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Surviving Covid

How the Armonk Chamber Helped Businesses Weather the Covid Crisis

August 17, 2021 by Andrew Vitelli

Neal Schwartz, President, Armonk Chamber of Commerce Photo by Chad Kraus

When COVID emerged as a crisis in March 2020, many local businesses were forced to close their doors while others saw their revenues dry up. But for the Armonk Chamber of Commerce, this time was as crucial as any since Neal Schwartz became president more than a decade ago.

The chamber has historically hosted a range of community events, held regular meetings, and published a directory of members. But most chamber members, Schwartz says, are generally passive participants that changed when business owners found themselves in uncharted waters as COVID hit. Suddenly, their businesses’ survival depended on navigating a host of new federal programs and incentives like Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans and on finding ways to keep their business running through restrictions and panic over the virus. Some businesses, like dental offices, had help from their industry groups, but others turned to the chamber.

“We became a conduit for using information from the state, the county and the federal government,” Schwartz explains. “It was invaluable to those members who weren’t connected to some of those other associations.”

The chamber helped connect its members to Zoom calls and other events that helped members navigate the new terrain and explore their options. It also created an app to give residents up-to-date information about which businesses were open. 

When necessary, the chamber organized its own events, bringing in chamber-affiliated accountants who were well-versed on the available recourses to answer member questions. 

“A couple of chambers [elsewhere] almost stopped functioning [during Covid], because they had their set activities and those activities didn’t happen, and they were kind of at a loss,” County Executive George Latimer explains. “The Armonk chamber made the transition that you had to make once you realized that Covid was going to shut down the normal activities.”

Latimer continues, “What they did was they morphed into providing the information and to some extent material [such as] PPE that the businesses needed.”

Spotlighting the Armonk Chamber of Commerce, Top Row, L-R: Neal Schwartz, president; Bharti Gupta, board member; Ed Woodyard, member; Shari Ascher, Director of Policy & Programs, Westchester County; George Latimer, Westchester County Executive Second Row, L-R: Ken Sassano, board member; Catherine Censullo, board member; Tammi Ecker, board member    Photo by Chad Kraus

The county government had access to both information and resources to help businesses but did not have the manpower to connect with every business from Yonkers to North Salem. 

“Sitting at the county level looking at 45 communities, how do we reach the business communities and small businesses? We can’t do it on our own. We don’t have the bandwidth,” Latimer says. “But when we know that we’ve got a chamber of commerce that is working–that is having Zoom meetings and exchanging information–then we can channel through the chamber and the chamber has the relationships with the local businesses.”

The county, for example, had access to free masks and sanitizer to give to businesses. But walking up and down every street in every city, town and village in Westchester distributing it was not possible, Latimer says. 

Instead, the chamber determined the local needs and the county dropped off supplies at a central location. The chamber then worked to distribute these supplies throughout Armonk. 

When certain workers such as restaurant servers became eligible for the Covid vaccine before the general population, the county again worked through the Armonk chamber and other local chambers to inform businesses whose employees would qualify.

County Executive George Latimer / Photo by Chad Kraus

But perhaps the biggest role the chamber played was in working with business owners through the federal assistance available.

“The saving grace for a majority of businesses was how they navigated through the loan portion of the federal offerings that were there,” Schwartz says. “Depending where the numbers were for a business, they may have done reasonably okay if they took a PPP loan, which didn’t need to get paid back.”

Despite (or, in a sense, because of) their falling revenues and the uncertainty surrounding the pandemic, the chamber saw new businesses joining to take advantage of these offerings.

“We picked up more members than you would expect in the middle of a pandemic,” he says. “There weren’t a ton of them, but there were people who began to appreciate that this chamber stuff has value.”

Haves and Have Nots

The pandemic and resulting shutdown did not hit all industries with the same force, Schwartz says. Some industries thrived even through the lockdowns, while in other fields businesses struggled to stay in business or were forced to close their doors. 

Home improvement was a sector that thrived, he notes. Trapped in their houses all day, local residents decided it was a good time to put in a pool, or redo their lawns, or make long-needed home improvements.

“The businesses that did well were the businesses that supported home life,” Schwartz says. “Some of them saw years that they haven’t seen before.” But many other businesses, particularly those that depended on traffic flow, struggled. It is hard to quantify exactly how many businesses went under, Schwartz says; he estimates some 10% of their members. 

Armonk is now well on its way to recovery, he says. 

