The New York Times
How COVID survivors are finding their way into politics
Pamela Addison is, in her own words, “one of the most timid people in the world”. Certainly not the type of person who would send an article to a newspaper, or start a support group for strangers, or ask a US senator to vote on $ 1.9 trillion legislation. No one is more surprised than she is to have done all these things in the past five months. Her husband, Martin Addison, a 44-year-old health care professional from New Jersey, died of coronavirus on April 29, after a month of illness. The last time she saw him was when he was put in an ambulance. At 37, Addison was left to care for a 2-year-old daughter and baby son and survive alone. Subscribe to the New York Times newsletter The Morning “Seeing the impact my story has had on people – it was very therapeutic and healing for me,” she said. “And knowing that I am doing this to honor my husband gives me the greatest joy, because I am doing this for him.” With the staggering number of coronavirus deaths in the United States – more than 535,000 people – thousands of stories like hers come. Many people who have lost loved ones or whose lives have been affected by long-distance symptoms have turned to political action, seeking answers and new policies from a government whose failures under the Trump administration have allowed the country to become one of the hardest hit by the pandemic. . There is Marjorie Roberts, who fell ill while running a gift shop at a hospital in Atlanta and now has lung scars. Mary Wilson-Snipes, still on oxygen more than two months after returning home from the hospital. John Lancos, who lost his 41-year-old wife on April 23. Janis Clark, who lost her 38-year-old husband the same day. In January, they and dozens of others participated in an advocacy training session on Zoom, led by a group called COVID Survivors for Change. This month, the group organized virtual meetings with the offices of 16 senators – 10 Democrats and six Republicans – and more than 50 members of the group lobbied for the coronavirus aid package. The immediate objective of the training session was to take people who, in many cases, had never attended a school board meeting and teach them how to do things like put pressure on a senator. The long-term goal was to tackle the problem of numbers. The numbers are dehumanizing, as activists like to say. In sufficient quantities – 536,472 on Wednesday morning, for example – they are also numb. That is why converting numbers to people is so often the task of activists who seek policy changes after a tragedy. Mothers Against Drunk Driving, founded by a woman whose daughter was killed by a drunk driver, did this. Groups that promote stricter gun laws, such as Moms Demand Action and March for Our Lives, have sought to do so. Now, some survivors of the coronavirus think it’s their turn. “This volume, that collective national trauma, is almost very difficult for people to understand,” said Chris Kocher, who is the executive director of COVID Survivors for Change and has worked with survivors of armed violence in Everytown for Gun Safety. “But you can understand a story and a life lived.” Kocher started organizing the CSC last summer – on a “minimal” budget, he said – and the group was launched publicly in October with a memorial event with Dionne Warwick. Just before lobbying their senators on March 3, members of the CSC heard from someone who once held office: Rep. Lucy McBath of Georgia, who joined Moms Demand Action after her son, Jordan Davis, was killed in 2012. She spoke about her own experience moving from personal tragedy to political activism and how the stories of survivors can influence elected officials. A member of the CSC, Wilson-Snipes, 52, also worked with Moms Demand Action; she started a branch in Junction City, Kansas, after her son, Felix, was shot dead in 2018. Then, in November, she took COVID-19 and was hospitalized with pneumonia. Wilson-Snipes returned home on Christmas Eve with an oxygen machine, which she still needs. His lungs are still inflamed, his chest is still sore. Although the policies she promoted with Moms Demand Action are different from those she and others are advocating with COVID Survivors for Change – such as wearing a mask and financial assistance for people affected by the virus – she said the message was the same: “You could be in my family’s place, in my place. “That was also the message that Addison conveyed in an opinion piece after former President Donald Trump contracted the coronavirus and told the nation,” Don’t be afraid of COVID. ” It was at that point that she was angry enough to speak, she said, because Trump’s words “were probably the most painful words I have ever heard a leader say.” Star-Ledger published Addison’s opinion piece in October, and the intensity of the response shocked her. “I never really thought about it that way – that I could use my story to make