Voices from the Pandemic: Americans Tell Their Stories of Crisis, Courage and Resilience

Voices from the Pandemic: Americans Tell Their Stories of Crisis, Courage and Resilience

A powerful and cathartic portrait of a country grappling with the Covid-19 pandemic—from feeling afraid and overwhelmed to extraordinary resilient—told through voices of people from all across America • F rom the Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter and author of Rising Out of Hatred The Covid-19 pandemic was a world-shattering event, affecting everyone in the nation. From its first ominous stirrings, renowned journalist Eli Saslow began interviewing a cross-section of Americans to capture their experiences in real time: An exhausted and anguished EMT risking his life in New York City; a grocery store owner feeding his neighborhood for free in locked-down New Orleans; an overwhelmed coroner in Georgia; a Maryland restaurateur forced to close his family business after forty-six years; an Arizona teacher wrestling with her fears and her obligations to her students; rural citizens adamant that the entire pandemic is a hoax, and retail workers attacked for asking customers to wear masks; patients struggling to breathe and doctors desperately trying to save them. Through Saslow's masterful, empathetic interviewing, we are given a kaleidoscopic picture of a people dealing with the unimaginable. These deeply personal accounts constitute a crucial, heartbreaking record of the sweep of experiences during this troubled time, and show us America from its worst and to its resilient best. Two-time Winner of the Pulitzer Prize "Voices from the Pandemic offers a rich and valuable portrait of a confusing, frightening time in our history." -Associated Press   "One of the nation’s preeminent storytellers" -Oregon Live   "Saslow has done a sterling job of capturing real people’s experiences of the start of the pandemic." -Tampa Bay Times ELI SASLOW is a reporter for The New York Times , and the author of VOICES FROM THE PANDEMIC, TEN LETTERS, AMERICAN HUNGER, and RISING OUT OF HATRED, which won the 2019 Dayton Literary Peace Prize. He was awarded The Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting in 2014 and Feature Writing in 2023 and was a Pulitzer Finalist in Feature Writing in 2013, 2016 and 2017. The series on which this book is based won the 2020 George Polk award for Oral History. Chapter 1 “Anything good I could say about this would be a lie” Tony Sizemore, on the death of Birdie Shelton Indianapolis—March 2020 She’s dead, and I’m quarantined. That’s how the story ends. I keep going back over it in loops, trying to find a way to sweeten it, but nothing changes the facts. I wasn’t there with her at the end. I didn’t get to say goodbye. I don’t even know where her body is right now, or if the only thing that’s left is her ashes. From normal life to this hell in a week. That’s how long it took. I’d barely even heard of this damn virus until a few days ago. How am I supposed to make any sense of that? It’s loops and more loops. She transported cars for a rental company. That’s where all this must have come from. People fly in from somewhere for a meeting and fly out a few hours later. You’ve got germs from all over the world inside those cars. I didn’t like the fact that she was working so hard, sixty-nine years old and still climbing in and out of Ford Fusions all day, driving from Indianapolis to St. Louis and back with bad knees, bad hips, diabetes, and all the rest of it. Sometimes she hurt so much after work that I had to help her out of the car. I guess I should have told her to quit, but nobody told Birdie anything. She liked to drive, and we needed the money. I think she’d been feeling bad for a few days, but I don’t remember much about what happened early on. She wasn’t a complainer, and I’m not always the best at noticing. There was a cough somewhere in there. Probably a touch of a fever. But this was a few weeks back, when those things didn’t mean so much. I thought she probably had a cold, or maybe bronchitis. She would get that sometimes, lose her voice and be fine a few days later, no big deal. But then she woke me up at about four in the morning and kept pointing to her throat. She said she couldn’t sleep. Said her eyes hurt. Said it felt like somebody was pounding on top of her head. Birdie’s usually one of those who wants to rub some dirt on it and keep moving, so when she told me to take her to the emergency room, I knew it was serious. I knew she was sick. First it was a fever of 103. Then the doctors decided it was pneumonia and went ahead and admitted her. Then it was pneumonia in both of her lungs. If anybody was thinking it was the coronavirus, I didn’t hear it—at least not at first. Nobody in Indiana had it yet. Nobody here was even talking about that. Maybe you’d see it on the news every once in a while. But even if it was killing a few people on some cruise ship or infecting a nursing home in Washington State, it was basically just happening on TV. The best precautions weren’t taken in the early stages. Nobody really knew what the dangers were or what we were supposed to do. A few nur