Reporting on the pandemic

It’s been 20 months since the World Health Organization declared covid-19 a global pandemic. We’ve all been touched by it in some way. and we’ve all relied heavily on clear, fact-based reporting over the last year and a half. OPB’s Geoff Norcross sat down with three local reporters at the Portland Book Festival to talk about what covering the pandemic has been like. Eli Saslow is a journalist for the Washington Post and the author of “Voices from the Pandemic.” Eder Campuzano is an education reporter for The Oregonian. And Amelia Templeton is OPB’s health reporter.

The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:

Dave Miller: It has been 20 months since the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. We have all been touched by it in some way and we’ve all relied heavily on clear fact-based reporting over the last year and a half. Recently my colleague Geoff Norcross sat down with three local reporters at the [2021] Portland Book Festival to talk about what covering the pandemic has been like.

Geoff Norcross: We have the opportunity to check in with three Portland journalists who have been with this story from the start and who have done deep, necessary work.  Eli Saslow is a Pulitzer prize winning journalist with the Washington Post. He lives here in Portland. His book, Voices From the Pandemic, is a collection of dozens of stories from people who were directly affected by COVID-19. My colleague Amelia Templeton has been doing deep reporting from inside hospitals and ICU’s as they have strained under the weight of too many patients. Eder Campuzano has been covering the pandemic for The Oregonian Oregon Live. He’s written many stories about the exceedingly difficult decisions around when to bring students back to school and how to keep them safe. Please join me in welcoming Eli Saslow, Eder Campuzano and Amelia Templeton to Portland Book Fest. [audience applause] So I’d just like to go around the table here. Is there a story that you have reported over the last year that really sticks with you?

Eli Saslow:  It’s hard to pick one. I spent the last year and a half talking to dozens of Americans around the country and oftentimes embedding into their lives at moments of trauma or transformation as this virus was playing out.  I guess the main thing that sticks with me thematically and also as a story too is that this pandemic I think has accelerated and exacerbated inequality in this country. And in almost every way.

One piece that I wrote was about a woman named Francine Bailey. She worked as a nursing aide at a small nursing home. [She] didn’t have the luxury of quarantining or staying home. She’s a Jamaican-American woman who lives in a multi-family home in Hartford, Connecticut. She didn’t want to go to work when the pandemic started and knew that her nursing home did not have the ability to protect her at this point. Nursing homes and hospitals were only giving a small amount of PPE too because they were running out of supplies. So Francine had one mask. She was supposed to re-wear that mask as she went from patient to patient. She knew it wasn’t safe.

She needed the $9.75 an hour that she was getting paid. So she kept going to work and inevitably, very quickly, became sick and did her best to quarantine. But again she lived in a home with her mother, her sister and her children. So Francine kind of sequestered herself in one bedroom even as her four-year old daughter was constantly knocking on the door. ‘Mom, where are you? Mom come out’. Francine got really sick and got a version of this that impacted her breathing in profound ways. And she went to the hospital. The hospital sent her back home because the hospital was overwhelmed. Francine started to have panic attacks and during one of these panic attacks, she ran out of her room to get fresh air.

Her mother was 73 years old.  In that moment, her instinct was to try to comfort her daughter and gave her daughter a hug, embraced her and calmed her down effectively. And in Francine’s estimation, in this moment, in this five minute hug interaction, she passed the virus from her to her mother. And then over the next days Francine was quarantined in the upstairs bedroom. Her mother was quarantined in the downstairs bedroom and Francine would lie with her ear to the floor boards to hear her mother develop the same cough that sounded like her cough. And Francine knew the moment that cough started that her mother was not gonna make it and she didn’t. And I think the guilt that she lives with and also just the basic injustice of what happened to her in that family will stick with me for a long time.

