Health

900,000 New Yorkers Lost at Least 3 Loved Ones to Covid


Josefa Santana, 96, did not leave her Washington Heights apartment when New York City shut down to slow the spread of the coronavirus in March 2020. But her son, a butcher, had to work. He was the only one to leave the apartment in those weeks, so he probably was the one who brought the virus in.

Despite her family’s efforts to protect her, Ms. Santana got sick, and then died. She was one of three relatives whom her granddaughter, Lymarie Francisco, lost to Covid-19 in the first year of the pandemic, Ms. Francisco said last week.

The toll was devastating for her. It was also emblematic of the scale of loss and trauma in New York in the early stages of the pandemic, which new city data, released to The New York Times, shows in stark detail.

An estimated two million New Yorkers — nearly one in four — lost at least one person close to them to Covid within the first 16 months of the virus’s arrival, according to the data, which was collected in mid-2021 by federal census workers on behalf of the city. Nearly 900,000 New Yorkers lost at least three people they said they were close to, an open-ended category that included relatives and friends, the survey found.

About 1.1 million of the city’s 8.4 million residents kept going to work between March and June 2020, the survey reported. Of those, about 800,000, or 72 percent, were people of color, a broad category that included all New Yorkers who did not identify as non-Hispanic and white.



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