Five years later: Seeing COVID-19 in the rearview mirror

Yahoo

16-03-2025

Ominous and unstoppable, the coronavirus disease reached the West Coast of the United States in January 2020, the first confirmed case of what became known as COVID-19 turning up near Seattle.
Nearly two months passed before the disease arrived in southeastern Connecticut, long enough for those in health care and business in the region to prepare as best they could for a scourge they knew little about.
'We saw it coming up the I-95 corridor,' Shannon Christian, Lawrence + Memorial Hospital's chief nursing officer, recalled last week. 'We had time to plan. We set up a testing tent outside. ... There was so much we didn't know.'
On Friday, March 13, 2020, the disease surfaced here for the first time, its presence detected in a Rhode Island child attending a Mystic child care facility. By then, the number of cases in the state had climbed into double digits.
The following Monday, March 16, the hammer came down.
Gov. Ned Lamont and Govs. Andrew Cuomo of New York and Phil Murphy of New Jersey came together to announce that the restaurants, bars, movie theaters and gyms in their states would have to close that night until further notice.
Separately, Lamont told Connecticut's media outlets the Mashantucket Pequot and Mohegan tribes had agreed to shut down their respective casinos, Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun, the next day.
So much for St. Patrick's Day.
Five years later, many in the region have vivid memories of how COVID-19 disrupted their lives and forever changed the way they live.
At L+M, which admitted its first COVID-19 patient that March 17, things happened fast.
The tent meant to accommodate patients who would drive beneath it, step out of their vehicles and sit in a chair while a nurse took nasal and oral swabs was soon catering to drive-through traffic. Christian remembered the spread of the disease in Connecticut was initially concentrated in Fairfield and New Haven counties and that L+M nurses were able to assist their counterparts at hospitals in Greenwich and Bridgeport. Cases weren't expected to surge in southeastern Connecticut for months.
Dr. Oliver Mayorga, L+M's chief medical officer, said both health care and the public have learned to be more vigilant about viruses and vaccines in general since COVID-19's peak. Medicine's embrace of telehealth — virtual communications among doctors, nurses and patients — is another obvious outcome of the pandemic, he said.
An innovation L+M championed during COVID-19 was the placement of intravenous (IV) pumps or poles outside patient rooms rather than at bedsides. The relocation enabled doctors and nurses to monitor IVs from a distance, reducing their exposure to infections and the consumption of personal protective equipment.
COVID-19 also exposed a need for greater behavioral health resources, Christian noted, with patient violence against nurses and other hospital staff increasing.
'New nurses want to know, 'What can you do to keep me safe?'' she said.
Smoke clears at casinos
With Jeff Hamilton, a new president and general manager, at the helm, Mohegan Sun seemed on its way to a banner year in 2020. The casino's January business had been outstanding and February had been strong, too. Beginner's luck?
We'll never know.
In March, COVID-19 struck, causing both of southeastern Connecticut's casinos to close for the first and only time since their debuts in the 1990s. They locked their doors March 17, 2020, and didn't reopen — and then only partially — until June 1.
'Seventy-four days,' Hamilton noted last week. 'It was the most difficult thing I've ever had to go through professionally. Casinos are not made to be closed.'
During the shutdown, Hamilton stayed in touch with his employees through weekly updates he filmed in his home and posted on a casino website. He kept people abreast of COVID-19 and management's plans to reopen. He talked to them about unemployment benefits and assured them their health insurance still was intact.
'It showed I'm just a normal guy, going through what they were going through,' Hamilton said of the updates, which he's never stopped doing.
Largely recovered from the pandemic, the casinos are nevertheless different than they were. Buffets are gone for the most part, as are the buses that ran back and forth to Asian enclaves in Boston and New York City. The biggest change, though, Hamilton believes, is the casinos' ban on indoor smoking.
Prior to the pandemic, smoking was allowed on portions of the gaming floors at both casinos.
