New Havener Of The Year

Maritza Bond thought she was returning home to New Haven after 19 years to fix the city’s lead-paint enforcement.

Then the Covid-19 pandemic swept in — and thrust her into the forefront of New Haven’s public-health response.

She was ready.

It was March, in the first weeks of the worst public-health crisis in a century. Bond was in the midst of it.

Nineteen years after she left town, Bond had returned home to become New Haven’s health director. She was now in her second month on the job. Already she had emerged as the public face of the city government’s public-health response to the Covid-19 pandemic. She was scrambling night and day to figure out how to prevent thousands of people from dying.

Now, as she lay in bed, her thoughts turned to how to keep her own family safe.

Amid the scramble, she had neglected to check in on her mom in Brooklyn. Until her aunt called.

“Your mom’s in the hospital,” her aunt told her. ​“We don’t know why. She was having breathing problems.”

Given the chaos in New York’s hospitals at the time, it took some doing to connect to her mom. Bond didn’t give up. She reached her mom. Her mom was breathing hard and described her symptoms. The world was still learning about Covid-19. Mom hadn’t received test results, but there was no mistaking that she had it.

Mom was put on a ventilator. She recovered enough to return home. Then the family couldn’t find anyone nearby to deliver groceries to her. A market called Gala delivers to homes within a zone near its store, but Bond’s mother lives just past the boundary in Brooklyn.

Bond, consumed with concern about how to protect New Haveners, now was trying to figure out how to protect her mom as well.

She couldn’t go to New York herself. She couldn’t expose herself to Covid-19. She had a job to do here in New Haven, not to mention two boys at home to take care of.

The solution hit her at that 5:30 a.m. wake-up. She remembered: Bridgeport has a Gala’s, too.

In her last job, as Bridgeport’s health director, Bond had inspected the market. She met the owner. She still had his number.

She texted the owner: Is there any way you can get groceries to my mom?

Gala came through with a delivery of a month of groceries. Bond ordered her mom a microwave too.

Bond’s skin was thickening by the day. It had been thick to begin with. But remembering that story nine months later, Bond started tearing.

“Thank God,” she said, ​“for technology.”

The Face Of The City’s Response

New Haven can thank Maritza Bond for leading the city’s public-health response to Covid-19 this year. She has brought the same focus she brought on finding her mother groceries to finding solutions to the mystery of how best to contain a pandemic.

Thousands of New Haven government employees worked harder than ever this year and put their lives at risk. Firefighters and cops worked double shifts and wandered each day into Covid-19 hotspots, both at headquarters and in the community. Teachers struggled to keep students learning online while in many cases keeping their own children focused at home. Workers labored from morning into night to keep elections running. Inspectors donned masks and gloves to ensure business owners kept customers and landlords kept tenants safe. Drivers picked up the garbage and plowed and cleaned the streets in Covid red zones. Department heads put in overtime to figure out how to keep work going amid coronavirus unknowns and vanishing revenues.

Bond and her team at the health department were among those thousands of public-service heroes in 2020. They worked seven days a week, morning through night, for months at a time during the pandemic, and they haven’t let up.

Like every public official in the world (except the prime minister of New Zealand), Bond and her team didn’t have all the answers. They have had to improvise in tackling a coronavirus that spread worldwide before scientists knew much about it.

Working along with her staff, the mayor, fellow department heads, and people in the community, Bond put New Haven ahead of the curve. Months before the state, she teamed up with 160 Yale medical and public-health students to do contact tracing throughout the city in order to limit the spread of the coronavirus. She teamed with faith leaders to convince evangelical churches to move services online. She helped organize a team of inspectors from different city departments to pop in on businesses to ensure they complied with Covid-19 restrictions — and shut them down if they refused. No matter how much guff she got in return.

“I’ve never seen anyone work harder than she does. She’s on 24 – 7,” observed Police Chief Otoniel Reyes. ​“She’s collaborative.” At the same time, ​“she’s not trying to be warm and fuzzy. She does her job. She has no problem calling me and letting me know officers are not wearing a mask.”