Eder Campuzano:  In addition to reporting on education for the longest time, I’ve been The Oregonian’s lead reporter on protests, so that was kind of an interesting confluence of beats, for lack of a better term.  Last year toward the end of the school year, we did this series where we basically put together a ‘breakfast club’ of Portland’s seniors to just tell us their stories of their last year as high school students at the very beginning of this pandemic. And one of them who graduated from David Douglas High School wants to be a social activist. He’s going to Brown University right now. And one of the things that he told me that just struck me is that in his sophomore or junior year of high school he remembers hearing the statistic that Portland is the whitest major city in the United States. And he was like, ‘well that’s crap. Everybody that I see in my school building in my neighborhood is a person of color, so how does this make sense?’

And the first time that he went downtown as a teenager is when the light went off in his head. It was like, ‘oh, okay, I guess I see now.’ And so ever since then, in thinking about his experience and then the way that people who live east of 82nd Avenue, really, see things a little bit differently than you might if you live between this side of the river and the highway. [It] just gave me a greater perspective on the disparities between not just living conditions but infrastructure and everything which exists. But until you hear it from a teenager right, with that perspective and at that point of view. I think that’s the thing that’s probably stuck with me the most.

Norcross:  How did the pandemic and the protests converge? What do they have to do with each other?

Campuzano:  What I heard from a lot of student activists, especially, is that they felt that if we rewind a little bit to 2019, there were these walkouts and protests at what’s now Ida B. Wells High School in southwest Portland. Students there had faced microaggressions and straight out racism from their classmates. And so they’d said, ‘enough is enough’, walked out of class and demanded more from their administration. And so I revisited some of them during the Black Lives Matter protests here.

And what they were telling me is that they felt that because there was not much else to pay attention to. There was this one all consuming event while everybody was home, glued to their phones and their TVs that it was harder to look away. You couldn’t escape it. And they felt like they were getting more support and more people asking them really valid and curious questions about their lives rather than just brushing them off because they were walking out of the cafeteria. So that’s one of the ways that, at least in the conversations that I’ve had with youth, those two events came together.

Norcross:  Amelia, what’s a story that really sticks with you?

Amelia Templeton:  I’m going to choose one that has kind of a joyful element for me because I think we could all use a little bit of that. So I got to go to an assisted living and long term care community for vaccination day. I was just on this complete high in part because I’m a broadcast reporter, I do radio and I have been doing Zoom interviews of people for months and that’s not why I got into this work. I don’t love connecting with people through a computer. I like to do it face to face. I like the way their voices sound.

And this pandemic has not equally impacted people and one group of people that has really disproportionately suffered is people you know who live in longterm care and assisted living, older adults, but especially older adults in these shared spaces. So to actually get to be there in a room full of people was incredible. And there were a few of them who came outside. It was like this just improbably gorgeous sunny February day, which never happens.

And we sat on a bench and did these interviews and I had a boom pole so that I could stand six feet apart because I wasn’t vaccinated yet. So it just felt like a miracle to be there and to be talking to people face to face. And they were so funny and so wonderful. And there were a few women in particular. There was this chemistry teacher from South Carolina who was, I think, in her eighties or nineties. I wished she could be the public face of why you should get your shot because she was funny and she was smart.  And then there was also a woman who had been married to her husband for 56 years. They had been missionaries together and he was in the Alzheimer’s memory care unit in the nursing home part of this facility and she was in the independent living half of the facility.

She basically hadn’t been able to see him or hold him or touch him since the pandemic started except for a day here or there, because of the visitation restrictions [and] the county case counts. So she was getting ready to go see him. She was hoping she was going to be able to see him. And a couple weeks after she’d been fully vaccinated, she was planning the balloons that she was going to bring because he can’t see very well.  But she thought maybe he’d see these balloons. And I was just so moved by getting to spend a moment in a day in the lives of these people.

Norcross: I’d like to know how you approached reporting on this. Normally you have a story, you talk to people, you flesh it out as deeply as you can and maybe you have an opportunity to follow up on it later just to see if there’s any progress being made. And it can be maybe a few weeks, maybe a few months of work. You’ve been at this for 20 months and you’re going to continue working on this story for who knows how long.  And I’m wondering if it changed the way you approach how you decide who you talk to, how you focus what you do. How does it change your practice as a journalist?

