The sidewalks of Mount Hope fill up early with essential workers.

The health care and construction workers come out first, followed by the delivery drivers, grocery store clerks, security guards, building porters and countless others.

They make their home in this hilltop neighborhood of 53,000 in the Bronx that has been an anchor against the coronavirus. From there, they disperse to all corners of the borough, the city and beyond to provide the services that other people count on in a global health crisis.

As New York City begins reopening, nothing has really changed in Mount Hope. Many residents never stopped going to their jobs. Not when confronted by the dangers of the virus. Not when looting broke out during the protests for racial justice over the death of George Floyd. Not when many other New Yorkers began working from home, and others altogether fled the wealthiest neighborhoods in Manhattan.

The only time that Albertha Johnson, 47, has been able to stay home from her job as a supervisor for the city’s Human Resources Administration, the nation’s largest social services agency, was when she got the virus in April.

After two weeks off to recover, it was back to her office in Harlem where people come in for help, from domestic abuse victims to those suffering from mental illness who may become violent.

“The type of work I decided to do requires hands-on,” she said. “You can’t tell somebody ‘stop hitting somebody’ from home. I choose it because I like what I do.”

The sheer number of essential workers in Mount Hope who cannot work from home is most likely why it was the only neighborhood in the city where the total number of commuting trips actually increased during the height of the pandemic, when New York came to a virtual standstill.

The average number of weekday commutes in Mount Hope, which sits about a mile and a half north of Yankee Stadium, rose 4 percent in April from the same month the previous year, according to an analysis by StreetLight Data, a transportation data analytics company. Across the city, commutes fell 34 percent. The analysis was based primarily on the movements of millions of cellphones around the city combined with census and other data.

Nearly all of Mount Hope’s population is black or Hispanic, according to an analysis of census data by Social Explorer, a research company. The median annual household income in the neighborhood is $30,706, compared with $38,085 for the Bronx, and $60,762 for New York City.

Essential workers are also concentrated in other parts of the city, including the Queens neighborhoods of South Jamaica, where there was virtually no change in total commuting trips, and Woodside, where there was a 5 percent decrease. Another neighborhood with many essential workers, East Harlem in Manhattan, had a 7 percent decrease.

In contrast, commuting trips declined by nearly 60 percent in Brooklyn Heights and Cobble Hill in Brooklyn, and in East Midtown and Turtle Bay in Manhattan. The analysis included trips by car, bus, subway, bike and walking.

In New York City, many essential workers who have shouldered the burden of the pandemic put in long, hard hours for not much money.

There are more than 1 million of these front-line workers who provide health care and social services, keep the subway and buses running, make deliveries, clean buildings, and stock shelves at groceries and pharmacies, according to a report by City Comptroller Scott M. Stringer.

In the Bronx, the borough with the highest Covid-19 death rate, many essential workers say they lacked adequate defenses against the virus. They were not provided with enough masks and protective gear and had limited access to testing and medical care until well after the outbreak had taken hold.

State and city officials have acknowledged the challenges they faced early on, but say that they have vastly expanded testing in the Bronx and have provided enormous amounts of protective gear, like face masks.

Health officials are increasingly looking at how and why people are getting sick, including what jobs they have. Many doctors and public health experts believe that front-line workers are at higher risk because they often spend hours around other people and cannot always maintain social distancing.

Mount Hope falls within two ZIP codes, 10453 and 10457, that each had more than 2,000 reported coronavirus cases as of June 9, and ranked within the top 25 ZIP codes in the city in terms of the number of cases, though it did not have especially high rates of cases per capita, according to a New York Times analysis of health data.

Ruben Diaz Jr., the Bronx borough president, said the borough has attracted many essential workers partly because of its efforts to create thousands of new jobs in recent years. The Bronx’s unemployment rate dipped to 4.7 percent in February before the coronavirus crisis exploded; it soared to 16.5 percent in April, compared with 14.6 percent for the city as a whole.

“These are the soldiers we were putting on the front-line with no ammunition and no body armor to fight the enemy,” Mr. Diaz said.

Many Bronx neighborhoods are now struggling not only with the health impacts of the virus, but also the economic fallout as workers have been laid off.

“It’s a double whammy,” said Jonathan Bowles, the executive director of the Center for an Urban Future. “These are hard-luck neighborhoods. They’re really dealing with it from both sides. I don’t know how they’re coping.”

The center found in a recent report that 1 in 4 people who live in the Bronx neighborhoods of Mount Hope, Morris Heights and Fordham South worked in industries decimated by layoffs — restaurants, hotels, retail and personal care services.

Mount Hope has drawn lower-income workers and families to the west Bronx with affordable rents in aging apartment buildings and houses, and ready access to subway and bus lines. The streets are lined with family-owned pharmacies, hair and nail salons, cellphone stores, bodegas and specialty shops selling halal and African foods.

Mount Hope residents commute an average of 41 minutes to work, the same as the citywide average, according to the Social Explorer analysis, and about 26 percent of neighborhood residents have commutes of an hour or more. Only about 5 percent normally work at home.

John Carter, who has diabetes, said he was so scared of getting the virus that he took two weeks of vacation so he could stay home from his job as a cook in Brooklyn. But when that ended, he said, his boss told him, “You have to come to work — or.”

Mr. Carter added, “You know what the ‘or’ means.”

“You talk about essential workers, putting their lives on the line, why can’t we be treated like humans?” said Mr. Carter, 44, who has to take three subway lines to work.

The virus has also rattled his neighbor, Roy Lee-Bey, who now wears rubber gloves to deliver bottled water from his truck. “People need water,” said Mr. Bey, 46, who earns $63,000 a year. “And you never know when you’re going to be in need of assistance.”

Ms. Johnson, the supervisor at the city’s social services agency, has spent part of her federal stimulus check on taxi rides to her job in Harlem. She usually takes the subway but wanted to minimize her exposure to the virus.

She started coughing anyway and went to a doctor. He told her it was probably allergies. When she didn’t get better, she saw another doctor, who tested her for Covid-19. She was positive.

Ms. Johnson, a single mother of one daughter, said she moved to Mount Hope 18 years ago and could never afford to leave. Her dream is to buy a house in New Jersey. “This area is collectively a working-class neighborhood,” she said. “We can’t save money. We can’t afford to sacrifice to get better.”

Jennifer Lutchman, a nurses’s aide who immigrated from Guyana, begins her day by checking her own temperature before getting on a bus to go to work.

“My patients are very scared and I’ve hardly had a good night’s sleep,” said Ms. Lutchman, 41, who has watched people around her get sick.

Ms. Lutchman earns $19 an hour, barely enough to support her family. Her husband, a security guard, was laid off from the Disney store in Times Square during the pandemic.

When the protests erupted, she worried about getting home before the city curfew, which has since been lifted. All night long, she heard police and ambulance sirens and helicopters whirring above. Her father’s pharmacy in the middle of Mount Hope was ransacked by looters.

But her patients needed her, she said, so she kept going to work.

“We don’t know what’s out there and we’re putting ourselves at risk,” she said. “We don’t know what we’re bringing home to our families.”

Elaine Chen contributed reporting.