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--:-- Shamita Basu: Good morning, I'm Shamita Basu. And I'm Duarte Giraldino. This is Apple News Today. Hard to believe, but this week marks one year since the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: It's amazing to think how much has changed. A year ago, we went into lockdown. It changed the way we work, how we send our kids to school, how we gather with family and friends.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And as we reflect on everything that's changed in this past year, we decided to do things a little differently on the show this week. Every day, we'll bring you conversations with journalists who've done extraordinary work capturing what this year has been like.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Today, we turn to a moving series from The Washington Post. It's called Voices from the Pandemic.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I'm trying to make people feel and understand what it's like to experience the world from a person's point of view. Eli Saslow, who you just heard, is the journalist behind the series. Eli has profiled about 30 people so far from all walks of life to capture what it's been like to live through the pandemic.
--:-- Eli Saslow: For me, I think in a year that was obviously hard for all of us, made so much worse by political and systemic dysfunction and inequity, these conversations were sort of what sustained me.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Each story is told as an oral history in the first person. They read almost like dialogue or a stream of consciousness. They're moments of profound sadness, of fear, loss, and a lot of guilt.
--:-- Eli Saslow: I started thinking a lot about the idea of guilt and what a heavy part of this pandemic guilt had become. That was the overwhelming feeling for one woman in the series named Francine Bailey.
--:-- Shamita Basu: One of the great cruelties of this virus is that it doesn't come from nowhere. It has to come from someone. And so people wondering if they'd spread it to somebody that they cared about, who they'd gotten it from, how they'd gotten it, if they'd made somebody else sick.
--:-- Eli Saslow: Francine was working at a nursing home during the pandemic. And she lived in a multi-generational household with her sister, her children, and her mother, all of them essential workers. Francine contracted COVID and she told me, "I want this virus to die inside me. I don't want to give it to anybody else."
--:-- Shamita Basu: So she isolated herself in her house, away from her sister, away from her mother, her kids. And she took it really seriously. She barricaded herself in her room and barely left.
--:-- Eli Saslow: Which was heartbreaking for her because her little daughter would come knock on the door and say, "Mommy, are you in there? Mommy, why can't I see you?" And at one point, she had so much trouble breathing that she sort of had a panic attack and she felt like she needed fresh air.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So in the midst of this panic attack, she opened up the door of her room. She ran down the stairs and sort of stumbled down the stairs. And her mother, as any mother would, had the instinct to like, "Are you OK? I need to take care of you." Wrapped her daughter in a hug. And in that moment, this one interaction that she had had in this house after she'd gotten sick, the virus passed from her to her mother.
--:-- Eli Saslow: And she deteriorated quickly and died while Francine was still quarantined in that upstairs bedroom.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Reading this, my heart just aches for Francine and the way that she admits that there just no words that can comfort her.
--:-- Eli Saslow: For me at least, reading this, it really resonated with my fears about interacting with my parents. I live fairly close to them. I think like a lot of people, we're all sort of weighing risks and trying to keep the people that we love safe.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I'm sure so many people could relate to that feeling and the horror of that thought.
--:-- Eli Saslow: I hope so. And frankly, I think it's a huge act of courage and trust and faith, frankly, for people to participate in stories with a journalist. I mean, I'm asking so much of somebody like Francine to call them up as a total stranger and say, "I want to talk to you at great length about the hardest, most traumatic moments of your life."
--:-- Shamita Basu: And then I'm going to share those moments with as many people as I can. Right. Like what a profound thing to ask somebody to do.
--:-- Eli Saslow: And the reason that Francine participated, and frankly, I think the reason that most people participate when they decide to participate in my work is because she wanted it to matter. She understood that other people were feeling the same thing and that that meant other people who were dealing with the same guilt, but also other people that she hoped this story might provide some sort of warning to behave differently, to think about the virus differently, to take it more seriously.
--:-- Shamita Basu: One thing that struck me is the diversity of perspectives in the series. And I'd love it if you told us another one of the stories.
--:-- Eli Saslow: So Tony Green, who is a gay conservative man living in Texas, who told me that he really hadn't taken the virus seriously until he got it himself.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Right. Can you tell us Tony's story?
--:-- Eli Saslow: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, Tony was basically a COVID denier. He had fallen down that long trap of various conspiracy theories.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Tony was feeling upset because his own business in Texas had really been crushed by the pandemic and the resulting shutdowns to keep people safe.
--:-- Eli Saslow: And he was angry and he was hurting. And he then saw a person that he admired in the White House who was minimizing the virus and not wearing a mask and things like that. And he got more and more cavalier about his behavior.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So Tony decided to invite his family over for the weekend. It was just his parents and his in-laws, six people in total, gathered at his home.
--:-- Eli Saslow: And on the last day of that weekend, Tony woke up feeling sick. And within two days after that, everybody else who had been in that house was sick and very sick.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Tony ended up in the hospital and had a real scare. His father-in-law, his partner's father, was in the hospital in a room next to him.
--:-- Eli Saslow: Those two were very close, had a really close relationship. And his father-in-law died a few weeks later.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And for Tony, what he told me was his first realization as he was in the hospital and he woke up from a surgery that he was forced to have was like, "I can't believe that I did this."
--:-- Eli Saslow: I think it was in some ways another version of that same guilt we talked about with Francine.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And this is the power in the series. You can read about one person sitting in Texas and another in Indiana and another in New York. All of them coming from very different perspectives on the virus and on politics.
--:-- Eli Saslow: And yet some of them end up arriving at the same place Francine had done everything right and had tried so hard to protect her family. And Tony frankly had done everything wrong, right? He'd like minimize this thing and made light of it. And he had put his family at risk.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And that risk had resulted in his father-in-law, who he loved, dying and sort of the implosion of his family.