Templeton: I cover health and I cover COVID and I had a revelation part way through reporting. Often when I do as a reporter, I’m looking for things that are novel and I’m trying to tell new stories and I’m trying to compete against every other piece of information in the world by telling you something you haven’t heard before. And with COVID, I have just accepted and sort of shifted the way that I think.I need to tell people some of the same stories over and over again because we’re going through this monumental shift and some things are going to be important and they’re not going to stop being important. So vaccination, that’s a big one for me. I am trying to think of how I keep telling the story about these vaccines, about why they’re important [and] about if people are afraid of them, how to answer those fears.

How can we keep coming back to the story over and over and over again and not get worn out and not get distracted and not get bored, but as journalists to stick with the stories through this pandemic that really matter, even if they’re repetitive and dig into the stuff that matters and not move on. So that’s kind of how my thinking has shifted.

Campuzano:  I don’t know that I’ve changed that much about my approach, save for the fact that in the early goings I couldn’t really walk up to a school during drop off and poll parents and start asking them what’s going on? I feel like I have been really really fortunate in that the platform that our newspaper and news organization has. Every time that I wanted to know about a detailed experience, like ‘how do you feel about the first three months of distance learning?’, I basically just put up a google form, embedded it in a post. and within three days I had 300 replies.

Before the pandemic, whenever I would do that, I’d get maybe twenty or thirty [replies]. Asking the audience to participate more really paid off in spades because by the end of the summer, I got this sheet that was maybe 500 names long. So I told people [to] ‘check this box if you just want to give me a feeling for what you’re going through, but you don’t want to talk to me’. I respect people’s privacy on that front. [I would] just talk to the people who wanted to talk to me, who wanted to go on the record, and who wanted to share their experiences. [Of those who just wanted to] air things out there were maybe 50 of the 500. The others were ‘please give me a call because I would love to speak to a reporter’. People were hungry, people really, really wanted to talk about their experiences. So in that way, using social media and using online forms a bit more, is how I got a lot of the really nuanced perspectives that I managed to get into some of my stories.

Norcross:  Eli what about you?

Saslow: I think I would say that in my experience, most of the major issues in our country require sustained reporting and sustained attention from all of us, right? It’s not unfamiliar to me, as a journalist writing about the big issues in the country, to pay attention to something and to write about it again.  Whether that’s gun violence, whether it’s the opioid epidemic, whether it’s inequality that in this country is getting worse and worse from one year to the next, or whether it’s COVID. So I think the challenge for me as a journalist and the challenge for all of us, just as people walking through the world, is to not look away, to not get tired of hearing some of the same things. We’re hearing some of the same stories because for the people that I’m writing about, they’re new every time. It’s not something that they’ve gone through before.

And also I think we need to grow our attention spans and also our empathy.  If I can go back and approach a story again from a place of nonjudgment but, when possible, understanding.  In trying to understand why something is happening, trying to understand why somebody feels some way, hopefully that continues to add value and brings attention back to the spaces that I think we should pay it.

Norcross:  Have you not had to fight compassion fatigue or empathy fatigue in the last two years?

Saslow:  Sometimes I have to recover between stories. I would say part of our job sometimes is being in really close proximity to trauma or to people in pain or too difficult situations. And it would be dishonest to say that sometimes that doesn’t take a toll. But for me I go back to my really happy, lucky privileged life. I go for a hike. I get to live in this great place and recovering is easy because I’m lucky. And I think the thing I try to remember is that for the people who I write about, the problems don’t end when the story ends.

For me, it’s a story and I get to move on to the next one. For them, they’re in these situations for much longer. And so whatever the true fatigue is, the true burnout, the true trauma is always on the side of the people who we write about and the people whose stories we are asked to tell. And then it’s our job to do them justice by being able to get beyond our own fatigue and go back into the story again.

