Today, Explained - The epicenter of the epicenter

Episode Date: April 20, 2020

Covid-19's victims, and the people they leave behind. (Transcript here.) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's Monday, April 20th, 2020. For those of you keeping count at home, that's 4-20-2020. It's a lot of 20s. I'm Sean Ramos-Firman. This is your coronavirus update from Today Explained. Over the weekend, President Trump and Vice President Pence continued to claim all 50 states have sufficient testing capability to start opening up and getting back to business as usual?

A bipartisan group of governors basically responded, Are you high? Maryland's Republican Governor Larry Hogan told CNN, To say that governors have plenty of testing and they should get to work on testing, somehow we aren't doing our job. It's just absolutely false. Virginia's Democratic Governor Ralph Northam agreed, saying it's, quote, just delusional. The Paycheck Protection Program, or PPP, has run out of money. That was part of the historic stimulus program Congress passed last month that included $349 billion to help small businesses.

Congress is very close to a $450 billion deal to replenish these loans. And guess what's holding the money up? A dispute over President Trump's handling of testing. In other testing news, the FDA approved more than 90 antibody tests without vetting them first. According to the Washington Post, some of these are of dubious quality, which of course means dubious results. Meanwhile, the World Health Organization says it's not even sure if high quality antibody

tests prove that someone has immunity from this novel coronavirus. So it might be a while before you see anyone with one of those immunity certificates we talked about on the show a while back. We also talked about how Singapore got out ahead of COVID-19, but now it appears to be falling behind. Their numbers of confirmed cases have nearly doubled in the past few days to 8,000. Turkey's confirmed cases also continued to surge. They just surpassed China's official numbers. Meanwhile, Germany is inching towards reopening as of today. Australia and New Zealand announced plans to do the same.

Musicians all around the world got together for a concert to celebrate essential workers this weekend. There was something for everyone. You had your Lizzo, Lady Gaga, Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, they even got a Beatle. The doctors, the nurses, and all the medical staff that keep us healthy, we love you. Thank you. The Maycans meet. Who finds the money when you pay the rent? Did you think that money was heaven sent? Bet MGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long.

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an authorized gaming partner of the NBA. BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling We've been talking about this coronavirus on Today Explained since January, well before it was a pandemic, and we've always been pretty clear about its dire nature, the risks, the consequences, the long-term implications. But one thing we haven't really dug into is all the death. We've talked about the numbers and not much else, probably because it's really tough. It's overwhelming.

We all know lots of people are dying right now every day and we have to forge on and we will. But today on the show, we're going to confront all the death head on. And there will be some tougher moments, especially in this first half. So if you don't think you're ready for it, maybe just jump ahead to the second half of the show after the break. I called up my friend and former colleague Arun Venugopal at WNYC for help today. He's been reporting on this crisis from home, and home is Jackson Heights, Queens. It's really eerie to live in Queens. I live within blocks of Elmhurst Hospital, which has become synonymous with this disease, this pandemic, uh with all the deaths that are piling up when i step out of my home onto the street you can't help but kind of feeling like the streets and the air itself is kind of contaminated right and that you're taking a real risk um by just walking out your front door which might be i, the case with a lot of people

right now. I guess it's especially the case right here because there's so many people dying in these neighborhoods. I mean, the epicenter of the epicenter. It's crazy to think that this is New York. These are the zip codes around me that have the highest, I think, mortality rate in the city, and I suppose for that matter, in the country. And I'm sure it's really tough living out there. You also got a message from a guy who has been working out there. Tell us about him. His name is Eric Frampton, and he's like,

he runs this boutique framing business with his husband. That's what he had done. And now, as of the last week or two he's become one of these many temp workers who are working in these mobile morgues set up across the city there's just dozens of these trailers which are accommodating these thousands of bodies, the people who've died from COVID and have overwhelmed the medical system and funeral homes and morgues. And you need people to handle that, to bring some kind of order to all this chaos. And Eric is now one of those guys.

I lurched. I said yes without knowing why I was doing it, without knowing if I was at risk, without knowing what the cost would be. And why did he sign up for this job to work in a morgue trailer? Was it money or duty or both? Eric has a couple reasons for having taken up this work. One is the money. It pays apparently pretty well. I mean, he was making like $75 an hour, and then he got bumped up within a couple days to $100 an hour. But also, he's been just feeling just furious at how the Trump administration and the federal government have been handling this crisis. And he kind of feels like the society has completely abdicated his role to keep people safe. And so he had this just rage building up in him. And he thought when this job kind of landed in his lap or, you know, he got heard about

this offer, he said, why not? You know, I guess it's the money as well as the ability to do what he thought was really important. And it's kind of crazy because he is married and his husband's brother is just barely recovering from near death. I mean, no surprise that, you know, it has become a major sort of like tension in his household. His husband is like terrified that he's going to get sick,

