Words can’t adequately describe what we all experienced in 2020. In early March and through the spring and summer, NYC was at the epicenter of the Covid-19 crisis.
Early on, a number of our employees (including me) had the virus. Fortunately, we all got through the first wave in good shape. For months, most businesses either moved to remote working or shut down, thereby leaving the city as a ghost town. The sounds of sirens filled the air around our offices in Brooklyn, only interrupted by the loud clanking of the pots and pans at 7PM each night by our citizens thanking our nurses, doctors and first responders.
Our team at Skywire were considered “essential” workers, often required to visit dangerous environments such as nursing homes, hospitals, homeless shelters and the like. I thank them all and our entire team for their incredible dedication and commitment during this perilous time.
Over the weekend, the NYT, published an article titled “Why 530 Frozen Bodies Sit in a Brooklyn Warehouse”. The article discusses why NYC needed to build a temporary morgue at the height of the Covid crisis. It was well documented that during height of the crisis, most NYC hospitals had no more capacity to store dead bodies…people dying from Covid. After reaching capacity, the hospitals secured frozen trucks to store the overflow of dead bodies, which would sit adjacent to the hospitals. Also, unidentified dead bodies had been buried at Hart Island, a small island located in the western end of the Long Island Sound. Even the burial site at Hart Island ran out of capacity. It’s horrifying, all of it.
The city decided to turn an abandoned warehouse on the Brooklyn waterfront into a temporary morgue. The building was vacant, having no facilities including internet. Within 24 hours over a weekend in April, Skywire was called on to deliver 1GB of Internet to the temporary morgue so it could function as a critical healthcare facility.
These types of challenges define all of us as New Yorkers and as we head into the New Year, we will no doubt be confronted with many more. As always, we stand tall with New York.
Like everyone, we are really happy to put 2020 behind us and look forward to a happy, healthy and prosperous 2021.
Alan Levy
CEO
www.skywirenetworks.com
