By Arthur Vidro
When our leaders tell us to stay at home, most of us do so.
Let us be grateful that we can.
It Is a lot harder to maintain distance from others in big cities.
Despite having some cases of coronavirus in our area, we are in much better shape than New York City and its suburbs.
Distancing oneself from others is much more difficult in the big city.
New York’s leaders also tell its residents to “stay at home.” They can try, but it’s far from easy.
For instance, what about the homeless? Where do they stay? Well, the homeless population in this newspaper’s territory is rather small. But in New York City, the homeless population is larger than the full population of Sullivan County. Where do they go? Into crowded shelters? With a virus lurking? So the homeless sort of fall between the cracks.
Even for folks with homes, staying at home is different in the big city.
Manhattan has about 67,000 residents per square mile (sources don’t all agree), and much more during workdays when, in healthier times, commuters would flock in.
New York City’s five boroughs average more than 26,000 people per square mile. There isn’t enough room to distance.
I lived in New York City and its suburbs for more than 40 years.
When I was a wee lad in the 1960s, we lived on the 15th floor of an 18-story apartment building in New York City’s borough of Queens. Suppose you want to go to the supermarket across the street from the building. You could take the stairs, but many people can’t or won’t. So they wait for one of the three elevators.
Suppose the elevator already has a few people in it who are descending from a floor higher up. Do you get in or wait a few minutes for the next elevator? Virus or no virus, a typical New Yorker doesn’t wait. So by the time the elevator reaches the lobby, you might have seven people in a cage that is roughly six feet by eight feet. No physical distancing possible.
Or, if you Are entering the building, would you climb up to the 15th floor? Carrying groceries? A few might. In my younger days I would have tried. But not now.
You get on the elevator and however many others want to get up to their apartments will get on too.
Even to get your mail, you take the elevator down to the lobby, where the mailboxes are. At any floor, the elevator can stop to take on more passengers.
To dump one’s trash, one walks down the hall to an incinerator. En route, you might pass a dozen or more apartment doors, any of which might open with people exiting just as you pass by.
Even folks with houses seldom had yards, often living in what were called town houses, which means your house is physically attached to the houses on either side.
Before “non-essential” businesses were shut down, the city’s subway system ran at full operation. At the busiest times, you wouldn’t even have to step into the train. Just stand on the platform close to the edge, and the herd of humanity swarming aboard will carry you along with it.
Even when it is standing room only (as it often is), people jam aboard rather than wait for a subsequent train.
So let us be thankful we live in an area where physical distancing is possible.
The word “furlough” keeps appearing in headlines. As in, “J.C. Penney to furlough most of 95,000 employees.” Department stores are struggling, for their stores have been shut down.
But what is a furlough?
A furlough is not a firing. For however long your furlough lasts, you stay away from work, without pay. Do whatever you want. Earn money elsewhere. Heck, even look for or accept a new job. But after the furlough ends, you are welcomed back to whatever your situation was before the furlough began.
If the company provides health insurance, then during the furlough it typically continues to provide the same level of coverage.
Companies issuing furloughs this season, though, are rather vague about the duration of furloughs. We can’t fault them for not being specific. They just don’t know how long the current conditions will last.
Yet for a furlough to be successful, it has to be specific. Furloughed workers aren’t going to wait around forever for an open-ended furlough to end. After enough weeks or months have passed, they will start looking elsewhere, out of necessity.
With a furlough the job is in limbo.
And so is the worker.
The company, on the other hand, will wait out the storm and, more often than not, survive.
Ifyou have consumerism questions, send them to Arthur Vidro in the care of this newspaper, which publishes his column every weekend.
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