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  • 4 months ago
Panorama 2020 E19
Transcript
00:00America is reopening as its COVID death toll reaches 100,000.
00:07But just weeks ago, so many were dying in New York that bodies were left to rot on the streets.
00:15I'm not going to sugarcoat this in any way. Very upsetting.
00:19I'm Hilary Anderson. For decades, I've worked as a reporter on wars and disasters all over the world.
00:27But I never expected to see a crisis of this scale in my own country.
00:32We were looking at a freight train coming across the country. We're now looking at a bullet train.
00:38Two months ago, I began filming my journey to the eye of the storm in New York.
00:44This crisis is completely out of control.
00:47I wanted to know how in the richest country in the world, 21,000 people could die in one city.
00:56And ask, is the rest of America about to repeat the mistakes of New York?
01:01I feel like we need to have a corona party. I'll bring the corona.
01:25Rural Vermont, my home.
01:33Far, you might think, from today's pandemic.
01:40But the virus knows no bounds. It's trickled deep into rural America.
01:47Vermont's relatively protected from the virus, but this old people's home right here has had seven people die in it,
01:56and 36 test positive, half of them staff.
02:00So, you know, this is how bad it is, even in a small, rural part of America.
02:08My neighbors are afraid. I've heard of one who's taking the safety of his family to a whole new level.
02:14I'm on my way right now to go see a friend who's a dairy farmer. His name's Joel Pomenville.
02:20And he lives with his mother, who's elderly.
02:24And I understand he's taken some pretty extreme precautions to try to protect her.
02:38Thanks, Mom.
02:40See if your soup is hot enough or you want me to heat it a little bit more.
02:46To protect his mother, Joel has built a physical barrier down the middle of their sitting room.
02:54Your mom, how did she react when you came up with the idea of the glass, the bubble room?
02:58She didn't like it.
03:01She doesn't like this whole COVID-19 thing interfering with her life.
03:07But who does, right?
03:10But I just feel responsible for her health.
03:14And how long are you planning on leaving this up and using this?
03:18Until we have a vaccine.
03:20Oh, a long time.
03:26Really?
03:29Well, I'm hoping.
03:32That means all summer?
03:34Johnson & Johnson says their vaccine is going to be ready in eight months.
03:38That was a month ago.
03:39Eight months. Oh my goodness.
03:44Can you do this for eight months?
03:46I didn't know that.
03:49With so few people here, it's a relatively easy place to isolate.
03:54But New York City is just five hours away.
03:59I'd begun talking to emergency doctors there.
04:03Their stories were disturbing.
04:06So it's absolutely insane.
04:09We just had another death in the hospital.
04:13The death toll from coronavirus has jumped dramatically tonight
04:16after New York City said it has been under-counting those killed by the disease.
04:21Other countries have higher rates of death.
04:24But by April, the United States had overtaken China and Europe as the global epicenter.
04:32And now, this was becoming personal.
04:37My sister and I were in the hospital.
04:40These are N95 masks that a friend dropped on my head.
04:43My sister is a local GP.
04:45She'd decided to volunteer in overstretched COVID wards in New York.
04:50I was proud of her, but worried for her too.
04:54So, yeah, I have a friend who works at an inner-city hospital in New York.
05:01She's told me that the hospital is not safe and that it's a very dire situation.
05:09She's told me that it is like an apocalypse down there.
05:18I wanted to see this crisis for myself.
05:22As a journalist, I was allowed to travel.
05:26I've covered a lot of wars and conflict all over the world for 25 years,
05:31and I've seen a lot of death.
05:33But I've never witnessed anything like this in the Western world.
05:38Tens of thousands of people have died of this pandemic in a matter of weeks.
05:47This was a 300-mile journey on roads that were virtually deserted.
05:58Queensbury, a town three and a half hours north of New York City.
06:03And my first glimpse of what was to come.
06:08These were the bodies of New Yorkers, buried out of the city in their hundreds
06:13by volunteer David Penipent.
06:16So many were dying in April that the city was short of space to cremate them.
