'A Dark Time:' Parade Marks Return To Normalcy For Queens Doctor

FOREST HILLS, QUEENS — For Forest Hills' Dr. Teresa Amato, this week's hometown heroes ticker-tape parade marked the "light at the end of the tunnel" amid a challenging past year.

“It just means a joyful occasion, something really great just happened," she told CBS New York of the parade. "What it means for me is that... things are really getting back to normal finally."

Indeed, the parade, which honored health care and essential workers as well as first responders who fought on the frontlines of the pandemic, was the city's first true parade event since the start of the coronavirus crisis last year.

When the pandemic first took hold in Queens, Dr. Amato was running the emergency department at Long Island Jewish Forest Hills' Hospital, which quickly became inundated with COVID patients.

"It was a really dark time here," she told CBS New York, adding that emergency room doctors spend their careers "preparing for mass casualties" but had no way to prepare for the crisis that surpassed hours or days and went into weeks and months.

“It was just day after day, it really didn’t seem like there was going to be a light at the end of the tunnel,” she said.

But, in recent months, it appears that the city has truly turned a corner. The place that once saw 500 people died per day, now has an average COVID-19 positivity rate of 0.59 percent, the lowest level measured since the start of the pandemic, according to Mayor Bill de Blasio.

Dr. Amato also has seen glimmers of hope during the past several months, like a public school teacher who recovered from the disease and is now able to teach again.

"To see him back doing the things he loves to do, that was a real morale booster for the team to see someone surviving,” she told CBS new York.

And more recently, the vaccine effort has led her to see "the way out of this pandemic."

“The more people we can get to take the jab, the better we’re going to be to crush this,” Dr. Amato told CBS New York, echoing public health advice, and noting that most of the COVID patients she nows see are unvaccinated.

While Dr. Amato was one of many heroes who "loved" the ticker-tape parade, some did not feel the same way — namely thousands of essential workers who are demanding hazard pay.

“During the pandemic, our members were out there 24 hours, 7 days a week, while people were home being able to go where they had to go because we took them there — and now its time for the government to step up and give us hazard pay,” Transport Workers Union Local 100 President Tony Utano told PIX II.

The union's workers, which include MTA workers as well as public and private bus drivers, were among thousands of paramedics, fire department workers, and other essential workers who did not attend the parade.

While the city did not respond directly to PIX II's inquiry about hazard pay, the news outlet reported that along the parade route New York State Attorney General Letitia James said that "one of the issues I have been hearing from front-line workers is hazard pay, and I’m hoping the City of New York negotiates something for the workers who sacrificed every day for others."

Read the full CBS New report here. Read the full PIX II report here.