changes,” she said. She decided to create a Facebook group for newly widowed parents and found her first members from comments in her article. In January, she participated in the COVID Survivors for Change training. This month, she and other members in New Jersey spoke to Senator Cory Booker’s office. Another cohort spoke to Senator Jon Ossoff’s office in Georgia. One of them was Roberts, 60, the former manager of a gift shop with a lung injury caused by the virus. “I woke up on March 26, it was fine,” said Roberts. “And when the sun went down that night, my whole life and the life of my family had changed forever.” After the meeting with Ossoff, she called Kocher in tears. In almost a year, she said, it was the first time that she felt heard. The political mobilization of coronavirus survivors is still in its early stages and it is impossible to know whether it will disappear when the pandemic is over or solidify into something lasting. But COVID Survivors for Change is not the only group looking for long-term change. Another organization, marked by COVID – founded by Kristin Urquiza, who lost his father to the virus and spoke at the Democratic National Convention – recently launched a comprehensive political platform. Among other things, it calls for a “public health workforce” of 1 million people to perform tasks such as contact tracking, a restitution program similar to the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund, and a commission to examine the response of the government to the pandemic. The platform also brings much more controversial proposals, such as federal job guarantees, universal health and childcare, cancellation of medical and student debts and a ban on imports of products linked to deforestation. Urquiza said the idea is to address the factors that make pandemics more likely and make Americans economically secure enough to withstand crises. “It is not just about making sure that we are responding to the most urgent pieces that are in front of our face right now,” she said. COVID Survivors for Change, on the other hand, does not have an official platform. Although members lobbying Congress did so in support of President Joe Biden’s stimulus package, the group is non-partisan and has focused on training survivors to promote the policies of their choice. Several members said the virus drew them into the political arena in a way that would have shocked them a year ago. Janis Clark, 65, said her husband, Ron Clark, was always politically active. “Whenever he watched politics, it was like, ‘Here comes the half-hour dissertation,'” she said, laughing. “I would be nervous about the PTA’s functions. Ron Clark died on April 23, after two weeks at home with a 40-degree fever and more than three weeks on a respirator. He never knew that his daughter was pregnant. Desperate for someone to understand what the virus toll meant, Janis Clark started writing. She wrote to Congressman Paul Tonko, DN.Y., who represents her district in Albany. She wrote to Sens. Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand. She did not know that they were unlikely to respond. “I just wanted someone to hear my story,” she said. “And it was like, how do you reach these people? I don’t know what the right way is. I had never written anything to my congressman ”. In February, Clark signed an open letter that COVID Survivors for Change organized, asking senators to approve an aid package and calling for a reimbursement program for funeral expenses and more medical resources for survivors. Now she thinks she can do more – maybe even watch a demo when it’s safe. For some people, it’s like building something out of rubble. Lancos met his wife, Joni Lancos, when he was an interpreter for the National Park Service at the Federal Hall in Manhattan and she was a clerk working on the third floor. The first meeting was on November 3, 1977. He took her to a Broadway show with Danish pianist Victor Borge. Last April, 41 years and 15 days after the wedding and less than 18 hours after her first symptoms, she died in an intensive care unit in Brooklyn. There was no funeral service, not when the streets of New York City screamed day and night with the sirens of ambulances carrying the dying. Then Lancos, 70, examined the wreckage of grief and his own infection – which left him with brain fog and short-term memory loss – in isolation. The funeral home sent him five pictures of a rabbi praying over his wife’s coffin. “That was it,” said Lancos through tears. “That was my funeral for my wife, seeing those five pictures.” On March 3, he was one of the members of COVID Survivors for Change who spoke to the office of Schumer, the majority leader in the Senate. Then he recorded a short message for a video. “I think Joni would -” he said, pausing to take a deep breath, “would be proud of what I did today”. This article was originally published in The New York Times. © 2021 The New York Times Company