5 years since COVID struck NYC, a look at how it changed how we live and work

When the first cases of the mysterious coronavirus were recorded in New York City five years ago, it was impossible to predict all the ways the pandemic would reshape city life.

Streets, subways and office buildings emptied. Commuters started working from home. Legions of delivery workers dropped groceries and takeout at the front door. All this happened within weeks of New York state's first reported infection of a woman in Manhattan on March 1, 2020.

“Essential workers” were later heralded nightly with clanging cowbells and applause. Wealthy New Yorkers fled city apartments, doctors’ appointments went to Zoom, and schoolkids squirmed in their own chairs in front of laptops at home. Schools closed on March 16, and bars, restaurants, and most workplaces soon followed.

And more than 40,000 city residents — in wave after wave of grief – died as COVID spread rapidly.

Here’s a look at five key ways in which New York was reshaped during the pandemic – and how it continues to evolve five years since – in ways that still reverberate in New Yorkers' workplaces, schools, homes and wallets.

Work from home, ‘doom loop’ predictions, and a new threat

New York City's economy fell off a cliff at the onset of the pandemic. Some 957,000 jobs were lost in March and April 2020 alone. The decline outpaced job losses elsewhere across the country and lingered for much longer. While the rest of the nation recovered some of its workforce in 2021, New York’s continued to shrink.

The job losses, coupled with so many downtown workers working from home, fueled talk in academic and government circles of a dreaded “doom loop” that would send New York City and other urban centers reeling and fuel decline as empty office space begat falling real estate values and shrinking tax revenues.

But even those worries have dissipated in the years since the pandemic struck.

A Feb. 27 report by Placer.ai, which measures foot traffic using pedestrians’ cellphone location data, called New York City the “nationwide leader in office recovery.” While visits to office buildings were down 34% nationwide from pre-pandemic levels, in New York City they were down just 13%, according to the findings.

“The New York City office scene is buzzing once again, as companies from JPMorgan to Amazon double down on return-to-office (RTO) mandates,” Placer.ai reported.

The return to office has been particularly pronounced among New York City office workers living within 5 miles of work, Placer.ai found. Workers who live farther away have returned in smaller numbers.

But the issue is hardly decided as a new force enters the equation. Anat Lechner, clinical professor of management and organizations at NYU Stern, said the bigger question is not whether more workers will return to high-cost office settings but how corporations will adapt, given the growth of artificial intelligence. It wasn’t a factor when the pandemic began and workers started staying home in droves.

Lechner cautioned that as more of our work is performed remotely, as opposed to within an in-person environment, it is being studied and captured by machines. “Once the machine learns,” she said, “we become not as essential, shall I say it mildly.”

The therapist will see you now … on your laptop

COVID brought with it a mix of social isolation, economic challenges and immense grief over the mounting death toll. Nearly 40% of New Yorkers reported feelings of anxiety and depression in spring 2020, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey.

That figure has since dropped to less than 20%, suggesting that New Yorkers are rebounding — but the pandemic’s impact on how people access mental health care appears to be permanent, even as the pandemic fades from memory.

“Prior to COVID, 100% of our work was in person, and then during COVID, it suddenly switched almost overnight to 100% being remote telehealth,” said Dr. Jeffrey Brenner, CEO of the Jewish Board, a mental health nonprofit that serves a mix of Medicaid and commercially insured patients across the five boroughs. Five years later, he said, about three-quarters of therapy visits still take place remotely.

The switch to this new model required the organization to make major changes, including shutting down most of its physical locations and investing in a more robust call center — and Brenner said they’re paying off. The nonprofit is now better equipped to compete with telehealth companies like Talkspace and BetterHelp for both patients and therapists, and its mental health clinics are operating in the black “for the first time ever.”

But does remote therapy actually work?

Studies comparing telehealth to face-to-face therapy have generally found comparable outcomes, but more research is needed to determine the types of patients who might benefit more from in-person care, said Dr. Mark Olfson, a Columbia professor who has studied telehealth's impact on access to mental health care.

Brenner said the Jewish Board mostly goes by patient preference, with some exceptions. For instance, he said, telehealth is not appropriate for young children or some people with serious mental illnesses who have very disorganized communication styles.

The shift toward telehealth can also put older adults at a disadvantage. New Yorkers over 65 experiencing serious psychological distress are far more likely to say challenges using telehealth pose a barrier to care than young adults and teens, according to the city’s 2024 State of Mental Health report.

Medicare, the federal insurance program for older adults, may also soon put some restrictions back in place on coverage for remote therapy that were lifted during the pandemic.

But New York’s investments in online therapy are ongoing. In 2022, NYC Health and Hospitals added mental health services to the ExpressCare telehealth platform it launched early in the pandemic. And in 2023, the city started providing teens with free access to online therapy through a $26 million contract with Talkspace, which the city health department says more than 22,000 adolescents have signed up for so far.

The COVID apartment deal giveth … and taketh away

Renters in New York City are well versed in the fierce competition for affordable apartments, the rising cost of upfront broker fees and the need to act almost immediately to secure a place – lest someone else submits their application, financial documents and security deposit first.

But five years ago, many renters who remained in the five boroughs during the pandemic encountered a far different housing landscape as wealthier residents fled. Some managed to score the deal of a lifetime, especially in Manhattan, where landlords were eager to earn something from their empty apartments.

“The Manhattan market was a ghost town,” said Michael Kenneth Davis, a real estate agent with the brokerage Compass. “People were getting apartments they never would have gotten before.”

Through 2020, landlords began reducing rents, offering free months and covering broker fees, while at the same time, holding some units off the market to limit supply.

