Dr. Michelle Morse, MD, MPH, Acting Commissioner, NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, spoke with the Amsterdam News for a Q&A about the 5th anniversary of the COVID-19 lockdown. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
AmNews: Can you give our readers your thoughts on the 5th anniversary of the COVID-19 lockdown?
Morse: I am so glad that you are covering this. I think such an important part of the pandemic recovery is to step back and reflect on what’s different and what isn’t different now, what we learned, and what we didn’t learn. To that effect, I think on the bright side, we spent two years actually in a citywide planning effort to review everything that happened during the pandemic and the city’s response, and to come up with a series of recommendations, and learnings in a report that was just released a few weeks ago. I think that’s again the kind of rigor we need because of the expansive and profound impact of the pandemic. It took two years to come up with that citywide assessment, learning, and recommendation document.
I mentioned that because again, I think it’s really important that we do that. And then, we did an internal 18-month-long process in the health department with over 1500 of our 7000 staff engaged in a learning process about the pandemic.
AmNews: Could you talk to us about Long COVID?
Morse: I’ll start by saying that Long COVID is a real disease, and we’re also still defining it. There are over 200 symptoms that could be attributed to Long COVID. It’s a very broad collection of symptoms, and because of that, each person’s experience with Long COVID really tends to be unique and different based on their unique medical history, background, and experience during one or more episodes of COVID that they had. What we do know for sure is that people who were in the intensive care unit with COVID are more likely to have Long COVID. People with more comorbidities are also more likely to have Long COVID –– women, people of color, people living in poverty. There are a number of risk factors. Those are clear for Long COVID, so those things are true, but each person’s symptoms are different. Now the definition of long COVID is having some collection of those 200 symptoms for longer than three months after having been infected with COVID. And so that definition stands, but that can mean just about anything for anyone, because the symptoms can look different. The defining factor really is that it persists … beyond three months after the infection.
AmNews: What is the future for the fight against COVID in NYC?
Morse: I think where we are now in terms of five years later … the bright side that I see is that our rates of death and hospitalization from COVID have plummeted from 2020 until now. What we’ve also seen is that life expectancy is starting to improve. So our Healthy NYC goal is to get us to 83 years of life expectancy by 20-30, which would be the highest life expectancy in New York City’s history. And to do so equitably. We are on track to meet or exceed that goal because the rate of COVID mortality has declined significantly. Our goal was to reduce it by 60% by 2030. We have already reduced it by 48% between 2021 and 2022, and then we are planning to release our 2023 data later this year.
So those are successes and again like that success I would say is also seen in our racial equity outcomes, the rate of death for Black New Yorkers was two to three times higher at the height of the pandemic and it is now about 1.2 times higher, so not perfect but significantly reduced for COVID related mortality.
For additional resources about COVID-19, visit www1.nyc.gov/site/coronavirus/index.page or call 311. COVID-19 testing, masks, and vaccination resources can also be accessed on the AmNews COVID-19 page: www.amsterdamnews.com/covid/. If you are recovering from #COVID19 or experiencing #LongCOVID, you can call 212-COVID19 to receive specialty care, or visit www.nychealthandhospitals.org/services/covid-19 to learn more about NYC’s COVID-19 Centers of Excellence.