Norcross:  Let’s bring your book into this discussion, Voices From the Pandemic. It’s a beautiful, sometimes maddening, enriching book. Can you first talk about how you found the folks who you included in this book?

Saslow:  Yeah, sure. So, typically in my work, I almost embed into the lives of the people who I write about. If I’m writing about somebody who’s being deported, I go back to Mexico and spend the first week that they’re there with them and document a family separation that way. If I’m writing about a heroin addict, I’m there as they’re going through rehab and trying to recover and I’m interviewing people and talking to people. But more than that, I’m using my eyes. I’m there to see things myself. At the beginning of the pandemic, it became clear that that kind of embedded narrative reporting was going to be, if not difficult, then even ethically impossible. By getting on a plane and showing up and embedding into somebody’s life, I’d be putting them at risks in ways that didn’t feel comfortable.

So I had to sort of start figuring out how I could still hopefully tell stories that are meaningful and intimate and empathetic when I can’t be there. I can’t go meet these people. And so what I started to do was look for people whose lives are being upended by the pandemic in various ways. Whether that was somebody who was sick, somebody who was caring for somebody who was sick, an anesthesiologist who was intubating 25 people a day in an overcrowded hospital, or a restaurateur whose family restaurant had [survived] for seven generations and was closing because of all of the mandates related to the pandemic. I would call these people and I would then spend hours and hours over the phone, usually for a week or two every day, two or three hours of conversation until I had 50 pages of notes. And then I would condense and edit those transcripts into these first person pieces about what they were experiencing.

Norcross:  How heavily did you have to edit?

Saslow:  Well I had to truncate a lot. Hopefully that saves all of you some reading time because you know the truth is, for all journalism, we’re all editing and figuring out what to include all the time. When we go to stories we talk to a lot of people and then we decide what quotes, what pieces of information are essential to the story. So in some ways this was very similar.

I was talking to people for huge amounts of time because that’s what’s required to get to a level of depth. Right? The first time that you talk to anybody, they’re not gonna feel comfortable yet to tell you exactly how it feels to be doing what they’re doing or to be seeing what they’re seeing. But maybe in the sixth or the seventh conversation you get to a more honest place because they trust you more and they’re used to talking to you. So a lot of those conversations are building that comfort .  Then I was taking sometimes 50 pages of notes and turning them into four or five pages. A distillation of sort of the most honest true stuff that we’ve had those conversations about.

Norcross: You talk to people who are going through unimaginable trauma. Amelia, maybe you can weigh in on how you approach people who are hurting and get them to speak to you without feeling like you’re imposing in their space.

Templeton:  I try to be guided by a couple of things. The first is I try to remember something that I read that an emergency medicine doctor once wrote, which was ‘never confuse that person’s trauma with your own and understand it belongs to them.’ Your feelings are sort of secondary trauma.  Reporting in these situations, you’re really an outsider stepping into somebody else’s world. And you have to respect that and not over-emotionally insert yourself into the situation. So I try to be really mindful about my own demeanor and you know, when I’m reaching out to people in these situations, being calm but not overly sort of solicitous or calm. Then, you know, I interview people for the radio and it really only works if people want to have a conversation. So I’m never pushing somebody who really doesn’t want to talk to me to talk to me.

Then finally, the last couple things they keep in mind are I think journalists can sometimes come across as sort of tragedy vultures, almost as if we’re sort of harvesting people’s emotion to be the punctuation in our stories. And as I’ve become more mature as a journalist, I’ve tried to really make sure that I have a real conversation with somebody who is experiencing that trauma and then I’m not just using them for their trauma and then I give them an opportunity to tell me why they think their story is important and why it is they want to share their experience.

The example that comes to mind is that the mother of somebody who was shot and killed by police in Portland, was deeply traumatized really wanted to talk. And she was struggling with understanding why this happened. And she had very insightful reflections on the whole thing and on mental health care.  So by not just using sources for their trauma and making sure that we’re engaging them in these deeper questions about how we solve some of the problems that we’re writing about - that’s how I’ve approached it.

