Sunday, December 27th, 2020
2020 in Hindsight.
It seemed an auspicious year, 2020 – a year for perfect vision. A great year to mark anniversaries and the achievement of big goals and the beginnings of journeys and new adventures. By this point, looking back over the year from December, the joke is that this year has felt like it’s been about twelve years long, and it’s no wonder why – so much has happened this year.
Pandemic
On January 30th, 2020, the World Health Organization declared a global health emergency. The next day, the United States issued an executive order restricting travel from China.
On March 7th, 2020, Governor Andrew M. Cuomo issued Executive Order Number 202 declaring a Disaster Emergency in the State of New York. On March 10th, it was announced that New York State was establishing a containment area in New Rochelle, to manage what officials were referring to as a “cluster” – an outbreak of the novel coronavirus, COVID-19. Within that one mile radius, schools and houses of worship and large gathering facilities were closed for a two week period, to mitigate the spread of a virus that we knew very little about.
By the end of that week, schools here in the Hudson Valley were preparing to close for a week or so, sending students home with Chromebooks and packets of papers. Many offices were making the decision to work from home to accommodate parents as local concerns grew about the spread of the virus.
On Sunday, March 22nd, New York PAUSE officially went into effect, closing all non-essential businesses statewide, in an attempt to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. We all became very familiar with the phrase “flatten the curve,” as the daily infection rate in New York began hitting over 5,000 new infections per day.
Essential Work
We learned early on in the pandemic that our most essential functions – the workforce that really makes our world turn – include healthcare providers, pharmacies, grocery stores and food services, utilities, delivery services, home improvement stores, gas stations, and janitorial services.
Businesses that rely heavily on social interaction – tourism, restaurants, salons, fitness centers, wedding venues – most heavily impaired by the practice of social distancing, worked hard to find creative ways to interact with clients where they could, but many could not. Between the heavy hit to in-person business and school closures, we saw the unemployment rate in the Hudson Valley leap in 2020, from 4.0% in March to 14.4% in April.
Vulnerabilities Revealed
The pandemic revealed vulnerabilities in our regional food system, as pipeline shortages left local grocery stores with bare shelves, food banks were overwhelmed by the rising need for services, and schools used buses to set up distribution points to provide food to the more than 140,000 students in the region, who receive free or reduced school lunches.
Teachers and administrators worked tirelessly to re-engineer school into a virtual format and figure out how to deliver those services to areas in our region that are underserved by broadband. Parents scrambled to make arrangements for childcare and the school’s role as childcare provider for our workforce became evident, as parents became full-time teachers at home.
At the end of May and into the summer, protests ignited by video of George Floyd’s death while in police custody, erupted across the United States and around the World. The protests sparked conversation and intense debate about systemic racism, inequality, inequity, community policing, and poverty.
As summer drew to a close, educators again prepared to deliver education in multiple formats – in-person, hybrid, remote learning – the services proposed were as varying as the number of school districts here in the Hudson Valley. Debates continue over school as an essential function, the safety of teachers and students, the inequities of broadband availability, the impact of poverty, food insecurity, and homelessness, the delivery of social services and educational support, the effectiveness of distance learning, and the mental health of children.
Pivot
We saw a lot of disruption in 2020. While disruption creates chaos – and it certainly did – it also births innovation and reveals resiliency.
Local manufacturers pivoted to meet the high demand for Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) needed by healthcare providers and essential workers. Businesses that could pivot to remote work frantically adjusted to new ways of communicating and managing teams, as technology progressed leaps and bounds for many organizations in a matter of days. The rise of video conferencing and communication apps including Zoom, Google Meet, Slack, and Microsoft Teams have helped facilitate business in a virtual world.
The shift to remote work has impacted local commuting patterns, drastically affecting public transit and allow commuters to set up residence further from their place of employment. Record numbers of visitors flocked to the Hudson Valley’s hiking trails and states parks in 2020. This in turn has led to a real estate boom here in the Hudson Valley, as many New York City dwellers and commuters push northward in search of homes in less densely populated areas, with larger floorplans and outdoor spaces. The high demand for real estate in the area has constricted inventory, pushing the median sales price up in every county of the Hudson Valley region.
In October and November, a period of acute political polarity surrounding this presidential election, socially distanced lines of masked voters wrapped around early polling places as citizens took advantage of early voting opportunities in the Hudson Valley.
As we approached the holidays, with new infection rates on the rise, local businesses and associations urged communities to shop local as shipping carriers saw increases in peak shipping volume. Unemployment numbers in the Hudson Valley declined through the fall months from 6.7% in September to 5.6% in November.
December brought news of effective vaccines, innovation that proves how powerful dedicated resources can effect change. The beginning of distribution of those vaccine to frontline healthcare workers provides hope that we can achieve herd immunity over the next year and a return to normalcy.
In Hindsight
The question remains what “normal” may look like after a year of so many challenges and changes. We still have much to evaluate as we look back over the last year. While 2020 may not have turned out to be the auspicious year we anticipated, it turns out that maybe, hindsight really is 2020, and we can look at it as an opportunity to make sense of the lessons we’ve learned and address the vulnerabilities that have been revealed as we move forward.