06:22In the past three weeks, after this week,
06:25I have made 600 human remains, brought them to various crematories.
06:34Yeah, it's beyond belief down there, what I'm seeing.
06:38It's just beyond belief.
06:46Arriving in New York was intimidating.
06:50I was driving into the heart of the pandemic.
06:54The city's streets were eerie, empty.
07:00As I got there, I witnessed what's become the ritual.
07:04A cheer for health workers.
07:06Here, it happens every night.
07:10I got here at 7 o'clock, right as the whole city is doing their evening shouting.
07:17It's amazing, you can hear it all around.
07:30This city has seen more COVID deaths than most countries.
07:36Around 8,000 people have died in London, which has a similar population.
07:43In New York, it's over 21,000.
07:47More than five times as many deaths as in the whole state of California.
07:54Central Park hosts a field hospital.
07:57This is completely surreal.
07:59I mean, this is Times Square, the normally throbbing, crazy heartbeat of New York.
08:05And it's almost completely quiet here.
08:12I'm standing here in the wealthiest neighborhood in the world.
08:19I'm standing here in the wealthiest nation on earth.
08:24The country with some of the best hospitals and scientists in the world.
08:29The question is, how did this place become the frontline of the global pandemic?
08:38At the start of the crisis, hospitals were closed to visitors and cameras.
08:43As pictures emerged, the pressures on staff were clear.
08:48So I asked the doctors I'd been talking to, including my sister,
08:52if they could catalog their days without disturbing their work or filming patients.
08:58I have a number of patients who are manual laborers.
09:03And they have just, they're literally bedridden.
09:06And you can't even sit them up without them developing labored breathing.
09:13Dr. Rob Gore worked in a COVID emergency ward in Brooklyn.
09:17The rising body count was alarming.
09:21Just coming off of one of the toughest shifts that I've had in a long, long time.
09:27I've seen quite a few deaths over the past couple of days.
09:31And it starts to wear on you.
09:35I've seen a lot of tragedy. I've seen a lot of disaster.
09:38I worked in Haiti pre-earthquake and post-earthquake.
09:41And saw a lot of people dying from illnesses and injuries or complications of injuries.
09:47I've never seen anything like that before.
09:50So another day in the COVID crisis.
09:52Many doctors were short of the basic equipment they needed to do their jobs.
09:57Dr. Anu Shah worked across six different hospitals in neighboring New Jersey.
10:03Here's the morgue. We're still seeing a lot of deaths.
10:06It's a small hospital and you get numb to it, you know.
10:11We are seeing it so frequently.
10:18I didn't want to see another death today.
10:22I did not want to see a death today.
10:28Never imagined that in this country that we would not have simple masks and simple gowns.
10:34And we would not have IV lines.
10:36We are like soldiers at the front line.
10:39Government and healthcare organizations should have stepped up way more.
10:42They should have been prepared for a pandemic.
10:47In March, the rate of new infections began soaring.
10:51Doubling at times by the day.
10:54We were looking at a freight train coming across the country.
10:57We're now looking at a bullet train.
11:00Just six weeks earlier, New York's Governor Cuomo, a Democrat, had been dismissive about the threat of the virus.
11:08Catching the flu right now is a much greater risk than anything that has anything to do with coronavirus.
11:16The White House had been warned as early as January that COVID could take half a million American lives.
11:23The Trump administration says it will now bar foreign nationals entering the United States if they've been here to China.
11:31President Trump shot down flights from China in early February.
11:37And continued campaigning for November's elections.
11:41His message to Americans, relax.
11:45We have done an incredible job. We're going to continue.
11:49It's going to disappear. One day it's like a miracle. It will disappear.
11:56What the president had not done was shut down flights from Europe.
12:00That would take six more weeks.
12:03During that critical period in February and March, the virus spread across the city unchecked.
12:10New York, about twice as crowded as London, the perfect breeding ground.
12:16The governor pointed the finger at Washington.
12:19January, February, March, three million Europeans travel to New York State. Three million.