Norcross: Do you want to add something to that?

Campuzano:  Yeah. My approach when I’m talking to students is to do the usual approach, announcing myself. ‘I’m a reporter from The Oregonian and I’d love to talk to you about this, sorry about your loss, or really just let them know that I’m a human first. But once they agree to talk to me, the first question right off the bat for them is, ‘do you have any questions for me’, like about what my story is going to be about, or the way that I work as a journalist, what on the record/off the record means, like this is what it looks like to work with me. If you’re a public official, this is what it looks like to work with me in your capacity as a human who does not owe me the time of day like as a private citizen [for whom] really I’m here to tell your story because it’s important and contextualized and is something that’s happening in our community.

But I’m not here to exploit you, I’m not here to, like Amelia put it so wonderfully, be like a trauma vulture. I mean the value of the stories that we tell is that they illuminate something about what’s happening. And if you’re not accomplishing that, then the approach is broken from the start. So that’s why I like to approach it from that sort of standpoint - letting the people who I’m talking to know explicitly what the process looks like, what role they play and what I’m trying to do and what I’m trying to accomplish.

Norcross:  Are you more transparent than you used to be?

Campuzano:  Um no, actually because before the pandemic started, I went to this workshop in Berkeley on the science of the adolescent mind. One of the education reporters for the L. A. Times was there. And she basically laid out this approach that I adopted. So I guess maybe it was a pandemic thing because this workshop happened. But that experience was very illuminating to me [in] opening my eyes to think more about what it looks like from the other side.

Saslow:  I think it’s also worth clarifying too, because journalism, in this moment to me, often feels a little bit misunderstood.  This, I hope, is not reductive in this environment because it’s a book festival. You’re a very literary crowd. You probably know these things, But it feels important to clarify that, as journalists, we can never pay anybody when we’re writing about them. That’s considered unethical. We also can’t offer the people who we write about control over their own stories. If I was to ask somebody for access and say, “hey, when I’m done writing this, I’ll show it to you and you can tell me what you think”, that would be empowering that person to basically be the editor of their own story. None of us are the most fair editors of our own stories.  So really all we can do as journalists, when we want to write stories, is say to people that we think this matters, we think this is important, and maybe if we can understand this experience, if we can learn something about this, we can write about it in a way that will make other people realize it’s important too. That’s kind of the pitch from one story to the next. That’s what we can offer.

Norcross:  Students going back to class or not, wearing masks were not, getting vaccinated or not working with teachers who are vaccinated or not. What has all this taught you about how these decisions are made when it comes to educating our children and what it all means for local control?

Campuzano:  I guess the first thing that comes to mind is that everybody’s exhausted and everybody’s trying their best. One of the things I’ve stumbled across in the last week is the extent to which social media can make some of those conversations really, really difficult to have. You’ve got competing factions of parents who want looser regulations on what it looks like to go back to school and other parents who are a little bit more skittish.

When you’ve got people screenshotting conversations from one group to the next and then just basically having at it among their insular groups, it doesn’t really help anyone. So the biggest thing that I’ve learned is that as humans, we need to be willing to sit down and listen and know that people are trying to do what’s best for their kids at every single level. When you think about it in those terms, your questions about local control (and I don’t know how you would break Oregonians of that idea). If you, at any point in the next, anytime, told anyone in any voting district, ‘we’re gonna go to Salem and ask for a broader set of regulations across the board - what do you think about that?’ it wouldn’t go over well.

The maddening thing to me, in the last few months, has been when school boards and parents in some districts ask for their own local control over health mitigation measures, when we know that even if the mayor of Tillamook is saying, ‘please don’t come from Memorial Day weekend’, people are going to show up. So you can’t take this ‘we-know-what’s-best-for-us approach when the virus doesn’t really stay put.

