Business as usual, until it was ‘too late’

In early March, as Mayor de Blasio and Gov. Cuomo scrambled to get ahead of the global pandemic, it was business as usual in break rooms at fire stations, subway facilities, bus depots and police stationhouses across the five boroughs

Thousands of cops, firefighters, transit workers and emergency medical technicians walked in and out of break rooms without wearing masks, unwittingly transmitting the disease to an untold number of colleagues.

For weeks, those employees — deemed essential by Cuomo — asked for more equipment, including masks, gloves and hand sanitizer. But amid a national shortage of materials, they were told by their superiors to carry on with a very limited supply.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said earlier in the year that people should not wear masks to prevent the spread of coronavirus unless they exhibited symptoms of COVID-19 or were caring for someone who had the disease.

City and state officials followed those guidelines; however, break rooms and worker facilities were still crowded, and many of those who may have had the disease had no masks or cleaning supplies to prevent infecting their nearby colleagues.

“In your break room what’s happening is they’re not wearing the mask,” said Anthony Almojera, a firefighter and EMT. “They’re coughing, they’re spitting, they’re touching their face. At least with the mask, they would’ve had that barrier.”

The shortage of face masks has also forced the Fire Department to loosen guidelines for EMTs, who are now only required to wear surgical masks when treating non-critical coronavirus patients instead of more protective N95 masks, said Almojera.

On March 6, Metropolitan Transportation Authority officials told the bulk of the agency’s frontline workforce that they were not allowed to wear masks because “medical guidance indicates that respiratory masks do not protect healthy people.”

Days later, the agency reversed course and allowed its workers to wear masks, but said the protective equipment would not be provided inhouse. Last week, MTA officials went a step further by securing at least 75,000 disposable surgical masks dedicated to agency employees.

But the agency had a supply of face masks all along. A NYC Transit pandemic policy put in place at the start of 2013 requires the agency to keep a sixweek stockpile of safety equipment including N95 face masks.

“We had a stockpile,” said MTA Chief Safety Officer Pat Warren. “You don’t really know what the pandemic is going to be, so you have a selection of items that are in there to use depending on what the pandemic is.”

Had transit workers, cops and firefighters worn masks in break rooms and while in close contact with the public throughout March, it could have helped contain the spread of the disease, said Jack Caravanos, a professor of environmental public health sciences at New York University.

“For your average Joe and Susan walking the streets of Manhattan, masks are probably not necessary,” said Caravanos. “But I tend to be a supporter of masks for occupations where there’s a high frequency of contact among different groups. I would probably recommend a bus driver wearing a mask. Same thing with subway personnel.”

“They missed the boat,” said Yann Hicks, a subway train operator and shop steward for Transport Workers Union Local 100. “I’m getting sick now. I want to go to work, but I can’t because they think I’m going to spread the virus. That’s the only way they contain it, by sending people home.”

As of Monday, at least seven transit workers, three cops and one firefighter died from the disease, with hundreds more infected.

“If people were taking this seriously a month ago, serious like they’re trying to take it now, that curve might have flattened,” said Almojera. “Now it’s too late.”