that both of them are going to get sick. And so it's really complicated. What's an average shift like for Eric? He would drive to work. He lives in New Jersey and he'd drive to the Bronx and show up outside this medical facility. And he'd go and change into many layers of clothes and PPE, double-layered masks. And he'd have these kind of bags wrapped around his legs and it looked kind of crude almost like they're just rubber bands holding them in place and then he'd go

outside to these trailers and the main task is to basically get these bodies from the hospital mortuary to the trailer and from the trailer to a funeral home director who has to come by and pick it up. That's the basic arc of the work. And the challenge with that is that it's not just the hospitals that are overwhelmed. You know, we know that. It's also the fact that there's so many bodies, so many people have died, that funeral homes are also stretched beyond capacity. And there are some days where it's just kind of manic, and you're getting all these bodies from inside the hospital that are coming out and they had to sort of like place these bodies on these shelves. I'm in the trailer that I've been working in for the last three days. Yesterday we had a new trailer delivered which is completely full. Unfortunately one of the shelves collapsed

in the new trailer so that was like six bodies that were all piled on top of each other. You know, sometimes they're not even proper bags. They're like these torn open, like barely just kind of sheaths for these bodies. They're not like proper, like medical grade body bags. And so we spent a lot of time on the phone, on FaceTime. He would FaceTime me from inside these morgue trailers, and I'd see sort of, I'd see all these bodies on wooden shelves around him and this, like, dim lighting. It was really, it was really eerie, Sean. I mean, it was extremely uncomfortable to be on these FaceTime calls with him

and to know really how to navigate these conversations because he clearly needed someone to talk to about this. I mean, he really wanted to try to make sense of this crazy and morbid landscape that he'd entered into. So it was partly, I guess, transparency and trying to like show what was happening but i think also because he was just so overwhelmed by all of this death and sort of the responsibility taken on because he felt very strongly about what about sort of the sanctity of what he was doing as well my respect for each body is a literal imagination of who knows them, who's calling about them, what person could not visit them when they were, you know, in isolation

before they had to go on respirator and they couldn't talk anymore. Who wants to know where that person is right now? I don't have any mournfulness for the vessel that I'm handling. I guess if I did, I wouldn't be able to do this. But I do constantly think of the people who want to know, where is their person? I can assure them their sense for so many people, because we're all limited in travel

and so far away physically and in a way socially from the rest of the world right now, it's really easy to feel disconnected from the grisly reality that you're seeing from just outside your window. When you speak to people like Eric, I mean, how shocking is it to hear the reality, the details, to see the bodies, even on FaceTime? Did it change even your impression of how just awful this is? Yeah. I think that's why people like Eric are important. They have to kind of

help us register what we sort of instinctively know is happening, which is that there's a lot of misery out there, a lot of people dying. And there's not just a lot of people dying, there are a lot of people who are dying alone. And this is all, I guess, incredibly traumatic, I think, for us as a society, you know, as hard as it is for us to know that this is happening around us, and that like, more than 10,000 people have died in this city of just of COVID and that now this is becoming like just about the number one leading cause of death in America right now. dying, not just their loved ones who couldn't be with them and help them through their last days, but also the people who are doing this incredibly harrowing and important work. People like Eric, you know, they're otherwise, what do we know about these people and what they're going through? And I think it's so traumatizing to people like him. And all we can do is just kind of listen to them

and make them feel like they can share what they're going through and what they're seeing. Well, thank you for sharing Eric's story with us and if you're still in touch with Eric, thank him for us. I will. I'll definitely thank him for you. Thanks.

Arun Venugopal is a reporter with WNYC New York Public Radio. You can find his story about Eric over at Gothamist.com. It's called Dispatch from a Coronavirus Morgue Truck Worker. They write a check for your first day in case you don't come back. After the break, another friend of the show, Ramtin Arabloui, talks about losing his uncle in Iran to COVID-19. Thank you. and management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month.

And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. You can go to ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained, r-a-m-p.com slash explained, cards issued by Sutton Bank. Member FDIC. Terms and conditions apply. I'm Ramteen Arablui. I work at NPR.

I'm a co-host of the podcast Throughline. So I live in Rockville, Maryland, but I was born in Iran, Tehran, Iran. And still to this day, that's where most of my family lives. So I've stayed connected to them over the years. I visited Iran in the summers. I've spent a lot of time there and really still do feel connected to them as family. My aunt, my mom's older sister, who lives in Tehran, is kind of a matriarchal figure in their family because they had a bunch of brothers and sisters, I think eight. And my mom was the youngest. So her mom was in her late 40s when she had her.