'Being nonsmoking helps us,' Hamilton said. 'We were worried at first because you've got to get up from the (slot) machine to go smoke outside and that takes time. ... We've never said 'never,' but I don't see us going back (to allowing smoking).'
Another change casino-goers might have noticed is the arrangement of slot machines. Long banks of machines have been replaced by 'pods' of four machines, and there's more space between machines.
Viral scenes, notions
Suzanne Sypher of Mystic, one of several people who shared their memories of March 2020 with The Day, described a train ride she took home to New York's Pennsylvania Station after visiting relatives in Florida. The coronavirus hadn't made a big impression on her by the time she headed south, but the news about it had grown scarier during her three-week stay in the Sunshine State.
When she boarded the train home in Sebring, Fla., it was nearly empty, Sypher said. And when she got off the train in Penn Station, there was nobody there. ... In Penn Station.
'Usually, people are racing everywhere there,' she said. 'It was just security guys with German shepherds. I said, 'What's going on?''
Riding an escalator, Sypher, a retiree who worked at L+M for 30 years, glimpsed the scene outside a train station window.
'No people walking on the street,' she said. 'No cars, maybe a cab or two.'
On the continuation of her journey, she was the only passenger in the train car she occupied from New York to New London.
She thinks it must have been April 1 when she got home.
'Eerie,' she said.
Like Sypher, Paul Berkel, a retired middle school principal living in Mystic, had a tale to tell about returning home from a trip to Florida. On their way back, he and his wife stopped in North Carolina to visit his brother's family.
'We spent the night with them,' Berkel said. 'I remember them supplying us with boxes of wipes and masks. It was just coming out that everything needed to be sterilized.'
When they stopped at a hotel, they 'walked around wiping doorknobs and bathrooms,' Berkel said.
'Once we got home, the other thing I remember vividly is that our house became our castle,' he said. 'We joked with friends that our gardens never looked so good. We couldn't go anywhere, only to the store when absolutely necessary. We turned our attention to our house, the garden.'
He said they're now more conscious of vaccines and public announcements about health. They're not fond of flying and probably never will be, given their post-pandemic aversion to crowds. No arenas for basketball games, no visits to The Kate in Old Saybrook or the Granite Theatre in Westerly for live entertainment.
The pandemic provided writers with plenty of material. Phyllis Ross, of Lyme, devoted a chapter to it in 'Revolutions, Transformations and Tragedies Through My Eyes,' which she published in 2021. The chapter includes her journal of the events of March 2020.
In her entry for March 15, she lamented how much her world had changed.
'Everything has been cancelled — not just social activities,' she wrote. 'The town of Lyme is essentially dormant. Town Hall is unoccupied. Check the website if you need information. People are not going to movies. Few are in restaurants. Sports activities are cancelled. People have been asked to wash their hands often and stay at home. It's hard to believe. This coronavirus has people scared to death.'
Nearly two weeks later, her entry for March 30 betrayed some hope:
'We're fortunate here in Lyme to have lots of open space and clean fresh air. I wonder how people in small apartments in New York — now the epicenter of COVID-19 — who are expected to remain in quarantine, can bear the confinement.
Walking along the street has been a source of great pleasure, especially since the spring flowers are beginning to bloom. People you pass move away at least six feet. Nearly everybody wants to chat — but at a safe distance.
Another writer, Michael Steinberg, who grew up in Niantic, graduated from New London High School and now lives at Bride Brook, a Niantic nursing home, authored 'The Disaster Diaries: Mad Musings in Corona Nation' while living in San Francisco.
He said he tried to capture what life was like in and around the city's Golden Gate Park, which he said still welcomed people during the pandemic. Cut off from his own family for a time, he witnessed others fall into poverty and lose their homes.
'You'd see clusters of tents all over the city,' Steinberg said.
Despite such scenes, he tried to inject some humor into his storytelling, he said. One of his earlier efforts, 'Millstone and Me: Sex, Lies and Radiation in Southeastern Connecticut,' tackled the Millstone Nuclear Power Station's safety record.
'It's not really over yet,' Steinberg said of the pandemic.
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