Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast. This is an election year. Will Donald Trump be re-elected? What is going on with the Democrats? And has America gone even more crazy? We'll be discussing all of these things and more, more than once a week, because

we don't feel you have enough Americano in your life. And I have a special offer for Americano listeners.

If you want to subscribe to the Spectator's US edition, which is brilliant, by the way, I edit it,

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on Twitter, you will get 5% off. Please do so. I'm joined today by Matt McDonald, who is Spectator USA's managing editor,

and he's based in Brooklyn. So I'm going to be asking him about what the coronavirus is doing

to New York. Matt, you wrote rather a sad piece, given your normal cheery tone, about what it's like being in Brooklyn at the moment.

And I can't actually hear a siren at the moment, but you said the sirens are becoming ever more frequent.

I can hear one at a distance. Yeah. I mean, I suppose it's one of those things where it's hard to know whether you're just noticing them more because you listen out for them more.

As in because we're being, everyone in New York is being told, you know, we're the epicenter

of the coronavirus in North America. Maybe there were always this number of sirens and people

weren't just picking them out. But I would say, you know, I'm someone who works from home usually,

and therefore it's usually very quiet during the daytime and therefore

you kind of notice and pick out when there's noise in the distance and now it's it seems near

constant that you'll hear you know an ambulance or a fire truck potentially basically you know

heading towards one of the hospitals in the area yeah Yeah. Well, you had quite a funny anecdote about

your nearest hospital. What's your nearest hospital called? My nearest hospital is Woodhull.

It is about a mile up the road, kind of further towards Williamsburg than where I, where I live

at the moment. And yeah, it's a, it's a pretty bleak-looking building from the outside, like it's

brutalist, kind of this concrete tower and one of my

friends who is a in EMT or he used to be an EMT working as a kind of paramedic in an ambulance he told me

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