“We are seeing these empty spaces get filled pretty quickly, considering everything,” he says. “It is not all doom and gloom at all.”

Latimer sees a similar picture on the county level, with sales tax receipts above where they were in 2019 pre-pandemic. Still, businesses face ongoing challenges.

One is the difficulty hiring workers, which Schwartz attributes in part to generous unemployment benefits distributed under the latest Covid relief bill.

“It went too far, so it was hard for restaurants to keep the staffing everywhere across the country,” Schwartz says. “People said, ‘Listen, I am getting more money to stay home and not go to work.’”

Latimer attributes the labor shortage to several factors, including the unemployment benefits, ongoing concerns about Covid, and an increasing preference for jobs with regular, stable hours. 

A Decade Leading the Chamber

Schwartz, who owns Armonk-based College Planning of Westchester, joined the chamber after opening his business in 2004, looking for the networking benefits the chamber would bring to his then-fledgling franchise. 

“I had bought all this equipment, furniture, systems, and I had no customers,” he remembers.

The chamber was helpful to him as he got his business, which specializes in tutoring, college counseling and ACT/SAT preparation, off the ground. But its activities at the time were limited to a sidewalk sale or two each year. In 2010, he stepped in as president and worked to build the chamber into a bigger player in the community.

Before he took over as president in 2010, he recalls, chamber activity was mostly limited to one or two sidewalk sales each year. When Schwartz stepped into leadership, he and his colleagues on the board scaled up the organization’s activity. 

In 2012, he launched cider and donut events. It’s grown from there, with 11 music events this summer, a “citizen of the year” award, a much larger Cider and Donut Festival, and regular chamber meetings. The chamber’s website has also been greatly improved, and now publishes the “Everything Armonk” community guide and business directory.

To learn more about the Armonk Chamber, please visit www.armonkchamberofcommerce.com

Filed Under: Cover Stories Tagged With: Armonk Chamber of Commerce., Cider Festival, George Latimer, local business, Neal Schwartz, PPE, Surviving Covid, Westchester County

Reflections from the Precipice

November 23, 2020 by Inside Press

On Climbing the COVID Mountain: A Heartfelt and Fact-Based Plea by an Emergency Room Doctor

By Dr. Evan Cohen

As an emergency physician, a husband and a father of two young children, I spend a lot of time thinking about Covid. Where we have been and where we are going. I find that despite all the destruction and pain that we have endured, the future is still ours to create.

Here, on the precipice of the Covid mountain I realize that I’ve gone through all of the stages of pandemic grief. In February and early March it was shock and disbelief. I did not think that Covid-19 would be so bad; it was being overblown by the media. Like Ebola, Bird Flu and SARS, it was happening far away and would not affect me. When it reached our shores and my community in New York, I felt certain that we could briefly quarantine our way out of the mess. As April rolled around, I was angry that so many people were dying. Selfishly, I was even more angry about the sacrifices that my family and I had to make. No more weekend date nights or get-togethers with friends, no vacations, no school or playdates for my children and there were no more escapes to the arcades and indoor playgrounds on those painful rainy days.  

Dr. Evan Cohen and his family

I stopped at the guilt stage during a frightening two weeks when my parents developed Covid. My father recovered very quickly, but as my mother’s illness lingered, I kept seeing her face superimposed onto my patients in the emergency department. I was constantly thinking about the possibility of someone so important to me lying in a hospital bed alone and with no effective treatments available. The worst part as a son and emergency doctor was that there was nothing that I could do other than call her every few hours to make sure her breathing wasn’t labored. After that experience, the Covid-related depression was almost a relief. It didn’t matter much that I am trained to recognize the risk factors for depression and get people help when they need it. I could only feel positive for so long while thinking about all that had been taken away from me, there was no end in sight. I remember leaving an interview I gave on Covid-related depression and feeling so hypocritical telling people how to try and battle the same gloom that I was feeling.

What kept me going during that time was the incredible support that I and my colleagues received from our community. As an ER doctor, I feel like I’ve been trained to deal with anything and anybody that comes through my doors. Having trained in Camden, New Jersey and worked all over the east coast of this country, nothing could shake or surprise me and I was proud of that. Many times, I was so good at separating emotion from reality that I forgot the value of my work. As a heartfelt reminder, our staff received countless letters of gratitude and witnessed several “drive-by” parades organized by the community. The hospital played “Fight Song” on the loudspeaker every time a Covid patient was discharged, a moment that always sent a shiver down my spine! I pray that every health care worker felt as appreciated as I did during those months.    