So she was kind of raised by her older siblings, who were all significantly older than her. So my aunt took that kind of figure in my life, too, when I would visit. I would stay with her in Iran. And her husband, Haji Ahmad is what we called him, he was a really kind, typically Iranian in the sense of being very welcoming to guests and treating family members, at least when they're in his home as like, as like God, basically, you know, he would make you eat until you're going to explode. He was a very generous person. And he came from like a lot of my friends, my family came from a village into Tehran when they were

young. And he made a life for himself in Tehran. You know, he fought really hard and was scrappy, and all four of his kids got master's degrees and went on to be really highly educated and successful people. And I think he took great pride in that, and they took great pride in their father, my uncle, being a really hard worker who did something really good for his family. He had been battling cancer for the last few years. And so they were really

worried about him once they heard that COVID-19 really targeted people who had underlying health issues and immunity issues, which he had. He was undergoing chemo on and off and he was on it this year. They did their best to keep the house clean. They didn't allow any visitors. They just, they were really anxious about him getting it. And he was continuing his chemo treatments. They were doing them at home when they could so that he wouldn't have to go into any facilities because just like here, emergency rooms and hospitals were being filled with the sick. And then in early March, my mom called me one day and was pretty upset and said that, you know, my uncle, Haji Ahmad, was sick, that he was getting a cough and was basically showing the symptoms of someone with COVID. And I was like, have they taken him in to get him tested?

And they're like, well, they're afraid to go in because people are there sick and maybe it's just a cold. And I was like, no, they should go. And they eventually did. And he escalated really quick. He got sick. My understanding is he got sick on like a Thursday and they hesitated about taking him in. And then they finally did on Saturday. And that day they tested him. They kept him overnight. They had to put him in isolation right away when they got to the hospital so they could only see him from like another side of a glass and it was really sad because one of my cousins told my mom that like he just looked really scared he's a man in his 80s and that really I think shook them up a little bit so they were just told to go home and they

would get a call the next day and when they got the call the next day, they were told he passed away. It was shocking because his symptoms went from like a cold to coughing to fever, and it escalated very quickly, like within a couple of days. They didn't get many answers. They were just kind of told, like, we're really sorry, but you have to come like identify and claim the body and do all that stuff and then it's going to be a

government-run burial basically. So the one thing you need to know and I think anyone who's Iranian or Shia Muslim will know that the funeral rites are really intricate. For example, the washing of the body is very ceremonial and it's really important. And traditionally, family members participate in that. And it's a part of the grieving process, I think, for many Iranians to have that kind of funeral. Well, they couldn't, my family couldn't do any of that. So for them, it was, they were just like really shook because they always saw their father, my uncle, as a patriarch of the family. They

really loved him and they thought well whenever he does pass away because he was getting older we'll have a big funeral for him and people will come and they'll all remember him and will really honor him that way. And they couldn't do that. I mean they did do Muslim funeral rites, but it was all done basically by strangers. Another part of the process that's sacred is the actual burial. Often a member of the family, a male member of the family, will go into the grave and put the dirt onto the person when you're burying them.

And again, this is all a kind of process of mourning, and it's really important for people. And they had to watch it from a distance. They couldn't participate. They didn't feel like angry that they had to do that. They understood that it was part of the, you know, protocol of not letting the disease spread, but it still felt unjust, right?

They felt robbed of this ability to mourn their father. And I just felt so bad for them. And I could imagine his face from the other side of the glass on the day that he couldn't really understand what was going on when they dropped him off at the hospital, basically. And I really just, I felt so bad. And I thought, like, how many other people in Iran and around the world are going to have to go through this with a loved one. Rantin, the reason we're having you on the show is because we all knew that you had lost your uncle because you actually shared a story about it online. What made you want to talk about this loss that your family suffered publicly so quickly after it happened so i um i found out about my uncle's passing um believe it was march 10th and then on march 12th i tweeted

uh this tweet my uncle in iran passed away coronavirus. He was gentle and kind. He'd been battling cancer for several years. His family had to stand 100 meters away and watch him being buried by men in hazmat gear. My aunt is now sick. Please take this seriously. I was feeling so bad. I wanted it to be, again, this is such an American thing, but I wanted it to like have a reason like for them to, you know, because I think they had the same feeling of like wanting people to hear what happened to them, wanting to share it as a warning. And like, take this seriously, like know that it could be someone in your family or it could be someone you know, or you love, and you could be facing what, what they're facing. What my, what my family's had to face in Iran with how they had to bury their father.

I think as human beings, it's really hard to be in the state we're in right now, in a state of emergency and isolation, that it's going to feel tempting to go back to normal, to start going outside the way we used to and the weather is going to get really nice. I really am afraid about what's going to happen over the next weeks and months to come. Thank you.