Then all that went away. Little more than a year later, young professionals flocked once again to the city’s trendiest neighborhoods. By the fall of 2021, tenants were waging bidding wars and paying over the asking-price for studios and one-bedrooms in Lower Manhattan, Midtown and parts of Brooklyn.

Davis said he recently represented the owner of a Boerum Hill brownstone, where a family beat out eight other applicants to rent a three-bedroom unit for $9,500 a month — $1,000 more than the initial asking price. Talk of COVID housing deals has long since been replaced by discussion about the city’s housing shortage and spiking rents.

“If this were 2020, that place maybe would have rented for $6,000 and they wouldn’t have had to pay a broker fee,” he said.

But not everyone got to share in the COVID discounts, even for a brief spell. A 2022 analysis by the news site City Limits found that rents remained relatively flat during the pandemic for the city’s lowest-cost apartments, and by some estimates even increased.

Closes schools, a digital divide, and enduring learning Loss

On March 15, 2020, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced the nation’s largest school system would close its doors to more than 1 million students as COVID cases soared. At the time, he said he hoped it would be for a few weeks – just through the April spring break.

City officials acknowledged it could go much longer, interrupting students’ education, severing social ties, and cutting kids off from school meals that were, for some, their most consistent source of food every day.

Within weeks, though, kids were remote learning with laptops, tablets or sometimes just a smartphone, sitting side-by-side with siblings from bunk beds, kitchen tables, or hallways desperately seeking a Wi-Fi signal. Teachers improvised an unprecedented experiment: conducting school via computer, while parents tried to work.

Attendance plummeted while anxiety and depression spiked.

New York City was the first big city to reopen its schools the following September, but it reopened in hybrid form, with kids taking turns coming in.

And even that approach stuttered, as rising cases caused individual buildings, and at times the whole system, to shutter again and again. The majority of public school students continued remote learning through the 2020-21 school year.

Now many experts say schools across the country were closed too long, causing significant learning loss and worsening a youth mental health crisis.  

Like school districts nationally, New York City saw its test scores drop dramatically following the pandemic.

This past January, there was a glimmer of hopeful news: New York City public school students’ scores on the so-called Nation's Report Card showed a rebound to pre-pandemic levels in math for fourth graders, but reading among fourth graders remained lower than before COVID.

Teachers have reported that even children who were babies during the pandemic started school behind in kindergarten, struggling more with language and social skills. Across grades, teachers have reported more behavioral challenges, anxiety and depression among students since the pandemic.

At the same time, New York City’s public schools have grappled with higher chronic absenteeism and an overall decline in enrollment. Before the pandemic, the public schools had a total enrollment of 1.1 million students. The system had already begun losing students, but the pandemic accelerated that trend.

As of last fall, there were 911,000 students, with the drop finally leveling off because of the influx of migrant students. Officials have said the enrollment decline is likely due to a mix of factors, including an affordability crisis in the city, and parents looking to the suburbs, charter schools, private schools or homeschool for stronger options.

Deputy Schools Chancellor Dan Weisberg told Gothamist there have been clear signs of the pandemic’s impact since students returned to school. Students had trouble sitting at desks for prolonged periods, attention spans had diminished, while conflicts between kids erupted more in or just outside school. He said those problems are getting better, but there’s still a long way to go.

“We as a city and as a country have never taken the time to really process what was a really terrible, traumatic time,” Weisberg said. “The kids, even if they were young, many knew somebody close to them had passed away due to COVID.”

He added: “They knew that their parents were very, very stressed out over a long period of time. … Now, our kids are amazingly resilient. They have recovered to a great extent. But those impacts on learning, those impacts on social development, we probably won't fully understand them for quite some time.”

Rise of hospital staffers, delivery workers, other ‘essential workers’

For a period of time beginning in the early days of the pandemic, the term “essential workers” served as a “unifying frame” for a number of professions that had not previously been grouped together, said Michael Morris, the Chavkin-Chang Professor of Leadership at Columbia Business School and the author of the 2024 book, “Tribal: How The Cultural Instincts That Divide Us Can Help Bring Us Together.”

Morris said the term brought together “emergency room physicians that we are used to thinking of as glorified heroes with supermarket stockers and food delivery folks from restaurants who weren't ever before put into that category of frontline workers.”

Five years later, he said the term appears to have less potency than it did at the height of the pandemic.

“It probably is dissolving as a category,” he said.

But Gustavo Ajche, the co-founder of Los Deliveristas Unidos, which organizes and advocates for app-based delivery workers, said the gains made by one category of “essential workers” – delivery workers – have been significant, nonetheless.

In the first weeks after the city shut down, Ajche and other delivery workers had no one to rely on but one another. Manhattan's streets were often eerie and desolate, even in the middle of a weekday afternoon, he said.

Like many delivery workers, Ajche is an immigrant and said not working was not an option, as he had to continue sending money to his children in Guatemala.

However, the emptiness of city streets left delivery workers vulnerable to assaults and theft. As a precaution, he said workers began forming small groups on WhatsApp and remained in constant touch with each other as they made their deliveries.

One day, he said he reached out to Ligia Guallpa, the executive director of the Workers Justice Project, and asked if she needed a hand.

“She said, ‘yes, of course,’” recalled Ajche. “From there, we start organizing the delivery workers,” as part of the community-based WJP.

The efforts bore fruit, said Ajche, leading to a slate of six laws in 2021 that improved pay and working conditions for the city’s delivery workers.

More recently, delivery workers secured a $17 million settlement from DoorDash, and serve as the inspiration for an upcoming book, “When the City Stopped: Stories for New York’s Essential Workers,” by Robert W. Snyder, Manhattan's borough historian.

That gives Ajche immense pride, he said, and gives workers the strength to take on new challenges.

“ We're here,” said Ajche. “We keep fighting.”