“I’m not the type of health director,” Bond said in an interview, ​“who sits at a desk and shuffles papers around. I need to have a sense of what’s happening on the ground.”

Day 1 Pivot

Bond, who is 42, had a sense something was happening on the ground on Sunday, Jan. 26, the day before she began working as New Haven’s health director.

Bond grew up in Fair Haven, where she ​“saw the violence and the drugs and people just sick in my neighborhood” and wondered how she could make a difference. She discovered how during her freshman year at Southern Connecticut State University. She took a course taught by New Haven’s health director at the time, Bill Quinn. Quinn assigned her to deliver meals and health information to HIV/AIDS patients.

“That’s when it clicked for me,” Bond recalled. ​”I always wanted to prevent” people from falling ill, ​“and promote healthier lifestyles and healthy behaviors. How can we prevent it from happening rather than dealing with a person after it’s been diagnosed, after a neighborhood has gotten so bad?”

She declared public health as her major, got a graduate degree, and moved to Ansonia in 2001 to begin her career.

Now, as January 2020 neared its end, Bond was coming back home.

The weekend before she started her job as city health director, thousands of high school students were staying at the Omni Hotel on Temple Street for a Model United Nations Conference.

A student from China had flu-like symptoms. Officials feared he may have come down with a coronavirus that was killing people in China. People here were beginning to hear about it. Had it arrived on our shores?

On that Jan. 26 Sunday, organizers canceled the conference. The students were sent home.

Bond received calls about it from health department staffers and from Mayor Justin Elicker. That night she met by phone with her staffers to begin discussing what to do if this coronavirus arrived in New Haven.

In this case, it turned out the Chinese student had the flu, not Covid.

On Monday, her first day in the job, Bond announced that news at a City Hall press conference with Elicker and her supervisor, Community Services Administrator Mehul Dalal. She encouraged New Haveners to get flu shots.

Back in her office, she pivoted. She had expected to focus first on rebuilding her department’s lead paint program. She inherited a broken department, an embarrassment for New Haven government. A data breach had compromised the private records of at least 587 adults and minors with sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). Five separate judges had excoriated the city for violating the law in its enforcement of laws governing lead paint.

Bond started that Monday on developing new standing procedures for lead paint enforcement and hiring inspectors. But she also got to work on what would later be called Covid-19. The crisis was coming.

“We had limited information from the CDC” — the national-level Centers for Disease Control, based in Atlanta — ​“on the extent of this virus and how contagious it was, and the real impacts it would have on the country,” Bond recalled.

So in addition to seeking information, she and her clinical nurse director, epidemiologist, and emergency preparedness coordinator crafted a plan for what to do if the coronavirus hit the city. ​“There was no infrastructure. We were not ready. Many health departments around the country were not ready,” she recalled.

She met with emergency operations chief Rick Fontana and other department heads. They discussed activating the emergency operations center (which they soon did) and drawing up plans for a unified command approach under Bond’s direction.

Bond flashed back to the first day of her public health career, in 2001. It was right after 9/11. She had taken a job as a community health outreach worker for the Naugatuck Valley Health District. An anthrax threat came in that day, in Oxford. Her team had to stop what it was doing to grasp what anthrax attacks could look like, and how they would respond. They worked through drill after drill ​“in the event that we were going to face a public health crisis,” she said.

Her role included reaching out to the Valley’s Spanish-speaking population. ​“I challenged the team about thinking about cultural and linguistic barriers that we faced. A lot of undocumented individuals live in the Valley that people don’t want to talk about,” she recalled. (Bond’s work in that vein led the Connecticut Health Foundation in 2015 to honor her as a ​“health equity superstar.”) The anthrax attacks never materialized.

Now, in New Haven in 2020, Bond realized she would need to pivot again. And this time fears of a crisis came true.

The Two ​“T“s

When people in New Haven started catching Covid-19, Bond focused on two ​“t” words: teamwork and transparency.

Her department launched a dashboard to inform people online about case numbers and precautions to stay safe. Elicker and Bond held daily press conferences. In contrast to officials seeking to downplay the coronavirus elsewhere in the country, Bond continued delivering facts, charts, and advice at these conferences through the rest of the year.

