments. But thinking about accessibility did inspire her to return to gymnastics, which she’d quit decades earlier because of a heart condition. If she couldn’t lift her hands over her head sometimes, and if a dive roll would never be in her future, then so be it: Gymnastics could be about enjoying what her body could do, not yearning for what it couldn’t. Before she identified as disabled, returning to gymnastics “was something I would have never, ever imagined,” Robles said. And she never would have done it had she remained focused only on when she might recover.

    Read: Long COVID is being erased—again

    Hoping for improvement is a natural response to illness, especially one with a trajectory as uncertain as long COVID’s. But focusing exclusively on relinquished past identities or unrealized future ones can dampen our curiosity about the present. A better way to think about it is “What are the things you can do with the body that you have, and what are the things you might not know you can do yet?” Piepzna-Samarasinha said. “Who am I right now?”

    Lindsay Ryan

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  • The Coronavirus-Naming Free-for-All

    The Coronavirus-Naming Free-for-All

    These days, it’s a real headache to keep tabs on the coronavirus’s ever-shifting subvariants. BA.2, BA.4, and BA.5, three Omicron permutations that rose to prominence last year, were confusing enough. Now, in addition to those, we have to deal with BQ.1.1, BF.7, B.5.2.6, and XBB.1.5, the version of Omicron currently featuring in concerned headlines. Recently, things have also gotten considerably stranger. Alongside the strings of letters and numbers, several nicknames for these subvariants have started to gain traction online. Where once we had Alpha and Delta and Omicron, we now have Basilisk, Minotaur, and Hippogryph. Some people have been referring to XBB.1.5 simply as “the Kraken.” A list compiled on Twitter reads less like an inventory of variants than like the directory of a mythological zoo.

    The nicknames are not official. They were coined not by the World Health Organization but by an informal group of scientists on Twitter who believe Omicron’s many rotating varieties deserve more widespread conversation. The names have, to an extent, caught on: Kraken has already made its way from Twitter to a number of major news sites, including Bloomberg and The New York Times. Unofficial epithets have come and gone throughout the pandemic—remember “stealth Omicron” and the “Frankenstein variant”?—but these new ones are on another level of weirdness. And not everyone’s a fan.

    The names associated with the coronavirus have been a fraught conversation since the pandemic’s earliest days, as scientists and public-health figures have tried to use terms that are comprehensible and hold people’s attention but that also avoid pitfalls of inaccuracy, fear-mongering, or xenophobia and racism (see: Donald Trump referring to the coronavirus as “the Chinese virus” and “kung flu”). The official names for variants and subvariants—names such as SARS-CoV-2 B.1.1.7—come from the Pango naming system, which was fashioned by evolutionary biologists in the early months of the pandemic to standardize variant-naming practices. As baffling as they can seem, they follow a clear logic: Under the system, B refers to a particular COVID lineage, B.1 refers to the sublineage of B lineage, B.1.1 refers to the first sublineage of the B.1 sublineage, and so on. When the names get too long, a letter replaces a string of numbers—B.1.1.529.1, for example, becomes BA.1.

    These official names do not exactly roll off the tongue or stick in the memory, which became a problem when new variants of concern started to arise and the world began groping for ways to talk about them. In May 2021, the WHO instituted its now-familiar Greek-letter naming system to stamp out the geographic associations that were gaining prominence at the time. B.1.1.7, B.1.351, and B.1.617—which were being referred to respectively as the U.K. variant, the South African variant, and the Indian variant—became Alpha, Beta, and Delta. But then, alas, came Omicron. Rather than giving way to yet another new Greek-letter variant, Omicron has spent more than a year branching into sublineages, and sublineages of sublineages. As a result, the nomenclature has devolved back into alphanumeric incomprehensibility. Seven different Omicron sublineages now account for at least 2 percent of all infections, and none accounts for more than about 40 percent (though XBB.1.5 is threatening to overwhelm its competitors).

