Pandemic press: Stanford alumni journalists at the frontlines of COVID-19

Nick Casey (Image credit: Federico Rios)

This has probably been the first time in the history of the New York Times where most of its journalists faced a blanket travel ban. Our headquarters are a ghost town, and reporters have been asked to do as much reporting as possible from the phone, at home. When news breaks, I am used to getting as close as I can to the action, and taking personal risks when the story is worth it – I lived in Gaza for a month at the height of the 2014 war, spent a week with leftist Colombian rebels.

But this is the first time where my presence is a big risk for my sources. An interview can get someone ill with neither party knowing it. Covering the coronavirus suddenly sets up a set of concerns you’ve never faced before.

I came off the Times’ international desk last fall to cover what was supposed to be the most important story of the year – the 2020 election. Suddenly the world was turned upside down. Entire lines of reporting that had seemed urgent just weeks ago are now rendered irrelevant. What’s the importance of the political horse race in a pandemic where the best-case model leaves as many Americans dead as the Vietnam and Korean Wars did combined? Yet politics is also more important than ever. All of the political currents of the Trump Era – populism, nationalism and the disregard for truth – have suddenly come to roost at a time of a deadly national crisis that now hinges on disputes between governors on whether it’s safe to reopen and untested cures promoted by the White House. We’re still sorting out our angles and adjustments to this new reality.

Few times have I seen everything so quickly changed and distorted by one event. Early in April, I published a story about how a college class reconvened on a videoconferencing app after Haverford College in Pennsylvania was shut down and its students evicted. On their tiny screens, they could suddenly see that not everyone was experiencing the virus the same way – one student was sitting at a vacation house in Maine, another was struggling to help her parents’ Puerto Rican food truck stay open. College was meant to be the “great equalizer” – you ate at the same cafeteria, slept on the same dorm beds. But the virus suddenly shined a light on inequality that was lurking underneath the surface of undergraduate life all the time.

In Farmington, New Mexico, few know anyone who got sick but everyone knows someone who has lost a job, and the mayor is dealing with competing views that “shouldn’t be competing.”

The virus is also overturning the lives of those I’ve written about at amazing speed. Not long before the outbreak hit the U.S., I’d come back from Gainesville, Floria, to profile Julius Irving. Julius had a powerful story. He was a former felon, who had just gotten back the right to vote and was canvassing to register other former felons to vote, too. But a fight he’d gotten into last year meant he was going back to court the next month on an attempted murder charge: He was set to possibly lose his freedom all over again, but spending the last days before trial trying to get more people to vote in the system that might put him away. Then the virus hit. Florida shut down, he lost his job canvassing for voters and was living in a car. But his court date is postponed indefinitely. Julius feels a strange combination of despair and relief.

These are the kinds of stories that are happening to people now.

Nick Casey, ’05, is a national politics correspondent for the New York Times.