Taking a Look Back: Three Years in the Life of a Global Pandemic's Effect Locally

Three years ago, a sleepy late winter burst into the high season nearly overnight.

A new vocabulary emerged, as did new animosities between neighbors. Toilet paper vanished from shelves. Smiles vanished behind face masks. And, for the unluckiest, loved ones vanished behind sealed doors of nursing homes and hospital isolation wards, some never to emerge.

The COVID-19 pandemic did not hit the South Fork with the same horrifying onslaught of death and misery as it did the nearby metropolitan region in March 2020, but it also was not the far-away tale — easily dismissed or disbelieved — that it was in other portions of the country that spring.

Some longtime local residents were among the first Long Islanders to be lost to the coronavirus. And when New York City residents fled the close confines of metropolis for second homes, they brought with them the stark realities, and fears, of what the pandemic really could mean here.

East End hospitals dug in, preparing to be overrun like their colleagues to the west. Grocery store clerks greeted customers through plastic shields and fearful eyes. Friends shared their disbelief through digital screens at how quickly the world had ground to a halt, and a whole new reality dawned. And a place called Zoom became the new local watering hole, the village green and the office all at once.

There were the lighthearted moments at the outset — “drive-by” birthday parties, musicians broadcasting nightly solo concerts from their living rooms, jokes about how people who previously spent their days indoors tied to electronics suddenly took “stay at home” orders as a cue to frolic in the outdoors.

But far from the blue light smiles of the generally fortunate and the petty inconveniences of the newly coined “social distancing,” a wave of grief and fear was washing over many others.

For the elderly, the coronavirus was suddenly a gun to the head — fate potentially lurking behind every passerby on the street, every bag of groceries or takeout food delivery.

Nursing homes were, quietly at first, then very publicly, becoming death traps, as the virus proved nearly impossible to keep at bay even with fastidious precautions — and especially in the face of a controversial state instruction that they must continue accepting new COVID-positive patients. Families locked out by doors that were doing little to keep out a virus already behind them cried out for help, for information, for the truth about what was happening.

While the numbers of deaths locally pale compared to the tens of thousands of statewide deaths, the hundreds of thousands nationally, in a small community the pain of loss still looms large.

The total number of local deaths from the effects of COVID-19 is not known. Since March 2020, there have been 92 deaths attributed to COVID-19 at Stony Brook Southampton Hospital — four since the new year, the most recent on February 6. Another 219 died at Peconic Bay Medical Center in Riverhead. And just shy of 100 people died in the three nursing homes on the South Fork and in Riverhead.

Local residents as young as their mid-40s continued to die of acute cases of COVID-19 in 2022. To date, more than 78,000 New Yorkers have died from COVID-19 across the state, including nine as recently as March 7, 2023.

A whisper of the COVID-19 pandemic touched the East End on March 7, 2020, when about three dozen SUNY students who had been studying abroad in countries deemed high risk for the virus arrived at the Stony Brook Southampton campus in Shinnecock Hills to quarantine in unused dorm rooms for 14 days before they could return to their families.

It was the first local connection to the growing spread — which wouldn’t be declared a pandemic until March 11 — and the move drew concern and criticism from local officials, who worried about the potential for introducing the virus to the community. At the time, just 173 people statewide were known to have COVID-19.

The first confirmed COVID-positive person in Suffolk County arrived at Stony Brook Southampton Hospital the following day, Sunday, March 8.

“I was at home in East Hampton that morning and got a call from the State Department of Health saying we had the first patient — he had been at Eastern Long Island Hospital and was being transferred to our ICU,” Robert Chaloner, the chief administrative officer of Stony Brook Southampton Hospital, recalled this week.

“[Chief Medical Officer] Fred Weinbaum and I met at the hospital to take a look at the ICU and how we were going to handle isolation. There was a real sense of foreboding. But I don’t think anybody at that time thought we’d still be dealing with this three years later.”

The hospital has treated and discharged more than 1,100 COVID-19 patients since that time. At the height of the first wave of infections, the hospital peaked at 54 COVID-positive inpatients on April 14, 2020. It would rise again, as high as 38 in early 2021, amid the surge in the wake of the first winter holiday season of the pandemic, and to 33 in early 2022 with the omicron variant holiday surge.

But the overcrowding that had crippled hospitals in New York City and Nassau County during the first wave would never be an issue in Southampton. By early April 2020, the hospital had doubled its bed capacity and tripled its ICU capacity — joining the mad scramble to secure ventilator machines — and the surge waned before the new limits were tested.