12:32And there was a critical lack of COVID testing.
12:37The governor begged the president to help step it up.
12:41The federal government here let the city down.
12:45It didn't stop travel from Europe when it should have.
12:48It didn't provide access to diagnostic tests when it should have.
12:52And because of that, New York City was flying blind.
12:55It didn't realize that there were thousands and thousands of infections in February.
13:02In the hospitals, there was fury.
13:05We're dying here. We're seeing our co-workers die.
13:09We can't move forward if we don't look at the errors that we committed in the past.
13:15This administration has blood on its hands.
13:18Every person that continues to die right now, that falls on the federal government.
13:24But the decision on when to start lockdown in New York belonged not to the president, but to Governor Cuomo.
13:32By the time he gave that order, at least 134 New Yorkers had already died.
13:39Jeff Shaman, a leading epidemiologist, believes thousands of lives could have been saved in New York
13:46had the city locked down earlier.
13:48We've modeled that. And if we were to back it up 10 days or 14 days,
13:5314 days back from when they locked down, ostensibly here when we started to see it,
13:58is when the first death occurred in the United States,
14:00we see a tenfold reduction in the number of cases.
14:04It didn't have to happen if people were proactive.
14:07Closing New York earlier before any deaths would have been a huge call.
14:15But San Francisco's leaders did exactly that.
14:20San Francisco is a smaller city, not as crowded or poor.
14:25Still, fewer than 50 people have died there.
14:29I mean, it has me screaming at the walls in my house.
14:32I'm publishing information that actually shows what the problem is.
14:35And we were ignored.
14:37In February, there was ample evidence that this thing was spreading very aggressively.
14:41And that if we had acted earlier and sooner, that we could have ramped up the war production.
14:46That we could have gotten companies to build test kits and got them deployed en masse
14:52and put ourselves in a position to be prep for this.
14:56A month later, nearly 16,000 people had died.
15:00But that's not the whole story.
15:03In places like this, parts of Brooklyn and the Bronx, where it's mainly Black and Latino,
15:09people have died at twice the rate of white New Yorkers.
15:13It's crowded and poor here.
15:16People are far more likely to suffer ill health.
15:21I got a call from David Penipent, the mortuary professor who I'd met in Queensbury.
15:27He'd had an emergency and had asked me to meet him.
15:30He'd had an emergency and had asked me to meet him at an Undertaker's in Brooklyn.
15:35Turn right onto Corona Avenue, then turn left onto 91st Place.
15:40You must be kidding me.
15:43That is just weird.
15:48The situation that awaited seemed almost too macabre to be true.
15:53These ordinary rental trucks parked on the busy high street contained dozens of bodies.
15:59The vans were being used as temporary storage space by the local funeral director,
16:05whose chapel already stored over a hundred.
16:09This is New York City and there are truckloads of bodies unrefrigerated on the side of a road.
16:16What this says is that this crisis is completely out of control.
16:20There have been many days throughout this when hundreds of people have died in just a 24-hour period.
16:26This is what it's come to.
16:31The crisis only came to light when the neighbours complained about the smell.
16:37This grieving daughter couldn't put it into words.
16:41It was now up to David to move the bodies to a proper place of rest.
16:48Do you find this disturbing at all?
16:50Yes, it's disturbing.
16:52I don't know if it's disturbing.
16:54I'm not sure.
16:56It's a bit disturbing.
16:58It's a bit disturbing.
17:00It's a bit disturbing.
17:02It's a bit disturbing.
17:04I don't know what's disturbing.
17:06It's a bit disturbing.
17:08It's a bit disturbing.
17:10What happened here?
17:11Very upsetting.
17:13I'm not going to deny it.
17:15I'm not going to sugarcoat this in any way.
17:17Very upsetting.
17:19What do you say to the families of these people?
17:22I basically say to these families, this is a good funeral director.
17:26He just became very overwhelmed and when he reached out to me he was almost in tears.
17:32Please help me, please help me.
17:34His voice was breaking up.
17:36He was very, very saddened by what was happening.
