Wayne Wong, a subway train operator for six years, has missed just three days of work since the coronavirus came to New York — this past weekend, after his brother succumbed to the disease.
“I’m still down there, doing what I’m doing,” the 56-year-old Queens man told The Post. “We don’t get hazard pay. We don’t get appreciation. We don’t get one week off like every other department. We’re just left out there like, ‘Oh if you die you die.’”
After taking the weekend to mourn his sibling’s death, Wong was back at work driving the E train Tuesday morning — where the cancer survivor has risked his own health through the pandemic by ferrying front-line workers to their jobs while dealing with dirty trains, homeless crowds and panicked customers.
Five days a week, Wong reports to work at 5:06 a.m. to drive trains back and forth between the World Trade Center and Parson Boulevard in Queens.
Before pulling out of the terminal, he uses a homemade cleaning concoction to spray down his operator’s cab. When the train isn’t too crowded, he cleans the train car as well.
“You have to be fearful. It’s obvious [the virus] is there, so you just want to have some preventative measures for yourself and for the passengers,” he said.
“If there’s not too many people [in the train car], I spray it. Sometimes when there’s people there I ask them, and they say yes.”
The E line was a hotspot for itinerants even before the pandemic, and homelessness is on Wong’s mind the moment he steps aboard the train for his shift.
By that time, the 10-car train already has 50 or 60 people sleeping on it, Wong said. He suspects they’ve been there since midnight.
Subways are some of the last remaining spaces the homeless can find refuge outside of shelters — which have had their own COVID-19 outbreaks — but he says the situation is making other straphangers nervous.
“If you have homeless people in there and they have [coronavirus], and you’re not kicking them out of the system, then [the disease] is almost a permanent fixture. It’s not going anywhere,” he said.
“There was this poor lady who was crying to me. She was a paying passenger and she couldn’t get a seat and she couldn’t go in any of the cars. I said ‘I’m sorry ma’am there’s nothing we can do.’ The best thing I could do was spray the car.”
The high concentration of homeless people on certain cars can create dangerous crowding on others.
Wong said dangerously large crowds on the subways pop up, then disappear — usually before the cops arrive to intervene.
“By the time police are there, the traffic has already left. They’re already gone. They’re packed in there, in my car,” he said.
Dozens of transit workers have died from coronavirus, and thousands more have contracted the disease, despite the MTA’s push to increase the amount of cleaning across the system.
In response to worker health concerns, the agency has started distributing masks, gloves and cleaning materials, and has now begun to install plexiglass barriers in some work locations.
Wong himself only recently wrapped up radiation treatment for cancer in February. But he continued to show up to work day after day in March, even as many of his coworkers called out sick.
A former accountant who took a job in transit so he could stay in Queens to take care for his 97-year-old mother, Wong said he never once considered playing hooky.
“I’m just brought up this way. You go do what you got to do,” he said. “You see people getting on, you can tell by their uniforms that they’re home health aides. These people need to get where they need to go. I would never disingenuously just book off.”
“I don’t consider myself a hero. Just taking people to work.”
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