While some patients lingered in intensive care for months in 2020, advancements in the understanding of how best to treat acute COVID-19 symptoms, as well as the emergence of less virulent variants and better immunity from vaccinations, means that most of those who do require hospitalization now are able to be sent home within a matter of a few days.

As the pandemic metastasized in the county and on the South Fork, the typically quiet transition time between winter and spring suddenly had the hustle and bustle of mid-summer, but with a host of new complications piled atop the normal logistics of the local population tripling in a matter of a weekend. Nearly every summer home was occupied again, every rental snatched up, and anything for sale flying into contract.

Resentments reared up, manifestations of the age-old bitterness between some locals toward the wealthy seasonal interlopers, with the additional salt of the potential for viral transmission and a feared shortage of access to medical supplies. Old tropes fanned by headline hungry tabloids — and even The New York Times — the conflict flamed up, but quickly faded.

The influx brought some local businesses, liquor stores especially, windfalls like they had never seen, even during a regular summer. Food delivery services were quickly booked weeks out, and wholesale companies used to dealing only with restaurants shifted their trucks to home deliveries of meats and produce.

But unlike with the regular arrival of summer visitors on Memorial Day weekend, many were not prepared with ample staffing and stocks of supplies. By the time Governor Andrew Cuomo ordered all essential businesses to shut down on March 22, 2020, photos of empty store shelves were already the defining image of the fledgling pandemic locally.

Businesses that had scaled back for the offseason were caught off guard. Supplies of household goods quickly vanished from shelves. Cleaning products, hand sanitizers and, most famously, toilet paper became hot commodities as those in need desperately dashed from store to store in search. Grocers and wholesale warehouses like Costco quickly put caps on the numbers of certain items that could be purchased. The “supply chain” became a topic of great fanfare — and the toilet paper roll its unhappy mascot.

“It’s been like the Fourth of July,” Mike Halsey, a clerk at Herrick Hardware in Southampton Village said on March 14, 2020. “Of course, we’re out of a lot of what people want.”

Other businesses, restaurants in particular, were hamstrung by social distancing requirements and feared for their very existence, their revenue stream slashed to a trickle. Takeout kept most on the barest lifeline, furloughed waiters driving delivery runs and organizing curbside pickups.

“It’s not like I got fired and can go get a job at another restaurant,” one furloughed waiter told The Express News Group in March 2020. “I can’t got get a landscaping job — I’m too old for that … I don’t know what I’m going to do. It’s really worrisome.”

In the end, restaurants survived — nearly all of them locally, anyway, with only few scattered exceptions — until dining resumed and outdoor seating sprouted on every sidewalk, driveway and rear patio. Ultimately, the industry went through a boom period during the offseason of 2020-21, when the crowds barely flagged from the summer high season that many owners said made up for the early bottom line losses.

The essential versus non-essential tag on businesses birthed a frantic tug-o’-war over who should, or could, continue working. Some who desperately didn’t want risk going to work but were needed by the community, like grocery store employees, became heroes — but sometimes paid dearly through illness for their sacrifice.

Others, more focused on keeping their businesses afloat and paychecks flowing, flouted stop-work orders or dug for excuses their business should be deemed essential — as landscaping and pool services were. The virus spread rapidly through employees of those industries, with sometimes deadly results.

Local governments were handed new challenges in managing the impacts of the pandemic at every turn, as well as rapidly changing mandates from the state to enforce social distancing rules. As “reopening” began in May, the challenges of enforcing new safety protocols piled challenges atop mountains of duties.

“There were so many new things we had to deal with: figuring out how to sanitize offices after someone tested positive, allowing outdoor dining for restaurants, testing sites, how to get people fed and distribute government services, modify work spaces, how to pay people who were working from home,” Southampton Town Supervisor Jay Schneiderman said recently, lauding the town’s emergency management coordinator, Ryan Murphy, for having done yeoman’s work during the pandemic.

“There was no pandemic playbook,” he continued. “And on top of it, we had all these code enforcement mandates coming down from the state. Policing construction sites, restaurants, outdoor events and on and on. And things would change all the time. I feel like two years were completely consumed by the pandemic.”

By mid-summer of 2020, the “new normal” had settled in. The summer saw a drop in cases and the easing of some precautions, both statutorily and in personal habits. But a false sense of security that “the worst” was behind us and relaxed attitudes toward precautions bit back that fall and winter when cases, hospitalizations, and deaths again spiked with the arrival of the delta variant, the holidays, and colder weather.