--:-- Eli Saslow: But I think when I'm having conversations with both of them, I'm coming to it from the same place. Like, I can see the pain and I can hear the anguish and I'm empathetic to that.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Doesn't mean that I agree with the decisions that Tony has made or necessarily that I'm sympathetic to everything that somebody that I write about thinks.
--:-- Eli Saslow: But what I do think and hope that people can empathize with is that feeling of pain and regret.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Eli said a lot of these people were feeling really alone. And part of why they agreed to speak with Eli and share their stories and be really vulnerable, it was a way to feel acknowledged, to feel seen.
--:-- Eli Saslow: That was the heart of these stories. People who felt a little bit out in the wilderness, almost shouting out and saying, "Like, I'm here, this is happening to me, can you see me?"
--:-- Shamita Basu: That was the case for Bruce, an elderly man who was living, and frankly, trying desperately to survive in a nursing home in Ohio, where there was a massive COVID outbreak.
--:-- Eli Saslow: The first week I started talking to him, there were 48 positive cases. By the next week, it was 75 positive cases.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And by the time I was in the week where I was going to be writing the story about Bruce, he was one of nine people left in the nursing home who was not sick with this virus.
--:-- Eli Saslow: And what he'd done was he had barricaded himself in his room in this nursing home. He'd tucked towels under the door. He'd opened up the window, even though it was 25 degrees outside, so that there was airflow.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And he was calling every day. He was calling the Ohio elder care department. He was calling anybody he could think of and saying, "Please help me. Like, do you see what's happening here? Like, this building is on fire. Can somebody please pay attention?"
--:-- Eli Saslow: What's going on? I'm on the Titanic and it's sinking. And I'm trying to, like, connect with the outside world with, like, a tin phone that's not going anywhere.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Somebody please pay attention. To me, that was the most vivid line in that piece. I still remember that description of a man being in this nursing home saying, "I am sinking on the Titanic and no one is noticing."
--:-- Eli Saslow: Totally. What is the plan?
--:-- Shamita Basu: Yeah, it's just so heartbreaking. And frankly, it's because so much of our country was sinking over this last year.
--:-- Eli Saslow: One of the common through lines in all of these stories, to me at least, is that people were admitting to some very vulnerable and personal thoughts. Guilt, as you've mentioned now, guilt came up a lot for many people.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Some people blame themselves for the worst outcomes for their loved ones dying. A lot of people were admitting to having angry thoughts or being bitter.
--:-- Eli Saslow: And those are difficult things to admit and difficult things to say out loud.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Do you think that people reached that point of vulnerability in a different way this past year?
--:-- Eli Saslow: I do think people reached that point of vulnerability in a different way this year because we reached a different point of desperation this year.
--:-- Shamita Basu: For every person that I talked to for this series, and now there have been 28 of them, there was no way left to pretend that things were okay.
--:-- Eli Saslow: We were past the point of pretending. This was a very shared experience. I could have called any person in America over the last year and had hours of conversation about COVID.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This is something we all went through together, right? It was a very shared experience.
--:-- Eli Saslow: So I think that also, I hope, allows us to be not only more vulnerable with each other, but also, and more importantly, more empathetic about what somebody else is going through.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Because we can see corners of our own experience and our own pain in what other people are experiencing.
--:-- Eli Saslow: Eli, I want to let you go, but one last quick question for you.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Sure, of course. You said you didn't know how long you were going to keep doing the series for. You know, when you started this, you had no way of knowing that we would see over half a million deaths in the U.S.
--:-- Eli Saslow: No way of knowing that for a lot of people, March 2021 is starting out pretty similarly to how March 2020 ended.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Where does the series go next, do you think?
--:-- Eli Saslow: I think that I will continue to do it because the story's not over.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Also because I think I've learned a lot this year as a journalist. I think I've become a better and more patient conversational interviewer, I hope.
--:-- Eli Saslow: And those are things that I'll carry with me.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And I've also learned, as always in journalism, I think stories are most powerful when people who are reading them or people who are watching them, they feel not like they're being told to believe something, but they feel in some way like they're seeing something or experiencing something for themselves.
--:-- Eli Saslow: When it feels like we've come to conclusions on our own, those are like much more lasting, powerful realizations in our own lives.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So I think that's the power of this kind of storytelling.
--:-- Eli Saslow: And for that reason, it will definitely continue to be a part of what I do.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Eli Saslow, thank you so much for your time. Thank you for this series.
--:-- Eli Saslow: Thank you for this series. I really do believe this is going to be remembered as one of the most moving accounts of what it was like to live through the pandemic in this country.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Thank you. I really appreciate it. I'm grateful to share the stories.
--:-- Eli Saslow: Thanks again.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Shamita, I loved hearing these stories from Francine to Tony to Bruce and how they're all so different. But it also shows how the pandemic just connected all of us.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Exactly. And I have to say, there were so many more personal stories that Eli brought to the series that, of course, we couldn't include them all in this episode.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But I really encourage you to go check it out. The series is called Voices from the Pandemic. Eli Saslow is the reporter at The Washington Post.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Tomorrow, we talk with Akilah Johnson. Akilah's covered the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on Black Americans and this idea that one death affects far more than one family.
--:-- Shamita Basu: More than once, we heard people say, you know, that he was the pillar of the family, pillar of the community. They were the folks that people went to when they needed help, when they needed encouragement, when they needed support. And now those people are gone.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app. And while you're there, check out some of our audio stories.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We'll talk with you again tomorrow.
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