New Haven issued one of the first public orders to close businesses, limit gatherings, and socially distance. It was one of the first to close schools.

Black churches, Orthodox Jewish congregations, and Hispanic Evangelical Christian groups blasted Bond and Elicker for seeking to limit their services. Some of the city’s initial fatal outbreaks occurred in those communities.

Bond resorted to teamwork. She and Dalal enlisted one of the city’s Community Services Administration staffers, Carlos Sosa-Lombardo, to establish dialogue with faith leaders. They organized webinars with dozens of ministers to lay out the Covid-19 facts, challenges and rules.

Bond turned for help to the Rev. Abraham Hernandez. Hernandez has influence in the Latino religious community. He serves as executive director of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference (NHCLC) for the State of Connecticut. Having grown up in the church in New Haven, Bond knew Hernandez. His dad was her pastor when she attended Second Star of Jacob Church on Chapel Street when she was growing up in Fair Haven. With his and others’ help, she got the word out on Spanish-language radio and meetings with pastors.

Bond’s team ​“did a spectacular job opening up and sustaining a line of communication with the faith-based community” and helping pastors transition to online services, Hernandez said. ​“The city worked very closely with the Hispanic evangelical community from the very onset.” He said he’s sure ​“countless lives” were saved

Nevertheless, hospital beds started filling up. New Haven didn’t see the thousands of deaths feared at first when it looked like the tragedy in Italy could replay itself here. But caseloads soared into the hundreds, then thousands. (This week the number approached 7,000 to date; the number of deaths passed 140.)

Bond’s team realized that people could no longer go to the hospital emergency room unless they were critically ill. Private practices shut down. So the health department activated a 24-hour hotline to help people needing medical advice.

Early on, they noticed that Black and Latino neighborhoods had the most cases and the most deaths. The city created billboards featuring ​“influencers” like rapper Smitty Bop and WYBC’s Juan Castillo to urge the community to mask up.

The national and federal governments had yet to offer much help with testing or contact tracing. Yale-New Haven launched a testing site on Long Wharf. Bond raced to find others to pitch in.

CVS helped. Yale-New Haven added pop-ups. Fair Haven and Cornell Scott Hill Health developed sites. A Greenwich doctor named Steven Murphy stepped in to set up clinics. The governor and a U.S. senator came to town for tests to highlight how one community was leading the way. Problems emerged with Murphy: He billed for extra tests insurers didn’t want to reimburse. He failed to notify some New Haveners for weeks, if ever, that they had tested negative. At least one person in town was hounded by a collection agency for payment on his ​“free” test. After the Independent’s Tom Breen reported on this, stories emerged about Murphy running the same scam in other communities. Scrambling to provide testing, the Elicker administration tarried in responding to those revelations. Eventually it severed its contract with Murphy. Bond noted that the problems never stopped anyone who tested positive from learning they had the disease.

160 Grad Students Put To Work

New Haven also took the lead on contact tracing. Medical and public-health students at Yale were doing tracing in-house. Bond reached out. Could they do the same for New Haven?

“They had a lot of free time,” Bond recalled. ​“School abruptly ended for them as well. This was a chance to engage them in real public health work.”

Plus, she said, ​“we could not wait for the state.”

Bond’s staff and the Yale students worked as a team. They enlisted 160 grad students to call people who tested positive, then track down people with whom they had had contact. The callers advised them to go into 14-day quarantines, and followed up. Sometimes the callers were the only person elderly people could turn to amid fear and confusion about the disease. (Click here to read more about that.)

“She is very earnest, very keen to do the right thing. She has been a good partner for us,” Sten Vermund, dean of Yale’s public health school, said of Bond’s work with the Yale team.

“She could have said, ​‘We’re not going to use volunteers.’ She didn’t stand on a high horse. She was very pragmatic about it. She came in with experience that was very helpful” as Bridgeport’s health director.

“People like the mayor and director of health, they did take this much more seriously than some of their counterparts did. I would give them a good grade,” Vermund said. (He offered one exception: New Haven was the only community in Connecticut to fail to reopen schools when cases dropped. He called that a public health failure.)

