How coronavirus crisis is changing our experience of the world

Birds are singing over the coronavirus lockdown. Skies are clearer and the air is healthier. We see fewer people, places and things. The touchstones of human affection — hugs, kisses, handshakes — have become taboo as potential transmitters of pandemic disease.

Humanity’s response to the coronavirus outbreak is reorienting how our senses experience the world — what and whom we hear, breathe, touch and see — and even how Mother Nature experiences us.

‘Try to listen’

“Quiet has taken up much more of our time now,” said Arline L. Bronzaft, a psychologist in Manhattan who studies noise and sound. “Things have changed. The sounds have changed. Try to listen. You'll hear some.”

The soundscape is different: ambulance sirens — the daily volume of ambulance requests in some parts of the metro area has eclipsed the total call volume of Sept. 11, 2001 — and the grassroots applause daily at 7 p.m. for medical workers, a tradition begun in January in the virus’ Chinese epicenter of Wuhan and continued throughout Europe, Latin America and beyond. Birds once drowned out by human activity can now be heard chirping, singing, buzzing, seemingly earlier, more often and louder, according to birders.

“Human activity can at times very much disrupt their life cycle except for those species that have adapted themselves to the human environment,” said Shirley Shaw, president of the New York State Ornithological Association. “If people are out in parks or on trails or whatever and they’re talking, even just the usual walking motion and all of that, that can spook birds so they will hunker down.”

Shaibal Mitra of Bay Shore, an ornithologist and assistant professor of biology at the College of Staten Island, said he thinks birds — which make sounds to attract a mate, maintain territory, warn other birds, signal alarm — are more noticeable to humans now because it’s quieter outside and people are more perceptive.

“If you’re a person who has a busy schedule, and you’re preoccupied with commuting, and distracted and in the car a lot, it would be easy to miss this sort of rapid change in birds all around us,” he said of the 300 or so species of birds who pass through the area. “If you’re not out there listening, it’s easy for it to pass you by.”

Mitra’s been out bird-watching, including Lesser Black-backed Gulls at Robert Moses State Park; and dunlins, sanderlings, and American oystercatchers, at Nickerson Beach.

In neighborhoods across Valley Stream, Lynbrook, Garden City, New Hyde Park, Floral Park, Malverne and elsewhere, the near-constant roar of aircraft to and from Kennedy Airport over Long Island has virtually disappeared, said Elaine Miller, whose Malverne home is beneath a departure flight path. She helps run the group Plane Sense 4 LI, which has been lobbying for higher altitudes since 2012, when the Federal Aviation Administration changed how planes fly over New York City and Long Island.

“I wake up with a smile on my face, and I go to sleep with my head on the pillow rested instead of being so tense and just waiting a minute or a minute or a half for the next plane to be rumbling over our home,” said Miller, who likened the quiet to being freed from torture.

For the first time in nearly eight years, she says, she feels fine opening her windows. Every few minutes the dishware in her kitchen cabinets isn’t rattling and the glasses aren’t clinking. She can sleep — and without earplugs.

Passenger volume at Kennedy Airport is down 97% from what it was two months ago and compared to 2019, Rick Cotton, executive director of the Port Authority, which runs the region’s airports, said by phone.

“We’ve never seen anything like that,” he said. “It’s just an extraordinary, extraordinary plunge in air passenger travel.”

‘There’s less toxic chemicals’

Monitoring from the state Department of Environmental Conservation shows a decline in particulate matter — down 17% in Suffolk County and 13% in Nassau, comparing March 2019 to March 2020, an agency spokesman said in an email. The reductions are even higher in New York City — as high as 35%.

Particulate matter is produced by activity like fuel burning to heat buildings and run automobiles, chemical reactions and dust from industry. It's been linked to respiratory disease, irregular heartbeat and premature death.

A small increase in long-term exposure to fine particulate matter results in a large increase in the coronavirus death rate, according to a study published this month by Harvard University.

Adrienne Esposito, the longtime executive director of Farmingdale-based Citizens Campaign for the Environment, said the air Long Islanders breathe has become noticeably cleaner, owing to a steep decline, since mid-March’s lockdown, of exhaust emitted by automobiles — on some major roadways, more than half of vehicles — and the closure of factories and other industry like manufacturers that emit pollutants.

“The air is cleaner and healthier for the public,” she said, “so there’s less toxic chemicals and less contaminants going into our lungs.”

It’s not just that Long Island and New York City are polluting less, she said: the regional airshed is cleaner, because there’s less pollution as far away as the Midwestern United States.

“From the Midwest, the emissions will blow across the continent and toward Long Island and deposit particulate matter, nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide,” she said, naming three types of pollutants that have been reduced since the shutdown.

Cleaner skies are being seen across the world. In India, the amount of particulate matter and nitrogen dioxide has fallen up to 60% during that country’s lockdown, according to the not-for-profit Centre for Science and Environment in Delhi.

Around the world, lockdowns have throttled human contact, limiting whom we see in person to immediate family or roommates.

‘I need my own life’

The daily routine of Beth Goodman of Commack, a middle-school reading teacher, has been disrupted, too. No wake-up at 4:30 a.m. for a gym class at 5 a.m., no drive back to make breakfast for her daughter, commute to and from school or in-person interaction beyond with the girl, Gia, 3 ½, and her husband, Dan, 39. She teaches virtually.

“I want to work. I need adult interaction. I need my own life and my own friends and a place where I can kind of separate myself,” said Goodman, 37. “And I absolutely love spending time with my husband and my daughter. I just don't want to spend every minute with my husband and my daughter.”

Around the world, epidemiologists have cautioned against handshakes, hugs, and kisses — these can spread the virus — except among people who live together.

“We do reap some psychological benefit from hugging people, holding hands, etc. so that certainly is something that we’re missing out on,” said Lisa M. Jaremka, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Delaware who studies the health effects of loneliness.

One way to augment the shortfall, Jaremka recommended: families should increase the physical affection they show one another.

‘We are losing something’

Some of the deficit people face during isolation can be supplemented with online interaction on Skype, Zoom, FaceTime and other video-chat services.

“Can we make up for that loss, perhaps by hanging out with people virtually?” she said.

Although research doesn’t provide a definitive answer — she said it’s reasonable to assume that the answer is yes — “we are losing something by not having that physical contact — that might be hard to completely make up in other ways.”

Mitra, the Bay Shore ornithologist, said he’s had to silence his iPhone: since the lockdown-fueled quiet began, fellow bird watchers keep texting him about sightings.

“I actually turned that dinger off to get a little bit of peace,” he said of a recent barrage of messages. “There were 47 texts!”

By Matthew Chayes

matthew.chayes@newsday.comchayesmatthew

Matthew Chayes, a Newsday reporter since 2007, covers New York City.