Over the next 18 months, the South Fork was largely spared the melodramatic cultural warfare over mask-wearing and vaccinations that roiled other parts of Long Island and the country as the pandemic stretched into its second and third years.

Mask mandates, or polite requests by individual store owners, were generally heeded with only scattered anecdotes of theatrical objections, even as recently as last summer. Local residents embraced vaccinations enthusiastically at, what appeared in state data, to be higher rates than other regions of the country and even of parts of Long Island.

First responders lined up when first doses almost miraculously were rolled out barely 10 months after the first cases in New York State. Many of the first eligible senior citizens spent hours hunting for appointments and traveled to New York City to get shots in the first weeks of mass vaccinations.

When East Hampton Town opened its own vaccination center in February 2021 — the only Long Island township to muster such an effort on its own — and local community groups organized vaccination clinics with the help of Stony Brook Southampton Hospital, the allocations of a few hundred shots were booked almost instantly. When a state mass vaccination site opened at Stony Brook Southampton, appointments quickly booked out weeks in advance.

“It was a wonderful day,” East Hampton Town Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc said on February 13, 2021, the first day that the town’s clinic administered shots, a full month before the first mass vaccination site opened. “Everyone was so happy. It was such a weight off people’s shoulders — there were people literally in tears at the relief.”

When mass vaccinations did finally come to the South Fork, the Stony Brook Southampton site, which opened on March 20, 2021, administered more than 55,000 doses of vaccine over the five months that it operated.

The arrival of vaccines represented a major turning point in the pandemic, but was far from the end.

The emergence and rapid spread of the omicron variant in late 2021 and early 2022 sparked the return of masking requirements in public spaces and, for many, a return to remote work. The less virulent but more transmissible variant has been seen by medical personnel as something of a godsend, because it built natural immunities in those who had resisted vaccination without causing as much severe illness, even though it spiked hospitalizations and death tolls again purely as a function of the enormous number of people it spread to last winter.

Recently, medical studies have said that omicron, a subvariant of which remains the dominant strain in the United States, is proving to be less likely to cause the lingering health effects that have come to be known as “long COVID.”

But the road back to a life that more closely resembles the one before March 2020 has been a fitful one that has still not quite hit a straightaway.

Aside from the continued spread of the virus and the steady drip of those who it hits hard — COVID-positive admissions at Stony Brook Southampton Hospital have wavered between zero and 10, nearly week to week — the most lasting impact of the pandemic locally appears to be the lingering effects of the exodus from relatively low-paying service industry jobs.

Last summer, many restaurants and other business found themselves forced to close on what would otherwise be lucrative summer days, simply because they did not have enough employees to fill all their necessary shifts — a particularly painful microcosm of a vexing nationwide problem.

Fears of the virus itself have clearly waned significantly as infections have gotten less severe. Bars and concert venues are packed again, but face masks are still seen in grocery stores, in Uber cars and behind the counters of many delis and stores — a nod to some lingering fears of close contact with many people.

“It’s still in our minds — you still hear about someone who has COVID every day,” Schneiderman said. “As long as it’s around, people are going to be wary of it. It’s not as bad now, but a lot of people lost loved ones, and it was very scary when you or someone you knew got it, because you never knew how bad you would get it. It was a scary time.”

At Stony Brook Southampton Hospital, which is in the midst of designing a new facility at the Stony Brook Southampton College campus, Chaloner says the three years of pandemic operations have informed a broad range of policies and understanding about hospital operations on top of the clinical advancements that have been made.

Never again will the hospital be caught worrying about whether it has adequate supplies of protective equipment like face masks, gloves and gowns on hand. “We’ve got that down to a science now,” he said, and like how the AIDS epidemic changed the way hospitals worked with blood, COVID-19 has wholly overhauled the understanding of how to protect against airborne pathogens in hospitals.

The shift to better use of digitization in medicine, like telehealth services with patients and virtual meetings between staff, has changed the workplace. And as the new hospital is designed, there is greater understanding of what features work best. Gone are the days of simple cloth curtains dividing emergency room beds, and in come the days of negative pressure ventilation systems for each care space.

Hospitals are collaborating better today than they ever have, Chaloner said, much in thanks to having been in the trenches together, if only conceptually, and knowing that they could find themselves there again.

“None of us expects this will be the last time we have to deal with this,” he said.