It’s impossible to quantify how many lives they saved, Vermund noted. New Haven is not immune to actions taken by its neighbors or to poverty and health problems that contribute to the disease’s spread. There are limits to what one city can achieve in tackling a worldwide pandemic. New Haven never had to stow dead bodies in a refrigerated trailer or fill overflow beds set up when far more deaths were projected. The city has at times had fewer cases per capita than comparable communities. That did not stop a resurgence of cases in the second wave that hit the whole country in the past two months.

The New Haven-Yale contact-tracing effort earned national, even international, attention (hailed, for instance, by the BBC).

By the start of summer, Connecticut was ready to conduct contact tracing and take over New Haven’s effort. Gov. Ned Lamont also stepped in to set the rules for Covid-19 response. He relaxed restrictions. New Haven could no longer under law effect stronger measures. It was time for another pivot.

Hitting The Streets

Starting June 1, it was Lamont’s decision as to how many people could gather where, which businesses could open, and how they could operate.

It was still up to New Haven to enforce those rules. Again, Bond turned to teammates to make it happen.

She, the building department and the fire marshal’s office formed a squad. One or two nights a week they hit a different neighborhood to pop in on businesses to make sure they were protecting the public as required by law.

In most cases they met with cooperation. They pointed out the need to keep tables six feet apart, to post signs, limit the number of people inside, wear masks.

The goal, Bond said, was to ​“educate,” not punish. Click here and here to read about two of those visits.

In a few cases they met with defiance. They swung into action on a Saturday night, for instance, when 1,000 customers jammed a Fitch Street parking lot to buy tickets for a bar and restaurant party. Bond returned days later with a shut-down notice. The owner threatened her and accused her of racism, of conducting a political vendetta, of lying. Bond marched ahead, ignoring the barbs. She served the notice. She posted the order in the front window. She didn’t argue. She didn’t flinch.

Sometimes the crew came upon non-Covid-related problems, like the discovery of a ​“rat’s nest” of wiring and illegal gas hook-ups and unrefrigerated food left out to spoil at Good Nature Market’s locations on Broadway and Whitney Avenue. ​“I found live mice stuck in glue. Big roaches that were tropical-looking ones that were alive,” Bond reported. The team shut the joint down.

“Any time you’re out with her, she doesn’t pull punches with anybody. She’s tough as nails. She’s the most visible health director we’ve ever had in the city,” observed Building Official Jim Turcio, a 25-year city government veteran who formed the task force with Bond. The two have bonded over their enthusiasm for enforcing building and health codes. (“He’s amazing; I love working with him,” Bond said.)

“This is the first time,” Turcio added, ​“we’ve ever interacted that much with the health department, ever. The whole staff is great.”

New Haven’s Covid-19 case numbers plummeted over the summer. Bond’s team kept watch to avoid flare-ups. She embraced the Black Lives Matter protests that brought thousands of people onto the streets, she said; she also worried about Covid-19 spreading. She showed up with co-workers at protests to hand out masks.

In mid-July Bond noticed case numbers creeping back up. Nationwide, similar upticks were emerging from houses of worship not practicing social distancing.

The city was able to trace at least 10 cases to a single 60-member church on East Street. Over 50 Hispanic Evangelical Christian churches had worked with the city and Rev. Hernandez to reopen according to Covid-19 guidelines. This East Street congregation had not participated. Carlos Sosa-Lombardo called the pastor 10 times. He never picked up or called back.

Bond slipped into services on Sunday, saw leaders preaching without masks, people singing and sitting close together. She called on Rev. Hernandez. He brought the pastor together with the city. The church took services online. It began working on complying with Covid guidelines before reopening.

Wave 2, Then Hope

As expected, a second wave began washing up on New Haven’s shores in October.

Bond and her team kept putting out the word about wearing masks. They kept up the inspections.

Bond and Turcio’s crew swooped to shut down Anthony’s Ocean View on Oct. 30 a night after receiving video of a mostly maskless, jam-packed Halloween dance party there. Bond marched in, took out her phone, and played the video for owner Anthony Delmonico (pictured).