    It’s great news that the ways in which the coronavirus has been mutating recently haven’t been significant enough to produce a whole new, widespread, and possibly far more worrisome version of itself that the world has to contend with. But it also makes talking about the virus much more annoying. Enter T. Ryan Gregory, an evolutionary biologist at Canada’s University of Guelph who is one of the leaders of a small, informal group of scientists that have taken it upon themselves to name the many subvariants that the WHO does not deem worthy of a new Greek letter. The names—Hydra, Cerberus, Centaurus—originated on Twitter, where Gregory compiled them into a list.

    Their value, Gregory told me, is that they fill the space in between the Greek and Pango systems, allowing people to discuss the many current Omicron variants that do not justify a new Greek letter but are still, perhaps, of interest. You can think of it in the same way we do animal taxonomy, he said. Calling a variant Omicron, like calling an animal a mammal, is not particularly descriptive. Calling a variant by its Pango name, like calling an animal by its Latinate species designation, is highly descriptive but a bit unwieldy in common parlance. When we speak of farm animals that moo and produce milk, we speak not of mammals or of Bos taurus but of cows. And so BA.2.3.20 became Basilisk.

    To decide whether a new lineage deserves its own name, Gregory told me, he and his colleagues consider both evolutionary factors (how different is this lineage from its predecessors, and how concerning are its mutations?) and epidemiological factors (how much havoc is this lineage wreaking in the population?). They’re trying to make the process more formal, but Gregory would prefer that the WHO take over and standardize the process.

    That, however, is unlikely to happen. When I asked about this, Tarik Jasarevic, a WHO spokesperson, told me that the organization is aware of the unofficial names but that, for the moment, they’re not necessary. “Virologists and other scientists are monitoring these variants, but the public doesn’t need to distinguish between these Omicron subvariants in order to better understand their risk or the measures they need to take to protect themselves,” he said. The WHO’s position, in other words, is that the differences between one Omicron subvariant and another simply haven’t mattered much in any practical sense, because they shouldn’t have any effect on our behavior. No matter the sublineage, vaccines and boosters still offer the best protection available. Masks still work. Guidance on testing and isolation, too, is the same across the board. “If there is a new variant that requires public communication and discourse,” Jasarevic told me, “it would be designated a new variant of concern and assigned a new label.”

    The WHO isn’t alone in objecting. For Stephen Goldstein, an evolutionary virologist at the University of Utah, the new names are not just unnecessary but potentially harmful. “It’s absolutely crazy that we’re having random people on Twitter name variants,” he told me. For Goldstein, dressing up each new subvariant with an ominous monster name overplays the differences between the mutations and feeds into the panic that comes every time the coronavirus shifts form. In this view, distinguishing one Omicron sublineage from another is less like distinguishing a wolf from a cow and more like distinguishing a white-footed mouse from a deer mouse: important to a rodentologist but not really to anyone else. To go as far as naming lineages after terrifying mythical beasts, he said, “seems obviously intended to scare the shit out of people … It’s hard to understand what broader goal there is here other than this very self-serving clout chasing.”

    Gregory told me that fear and attention are not his group’s aim. He also said, though, that his group is thinking of switching from mythological creatures to something more neutral, such as constellations, in part to address concerns of whipping up unnecessary panic. When it comes to XBB.1.5, some of that panic certainly already exists, whipped up by less-than-nuanced headlines and Twitter personalities who feast on moments like these. Whether or not the name Kraken has contributed, the fear is that XBB.1.5 might be a variant so immune-evasive that it infects everyone all over again or so virulent that it amps up the risk of any given infection. So far, that does not seem to be the case.

    As my colleague Katherine Wu reported in November, we are likely (though by no means definitely) stuck for the foreseeable future in this Omicron purgatory, with its more gradual, more piecemeal pattern of viral evolution. This is certainly preferable to the sudden and unexpected emergence of a dangerous, drastically different variant. But it does mean that we’re likely going to be arguing about whether and how and with what names to discuss Omicron subvariants for some time to come.

    Whichever side you come down on, the state of variant-naming pretty well encapsulates the state of the pandemic as a whole. Hardly anything about the pandemic has been a matter of universal agreement, but the present nomenclatural free-for-all seems to have taken us somewhere even more splintered, even more anarchic. We’re not just arguing about the pandemic; we’re arguing about how to argue about the pandemic. And there’s no end in sight.

    Jacob Stern

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