Norcross:  One of the biggest challenges of last year has been the spread of disinformation, which has felt, at times, like trying to hold back the sea. As a journalist, how does that affect what you do?

Templeton:  You know, it’s something I think about every day. It creates a sort of constant dilemma. Do I spend time trying to address misinformation because it’s out there and a lot of people in our audience may have heard it and might believe it. Or do I try to stay focused on the things that I think are important and put the time and energy I have to do reporting into the stories that matter to me. If anyone in the audience has great ideas for how, as journalists, we should think about this new world we live in, I’m taking suggestions. But you know, I guess the way I’m trying to think about misinformation right now is as an opportunity to hear that people want to have a deeper conversation about something that’s complicated and then to try to figure out how to engage in it.

And one for me personally, where I feel like I really missed an opportunity was on Ivermectin, which has become this kind of national flashpoint issue and I actually heard about it not as a reporter, but as somebody who’s car needed be towed from the tow truck driver who was telling me all about Ivermectin and had heard about it from I believe Joe Rogan. We had a good conversation and I mostly just listened to what he had to say. This was somebody who really wanted to have a long, interesting in depth conversation about something.  It’s easy to write people off as conspiracy theorists, but I do think that there’s like a kernel of curiosity there that we should be responding to.

In the case of Ivermectin, what happened at the national level was a lot of people cracked jokes about how all of these people were using something that was a veterinary medicine to try to treat COVID. And that’s not a very accurate characterization of what it is. And I think we could’ve had a deeper conversation. You know, it’s an anti parasitic uh, medication. It works really well for treating parasites. COVID is not a parasite.We missed an opportunity to really educate people instead of just a sort of mocking tone response to that. So yeah, misinformation. It’s just this constant challenge. And I feel like I’m never living up to really what it calls me to do as a reporter, which is to push harder to reach across the divide to people who want knowledge and aren’t finding it.

Norcross:  In your book, Eli, you’ve got a man from Arizona who refuses to wear the mask and in fact organizes maskless protests at stores chanting, “Remove the diaper”, “No more tyranny”, you know, that kind of thing. You’ve got a woman in Michigan who tells the big lie about the last presidential election being stolen from Trump. She was coming after a Florida election official who was talking about how hard he had to work to get people to be able to vote safely. But why include these people who are operating on lies, half truths, and misinformation in your book?

Saslow:  Well, because they’re included in our country. I think for all of us, the choice to not pay attention, to look in the other direction, to explain these problems away is not a valid choice at this moment. I mean we’re not talking about small groups of people who have fallen into places of conspiracy theory-thinking and disinformation. We’re talking about massive swaths of the country. I mean, two weeks ago, I was at a hospital, writing a story in Dayton, Washington, a small rural hospital, where Washington’s vaccine mandates for health care workers just went into effect. This is a hospital that’s been really hard hit by COVID. These people know the virus, they know what it does to people. Exactly half of the staff had chosen to get vaccinated and half of the staff had refused. So that’s not a small number of people and we can’t say that they’re all idiots who don’t pay attention to things and don’t know what they’re thinking. This disinformation is a huge part of the country that we live in.

And it’s also, I think, one of the main reasons why when I was looking yesterday, for whatever reason, at the betting odds for the next presidential election. Donald Trump is now the favorite for the next presidential election. So if we don’t try to understand these patterns of disinformation, the news deserts that have grown in the country, the unbelievable polarization that exists right now in America, those problems just continue to grow. I think we have to figure out how to report in those places and how to, if anything, explain people in a way that allows us to maybe reach them.

Norcross: So this pandemic, Eli, has been especially hard on communities of color and I’m wondering if you can talk about how, from your perspective, it exposed the inequities in the systems that we all rely on?