17:40Grief has consumed this city.
17:42So many relatives of the thousands who died, reliving the trauma, wondering why.
17:53Beatriz Núñez is one.
17:55She lives here in Brooklyn.
17:58In March, her fiancé Jorge began showing Covid symptoms.
18:03But there was a shortage of tests in the city and she says the hospital didn't test him.
18:07He had had a temperature of 106.
18:09He was completely delirious.
18:11And you still couldn't get him a test?
18:13No.
18:15Unless he had to be admitted and intubated, they would not test him.
18:18Hospitals in these parts of New York, overstretched at the best of times, were struggling to cope.
18:25Jorge was discharged the same day.
18:28He went home in an Uber.
18:30The hospital told us it gives all patients the appropriate treatment.
18:34He couldn't even stand up straight.
18:36When he came home from the hospital, I could physically carry him upstairs.
18:42At home, a few days later, Jorge's condition still wasn't improving.
18:47He asked if he could have a cup of tea.
18:50Which for us was even weird because he's not a tea drinker.
18:54And when his mom went to give it to him, because it was already cooled down, I don't know, maybe 10 minutes or so.
19:01And she realized he wasn't breathing.
19:02And that's when she called me and I ran to him.
19:05And, you know, I called 911 and I was doing the CPR.
19:09But honestly, in my heart, he was already gone.
19:12When she realized that he wasn't breathing, he was already dead.
19:15Jorge died of suspected COVID.
19:18He left behind a son, Logan, who was just turning two.
19:23He doesn't understand, but he for sure knows something's different.
19:29He asked for his dad all the time.
19:31He was extremely close to his dad.
19:34I'm sorry.
19:44Once again, the meals will be here shortly.
19:47But come get your hand sanitizer and your face mask.
19:52In the Bronx, New York's poorest borough, a food handout.
19:58This area was hit hardest by the disease and now too by the effects of lockdown.
20:04Almost a million New Yorkers are out of work.
20:0840 million unemployed across the nation.
20:12There's been nothing like this since the Great Depression.
20:15Here, many are down to their last pennies.
20:18Usually, when I have no more money left, I come here to the center to get food or I eat less food.
20:29Let's practice social distancing.
20:32Let's practice safety.
20:35The city, still in lockdown.
20:38Let's practice social distancing.
20:41Let's practice safety.
20:43The city, still in lockdown, is poised to start slowly reopening next week.
20:49Infections in New York have now decreased massively.
20:53But over 200 people died here of COVID last week.
20:58And many worry about a second wave.
21:08It's now four weeks since coronavirus cases in New York reached their peak.
21:14I've left New York and I'm back on the road.
21:18What I saw and learned in New York is really disturbing.
21:24The scale of the death, the chaos.
21:27But I also understand that if you come from a part of the country that hasn't been as badly affected, you might see things differently.
21:36Most states have been in some form of lockdown, but none have been hit on anything like the scale of New York.
21:46Ten states have had fewer than 100 deaths.
21:53This is New Hampshire.
21:55It's not far from New York state, but fewer than 250 people have died here.
22:02Wow, this place is open.
22:07It's amazing. I haven't seen this before.
22:12I visited just as lockdown was partially lifted in mid-May.
22:17Similarly to the UK, people here had been asked to only leave their homes for essential reasons.
22:24And today, finally, a breath of relief.
22:27Outdoor markets and many shops and salons are reopening.
22:33The government does not have the right to restrict assemblies of any kind.
22:38But for these protesters, it's not enough.
22:41They want everything open, and they want it now.
22:45The restrictions should be lifted completely. There's no state of emergency.
22:49We did have one, but the emergency is gone. It's time to get back to normal.
22:53Not a new normal, the old normal.
22:56As of yesterday, it's 183,000 people out of work in New Hampshire, out of a working population of 775,000.
23:04That's a huge price to pay for these decisions.
23:08We have our freedoms, and we're willing to fight for it if we have to.
23:13I love President Trump. I bless him, and I bless his family.
