NYC, A Year Later: Share Your Pandemic Story

It’s been a year since COVID-19 sent New Yorkers into lockdown. City Limits wants to hear from residents about how their lives have changed since then, how they’re feeling about the future and what they think the government can do to help people recover.

A year ago this week, New York City reported its first resident who died from coronavirus. School buildings were shuttered, supermarket shelves were wiped bare by panic-shoppers and residents across the five boroughs began adjusting to a new way of life under lockdown.

Still, it would have been hard to predict even then the enormous toll COVID-19 would have. The city lost 626,400 private sector jobs in 2020, and the unemployment rate in January was just over 13 percent, up from 3.8 percent prior to the pandemic.

But the most striking impact, of course, were the New Yorkers lost during the crisis: more than 30,000 residents have died from COVID-19, “more New Yorkers lost than in World War II, Vietnam, Hurricane Sandy, and 9/11 put together,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said Sunday during the city’s first Day of Remembrance ceremony, in which images of those lost were projected onto the Brooklyn Bridge.

“Every morning, the first thing I see is a list and there are numbers on it, but what it really means is how many people we lost, how many New Yorkers are gone, how many neighbors, how many members of our family,” the mayor added.

With vaccination efforts underway — 22 percent of the city’s adult population has received at least one dose so far — New York is facing another pandemic turning point. With a possible end now in sight, City Limits is asking residents to reflect on the past year and share their thoughts and stories. In what ways have our lives and neighborhoods changed the most during the pandemic, how are we feeling about the future and what can the government do to help New Yorkers better recover?

To share your thoughts, complete the survey below or feel free to email your reflections to [email protected]. City Limits may publish these submissions in our future reporting, or may contact respondents directly for more information about their answers.