The summer offered me a much needed respite and life almost felt normal. My mood was tied to the case count and as cases trended down in my community, I was able to spend time with my extended family, take my children to the playground and pool club. I would go days at a time without seeing a Covid patient at work.  Now, with the summer in the rear view mirror and the weather getting too cold to play outside, I’ve reached the acceptance phase, although I’ve had to go through many of these painful phases again on my way here.  

I accept that Covid is real and won’t disappear if we just wish hard enough. I accept that many more people will get sick and die and I accept that there will be sacrifices this winter. I also accept that myself contracting Covid is not inevitable and that I have some control over how things work out.  

Nationwide, we are seeing the exponential spread of this illness come back with a vengeance.  As case counts reach a critical level, the internal calculus we have been doing has changed.  Chances are that any time there is any gathering of more than just a few people, there will be someone in the crowd with Covid. We are back to all Covid all the time. The biggest public health threat, hospital overcrowding, is happening again.  

I appreciate that it seems like fewer people are dying and going on ventilators compared to last spring. The best explanation I can come up with for this is complex but I think is partially related to the amazing work of the scientific community in narrowing down and creating effective therapeutics. Dedicated scientists were able to figure out in short order that hydroxychloroquine, early ventilator use and azithromycin were out and remdesivir, steroids, and blood thinners were in. I feel optimistic about the new arrival of monoclonal antibodies. Despite all of these drugs, the most important factor that I see is the availability of nurses and other health care workers to be adequately staffed to care for the large numbers of Covid patients in the hospitals. This just cannot be overstated for any medical condition that requires a high intensity of care! For anyone that has recovered from surgery or serious illness, you know how important it is to take your medications on time, eat nutritious foods, be clean, communicate with loved ones and be able to walk. One of my health care heroes, a nurse colleague, donated countless hours last spring cleaning soiled patients and feeding them. those being the most essential tools in her toolkit. Those simple but crucial things just can’t happen without adequate staffing in hospitals.  

Now, from standing on what I hope is the precipice, I see two futures. In one dark world, we have not learned from the mistakes of the past. Our Ids control our superego and we do what feels good. After all, it feels good to eat in a restaurant, to hang out with our friends, and to see our families. In this future, I see our schools closing down and my five-year-old son unable to sit still for Zoom kindergarten. I see my three-year-old daughter deprived of seeing her best friend and unable to get the amazing nurturing experience and growth she has been given this year at her nursery school. I see the death tolls rolling up. I see my colleagues in medicine going back into that dark place of last spring. In the other (brighter) future, I see us all banding back together the way we did in April. We can be supportive of each other during this time and simply do better at keeping the virus at bay.  I do not accept that we have given our best effort at controlling this pandemic.    

I believe that to act with conviction, you must first understand your WHY. My WHY with Covid is mainly driven by fear. I have a fear of my friends and family getting sick, of my children not being able to go to school, overcrowded hospitals and of coming down with a debilitating case of Covid just days before I was scheduled to receive the vaccine. I will never claim that my Covid behavior is perfect, but any sacrifices that I make are with those visions in mind. I know that everyone has different motivations in their lives; nevertheless I hope and believe that many of our WHYs are aligned.  

Whatever your goals and motivations, we have a path forward in this together. And, thanks to the knowledge we have now in terms of mask wearing and physical distancing, we can do better. On the other side of this peak will be hundreds of millions of miraculous life-saving vaccines. Out of this tragedy, it’s possible that the Covid vaccines will offer the most impactful gift that the house of medicine has ever given to humanity. 

As the winter rolls in and we get an influx of young adults home from college and a line-up of holidays that traditionally foster large gatherings, all that I ask is for all of us to realize what is at stake and how close we are to being on the other side of this mountain. I hope to see all of you when we get there.

Dr. Evan Cohen is originally from Rockland County, New York and obtained a B.S degree from Syracuse University. He obtained his medical degree from SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse New York and completed an emergency medicine residency at Cooper University Hospital in Camden New Jersey. Currently, he is serving as a medical director and practicing emergency physician in Orange County New York. He lives with his wife and two children in Chappaqua, New York.

 

Filed Under: Surviving COVID-19 Tagged With: COVID-19, Covid-related depression, emergency, Emergency Department, Emergency Physician, Family, Future, hospital overcrowding, Mask Wearing, pain, Physical Distancing, precipice, Surviving Covid, vaccine

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