If fighting COVID-19 can take out a young police officer, a senior afraid for her life at the thought of going outside to secure medication, groceries and other essentials – has a far diminished survival rate on the streets. Cities are the first line of defense for seniors who are vulnerable to this disease.

And our cities are failing.

Right now, we need state, county and local leaders to marshal the assets they have and strategically respond to the realities in our most vulnerable communities — where densely populated living conditions and inter-generational poverty besiege the residents most susceptible to contracting COVID-19.

You hear the anecdotal stories about people refusing to abide by New Jersey’s stay at home order: groups of kids riding bikes with abandon in Paterson and Newark, two of our most impacted areas, in a state where we’re hovering at the 100,000 mark of positive COVID-19 cases. That’s bad enough.

Then you hear about senior citizens afraid to go outside because of people congregating on street corners. While people watched and filmed in the street, police shot a man dead today in Paterson, sparking an investigation by the Attorney General. This happened just this afternoon, but the threat is there every day. People – sometimes menacingly and with obvious ill intent as they ply their trades – and certainly without care for those walled off from the world, cluster on sidewalks in ignorance or defiance of social distancing.

Think about that senior citizen inside her apartment who can’t get out because of those people standing around on the sidewalk in front of her home.

She’s inside with dwindling resources.

She’s abiding by the order to stay at home.

She is unable to open her front door to walk to the store.

Forget about going to get a coronavirus test.

If she lives in Paterson, she occcupies one of 11,000 households that does not have a car to get there.

So the best she can hope for is to stay inside for as long as she possibly can until her groceries and medications need to be replenished.

Then what?

Then she has to venture outside, through a crowd, maybe a hostile crowd, or maybe just one that is wholly woefully ignorant and possibly coronavirus-infected.

Now, Governor Phil Murphy and Newark Mayor Ras Baraka today both mentioned a partnership with Rutgers Univerity to provide COVID-19 tests for people where they live in the coming days, hopefully by the end of the month.

But as the scourge continues and we fail to socially distance in those densest of our asthma and chronic lung disease-beset communities, our frontline first reponder workers need help. We’re losing cops. We lost one in Paterson last week. We’ve lost two in Newark, Baraka said. Hopefully, we know enough now to limit those losses. Yet if this crisis drags on without significant relief, we face the prospect of losing more frontline responders, and with whole areas of our cities already underserved, we will place further appalling strain on those old people alone behind walls.

“There’s burn-out in a local care facility, where care workers are walking offf the job,” state Senator Ronald L. Rice (D-28) of Newark told InsiderNJ.

We need a better effort from people, particularly young people, to stay inside and to stay away from one another.

Get this done.

We need money.

God knows.

But we need also money very specifically targeted.

Before we continue to let those senior citizens remain untreated, scared, and cut off in their homes, unable in many cases to get outside to even open their front doors, we must as a state that has long chosen to turn away, in this moment of crisis take immediate corrective action.

Earlier this week, Senator Rice, who once came home from the Vietnam War to find his city on fire, said leaders must consider a National Guard presence as a possible relief option in his city. Passaic County Freeholder T.J. Best agreed that Paterson also desperately needs help, but does not believe the National Guard would be as effective as regular civilians, many of whom increasingly find themselves out of work.

We must create a chance here to change course.

This war will not be won on the couch.

Just as they have failed for years in the inevitable lead-up to this crisis, and in fact sped the crisis – we need the two parties in Washington now to demonstrate some usefulness at long last, to reverse themselves, and fund a federal Works Progress Administration (WPA)-style effort to augment what appears to be our overdue upgraded COVID-19 testing services; and to rapidly train, equip and command position people – both from the communities they reside in and from without – to work on the ground in our densest areas (armed with all the knowledge we have gained about this virus to this point to protect all parties) to provide auxiliary relief and ensure the safety of our most vulnerable citizens.

If we don’t immediately do that, even as we witnessed today the police shooting death of a man on the street in Paterson (pictured, above), we will find, when this is over, if it ever ends, seniors in those highrises and buildings and apartment complexes ,who will have persished from COVID-19 and from fear, and from our collective neglect – and on the way, our children in groups on bicycles – increasingly in danger of deadly crossfire.