At the end of seven hours in mask, gown and gloves at Bellevue Hospital Center on Monday, Dr. Richard Levitan finally had a chance to look at his phone.
Dr. Levitan, an emergency physician who lives in northern New Hampshire, had volunteered to work for days at Bellevue, in Manhattan, as coronavirus patients besieged New York City hospitals. Monday was his first shift there.
A text had arrived from his older brother, who was letting him use an apartment on the Upper West Side. It read: “Hey Richard – We are so proud of you and your heroism. I hate to be the bearer of bad news but looks like our apartment building doesn’t want you staying in our apt. ”
The building’s board of directors wanted him out.
That took a minute to sink in.
On the one hand, Dr. Levitan was answering the state’s urgent plea for help in the worst public health crisis in decades.
On the other, his brother was dealing with the idiosyncratic creature known as a New York City co-op , run by a board of apartment owners. Within their four walls, co-ops are tiny nation-states.
So, while Dr. Levitan was working to save the lives of strangers, his brother was pleading with his neighbors to let his sibling rest in the apartment. He got nowhere. The board had heard what he was doing and did not want him around.
That kind of thing is rampant and emerges in many shapes, if rarely so outrageously as the shunning of a medical volunteer. Governors were talking about pulling over cars with New York plates , and people in rural areas were mad about city residents who had fled to their second homes . In the city, people want to know if anyone in their building has tested positive, though with the virus so widespread, the only safe course is to assume that some neighbor has it or had it, and to take precautions.
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