She tried to help businesses stay open, especially food businesses. Walmart on Foxon Boulevard, a lifeline for seniors and others on the east side of town, blew off the city for months when Bond’s team documented Covid-19 violations. Bond issued a final warning in November: The company had 72 hours to clean up its act or close its doors. That time it responded.

Bond kept watch; one Sunday she rushed over when a shopper sent her a video that suggested crowding. She found occupancy within the governor’s limits. She reminded management to work at keeping customers distanced from each other. So far the doors have been able to stay open.

But New Haven isn’t an island (though Fair Haven comes close). The coronavirus is back. Bond, her team, the city can’t let down its guard.

Hope has come in the form of two vaccines. Bond’s team crafted a plan for rolling it out. Yale-New Haven has begun vaccinating employees. The health department will start doing the same for essential workers next week with a first shipment of vaccines that arrived Wednesday.

The task has reinvigorated Bond. She has organized another set of workshops with clergy. She has formed a ​“risk communication team” to address fears in the community about the vaccine. Her goal is to vaccinate 100 people a day. She has gone on Twitter to recruit volunteers for a ​“Medical Reserve Corps” to help: Medical volunteers will screen patients for eligibility and administer shots, document shots. Others will help with ​“clinic set-up, break-down, crowd control [and] flow.”

Bond popped in on an online holiday party this month hosted by the Hill’s community management teams to help spread the word about how to wear masks correctly.

Meanwhile, she has kept her eye on other priorities. She has put a new crew of lead paint inspectors in the field. They’re citing landlords based on lead blood levels required by law and judges. Amid court delays and coronavirus-mandated breaks, the health department issued 56 abatement orders between Aug. 1 and mid-October. A settlement is near in the lawsuit filed against her predecessor. ​“Director Bond is a superstar,” said Amy Marx, one of the New Haven Legal Assistance attorneys who filed the suit. ​“She has committed time, attention, and leadership to address longstanding problems in the health department’s lead protection program, all while dealing with a pandemic. Although the case is not settled yet, she always still comes to the negotiation table with respect, devotion to public health service, and a positive attitude.”

And on Oct. 30 the city reached a settlement with the federal government over the 2016 data breach.

Bond still hasn’t seen her mom since her mom left the hospital. ​“I don’t feel it is safe. I am following the sector rules. I already get exposed enough,” she said.

Her grandmother, who ​“technically raised me with my dad,” came down with Covid, too. After Bond’s mom did. Bond discovered that her grandmother, who lives in a nursing home, sounded off during a phone conversation. She called an aunt who has power of attorney to arrange for a test. The aunt tested positive.

“That really broke me down. She is my world,” Bond said of her grandmother.

Bond was asked what, given what she has learned in the past 10 months, she would advise herself if she could go back in time to February.

“I would say, ​‘we need to protect the most vulnerable communities, starting at home with extended family,’” she responded. ​“While I was trying to save the city,” her mother and then her aunt were getting sick.

“So when people tell me that Covid is a hoax, when people do not take the safety sector seriously — it comes from a personal passion [to respond]. The carelessness and the negligence, how people put a dollar on a person’s life, is no laughing matter. It is real to me.”

Covid is not done with New Haven. People still disagree about how best to tackle it. New Haven’s general presses ahead, undaunted.

Previous New Haveners of the Year:
• 2019: Anthony Duff
• 2018: Kim Harris & Amy Marx
• 2017: New Haveners Under 30: Caroline Smith, Coral Ortiz, Justin Farmer, Jesus Morales Sanchez, Margaret Lee, Sarah Ganong, Jacob Spell, Steve Winter, Eliannie Sola, Leiyanie Lee Osorio
• 2016: Corey Menafee
• 2015: Jim Turcio
• 2014: Rev. Eldren Morrison
• 2013: Mnikesa Whitaker
• 2012: Diane Polan, Jennifer Gondola, Jillian Knox, Holly Wasilewski
• 2011: Stacy Spell
• 2010: Martha Green, Paul Kenney, Michael Smart, Rob Smuts, Luis Rosa Sr.
• 2009: Rafael Ramos
• 2006: Shafiq Abdussabur