23:17The pace of reopening America has become a massive political issue in an election year.
23:22A lot of Americans are absolutely craving this, a chance to get out into the sunshine.
23:28And they want their jobs back.
23:30Many are thrilled that the president is saying it's time to open America back up.
23:36President Trump has chosen a powerful electioneering message to rally his base.
23:43Until all this, President Trump's strongest electoral card was America's booming economy.
23:50But now there are warnings of a 30% downturn, which could be politically devastating.
23:56President Trump has signaled his support for these protests from the outset.
24:01These are people expressing their views. I see where they are, and I see the way they're working.
24:07These are people expressing their views. I see where they are, and I see the way they're working.
24:12They seem to be very responsible people to me.
24:19In May, the president supported armed protesters who'd invaded the state capital in Michigan,
24:25where there'd been almost 4,000 COVID deaths,
24:29saying the protesters were good people and the governor should give a little.
24:37Mary Rivaud, a hairdresser here in New Hampshire, thinks Donald Trump's great.
24:42She's just officially opened her salon for the first time since March.
24:48But today, she can only take one customer at a time.
24:53Mary's infuriated that the virus is still, months on, cramping her style and killing her business.
25:00So, my love, this is the waiver I have to have everybody sign so you can't sue me for, you know, coronavirus.
25:09I know, it's ridiculous. Perfect.
25:12For Mary, the horror stories of New York are a world away.
25:16Do you remember back in the day my mom was telling me about this?
25:20They used to have chicken pox parties where you'd literally invite every kid in the neighborhood
25:25so everybody would get chicken pox at the same time.
25:26I feel like we need to have a corona party.
25:30I'll bring the corona.
25:32Mary believes the president has handled the pandemic well.
25:36The White House has increased testing, outlined science-based guidelines for reopening,
25:41and is sending millions of Americans stimulus checks with the president's name on them.
25:46I think most business people realize that he's doing far more than most politicians.
25:54Where are the Democrats now? Nobody's helping.
25:57I support him 110%.
26:00I don't have a lot of people that I know that have been sick.
26:03And if the numbers are like they're saying they are, they're obviously all in New York.
26:08But why in New York did it get hit so hard?
26:11Is it because we have a lot of people that aren't there legally?
26:14Is it because we have thousands of people, like, living on top of each other?
26:17The president can exert pressure for America to reopen,
26:21but it's state politicians who make the decisions.
26:26Representative Tim Lang says they're reopening cautiously here, in line with the science.
26:32Every one of our recommendations are being reviewed by our state epidemiologist,
26:36a nonpartisan person who's looking at for strictly public health concerns.
26:40If we wanted to open probably a large concert venue with 10,000 seats,
26:44as we talked about, I bet you they would tell us no.
26:47So if the infection numbers go up, you'll start to close down again?
26:50I will say if the numbers go up, the governor will consider moving backwards, if necessary.
26:58Now all 50 American states are starting to reopen.
27:02In just over half, New Hampshire included, infections are decreasing.
27:08But in many states, infections have been steadily rising.
27:11On last week's holiday weekend, the beaches were packed,
27:15as if none of this had ever happened.
27:18Once again, the American scientific community is sounding the alarm.
27:24We have to remember, though, that coming out too soon could set us back,
27:28could mean a large resurgence of cases that damages not only lives, but also our economy.
27:34We are seeing a surge in COVID-19 cases.
27:37We are seeing a surge in COVID-19 cases.
27:40We are seeing activities in some places that worry people,
27:44together in enclosed spaces with no face masks on,
27:49in communities where the virus is spreading.
27:51That's a really risky thing to do.
27:53Do you think the pandemic is being politicized by the White House?
27:56I'm very concerned by some of the political aspects
28:00that are being layered onto what should be scientific decisions.
28:03Scientists warn that 135,000 Americans may be dead by August.
28:10But in the land of the free, each state makes its own choices.
28:16Will America learn the lessons of New York?
28:19Or will election-year politics drown out the scientists,
28:23putting America once again in peril?
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