Lenin CerónIllustration by João FazendaThe new coronavirus has made all the easy stuff hard. The rules are shifting. Subways? Bad. Cabs? Murky. Mayor de Blasio says use them if you must and if you’re alone, but he banned shared rides for everyone but families and what he, strangely, called “real couples.” Takeout? The F.D.A. thinks the virus doesn’t spread through food. Other experts say maybe make some ramen.“New Yorkers are hungry,” Lenin Cerón said last week. Someone has to get them their food. Cerón is one of those people. He is a courier for Relay, a delivery company that has instituted a “contactless delivery” system, a vital real-time experiment in safely feeding the shut-in city. “I take this very seriously,” Cerón said. “When I get home, I have a bucket with soap and water, so I can step right into the bucket, and throw everything in. I wash my hands, take off my clothes. I clean all the knobs. Then I take a shower at night and in the morning. I disinfect the bathroom. I try to be as clean as possible.” In his delivery bag, he’d stashed plastic gloves. Hand-sanitizer bottles were ready in a pouch on his vest. “You can never use enough,” he said. Earlier in the morning, he’d bought a box of masks from a purported ninety-nine-cents store in Chinatown. “Fifty dollars!” he said.It was the first night of the ban on eating in restaurants. Cerón, who is thirty-four and originally from Guerrero, Mexico, had commuted from the Bronx to Union Square with his electric bike. He is a recent vegetarian, and a frequent smiler, under the mask. He uses the word “O.K.” to describe the many thi
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