By Jared Evan
The NYC subway system has become a literal nightmare as ridership has drastically dropped because of the massive lay offs and job loss due to coronavirus pandemic; the trains are now heavily populated with dirty and sometimes deranged homeless people, spreading disease and destroying the subways seconds after they are cleaned.
As of press close to 90 MTA workers have died from the virus and thousands upon thousands have become infected.
‘I feel like the city is using the subway system as containment for the homeless. You have to assume that a lot of them have it. If they close the system what would they do with all these possibly infected homeless people?”, Canella Gomez, a train operator who is out on leave and is a union activist told the NY Post.
“The horror begins when it comes out to the public,” he said. “The minute it pulls into the station, you got the 100 homeless hanging out there. This is where they live. They get on there. They lay down. They use the bathroom. They vomit. Anything you can imagine gets done”, Gomez stated.
“It’s not fair. It’s not fair on people that have to go to work. It’s not fair on the homeless people,” she said. “Something has to be done. This mayor we have is just completely out of touch with reality as to what’s going on.”, a 56-year-old commuter told the Post.
“They’re coughing. They are peeing. They are defecating in the cars. We do not know if they have COVID-19. They’re up in our faces every single day as well as the other people who are taking the trains to and from work every day”, MTA conductor Adrienne Blocker told the NY Post.
Blocker told The Post that as soon as trains are cleaned, they immediately get dirty.
Sarah Feinberg, the MTA’s interim transit president, said this week that the agency was also fed up and that the city needs to do more. She claims de Blasio has been unresponsive to her requests for more assistance.
Recently an MIT economics professor and physician Jeffrey Harris, pointed to a parallel between high ridership “and the rapid, exponential surge in infections” in the first two weeks of March — when the subways were still packed with up to 5 million riders per day — as well as between turnstile entries and virus hotspots. He concluded the trains were a major disseminator of the virus.
It is without a shadow of a doubt that during February and March as the pandemic was starting to show its ugly face in NYC, the trains rapidly spread the disease. The large transportation system is unique to NYC
A quick look at the numbers, nationwide only 5% of Americans relay on public transportation to get to work, in NYC 39% use the subway, 23% drive alone, 11% take the bus, 9% walk to work, 7% travel by commuter rail, 4% carpool, 1.6% use a taxi, 1.1% ride their bicycle to work, and 0.4% travel by ferry, according to MTA numbers. That is a big difference between NYC and the rest of the country, over half of city residents take public transportation.
If something is not done about the homeless taking over the subway system, it could be deadly to open up the city again. Many homeless are dangerously psychotic and do not go to the doctor when they feel sick, they are spreading COVID-19, they have been the entire time & the leadership of NYC has refused to address the situation. While de Blasio is setting another city agency up which will be looking into race and coronavirus, maybe the homeless situation on the subways should be a priority instead. Eventually close to half the city is going to be on these coronavirus infested trains once more and will have to ride with potentially infected homeless.
