The covid-19 deaths were piling up so fast that New York City bus driver Danny Cruz began to worry that no one understood the toll the virus was taking on his fellow transit workers.
So in early April, he began keeping a list of those killed by the disease and posting it on Facebook. Cruz had lost a friend and fellow driver at his depot to the novel
coronavirus a few days earlier. He also had tested positive for it himself.
“Every morning I wake up and one of the hardest things I have to do is to try to keep this updated,” he wrote April 7, when the death toll was 41. “Every time I have to add a name, my heart loses a beat. . . . Why is this happening? Why were we not better prepared? How many more members will we have to lose?”
By Cruz’s count, 129 New York City transit workers have died of covid-19.