Saslow:  Well, first of all, I would say those of us who didn’t know about those inequities beforehand were much more naive than we should have been.  The systemic racism that has been a part of America for so long was a part, a big part of what was going on in this country. And a big part of all the major issues that we faced before the pandemic, I hope that this made some people more aware. But if we look at the statistics of people who got sick, who disproportionately died, who disproportionately lost their jobs,  who will disproportionately be evicted in an upcoming eviction crisis, communities of color are hit way, way harder.

And the other thing is when this pandemic ends in whatever ways that it ends, it will end for those of us who are privileged enough to have it end. The way that America has worked historically is that people who are already vulnerable, recover at much slower rates. People in this country are still trying to recover from the economic collapse in 2008. That has created a wedge that will be further now.

So I think the other challenge for us is to not just pay attention momentarily to the fact that, yes, this exposed a lot of the white supremacist inequity at the heart of the country. The challenge is to sustain our attention and to say these people will be suffering disproportionately for years or generations to come because of what’s happened in the pandemic, not just temporarily.

Norcross:  Eder, have you seen those inequities play out in the classroom?

Campuzano:  If you look at the most recent state report cards, 9th grade on-track-to-graduate [illustrated] the widening gap between latino students, in particular, in PPS. Also latino and black students across the state at-large fell behind at a higher rate than white students.

So we can meaningfully point at the data and say it was in PPS that [approximately] 18% of black 9th graders did not get >¼ of the credit they needed to graduate last year. When you look at it through those lenses and think about the factors that go into students not performing academically as well as they could, the district report cards on student wellbeing in classrooms [recorded that] for the first three years of these surveys, students of color felt less safe in their learning environments than they did than their white peers did, [while] in the last school year, black students felt safer, on average, than their white peers did. And the main differences between last year and the year before [were that] they weren’t in the same school building, facing microaggressions, being bombarded with these messages. From a system standpoint, from a peer standpoint [it suggested] telling them you either don’t belong here or you’re being ostracized or you’re different.

Norcross: Amelia, you and I spoke a few weeks ago about hospitals not getting adequate guidance from the state, when it comes to crisis standards of care and the best way to determine who to prioritize for care. And I’m wondering what this has taught you about how leaders are equipped to manage a crisis like this [and] just give us basic guidance on keeping people safe?

Templeton: It’s a big question. I think I’ve seen the state struggle with the pace of change that we’re going through. And in my own life, I’ve been a journalist for more than 10 years and you can almost feel the pace of history sort of shifting. And it feels like things have shifted into high gear in the last four years. I think with the pandemic I have reported on a lot of very hard working, very well meaning people in state government who I think are also equally overwhelmed and are dealing with many of the same human challenges that we are in terms of having kids at home. They have lives to go back to, they’re also trying not to get COVID and it’s just been a really tough environment to make any kind of policy in.

But the other thing I think I’ve really observed in the last year is just that we all tend to overestimate the power of government, especially state government. There’s a lot of policy that is happening at the county level or at the local level or at the school board level. And this pandemic has really revealed how you need all of those pieces working together. And they’re not. We’re a really, really polarized state. And so no matter what happens in Salem, the decisions that are getting made by people in Malheur County and Lake County and in Bend and Burns are equally important. So it’s been, I think, a year that’s kind of underscored what feels like a growing divide in our state.

Norcross: Eli, is there a story over the past year that you wish you could have told.

Saslow:  There are a lot that I hope I will still tell that are still on my list of stories that I want to get to. But going back to the question about disinformation and that divide, what I would like to be able to do is write a story about people who are not even just vaccine hesitant but who don’t want to get vaccinated or whatever else, in a way that would help even just me understand it.  I think sometimes with people who we disagree with, we really want to be able to rationalize their decisions and figure it out. And so when I was in Dayton, I spent a bunch of time with this nurse, Director of Nursing at this little hospital. She’s been there for 24 years. She was the person who would stay in the elder care patient rooms and read them novels to keep them company. She’d refused to take a raise from this little rural hospital three years in a row to help it stay open. She loved this place and she was a big part of it.

And now she was going to quit because she was refusing to get a vaccine that, by every measure, is safe and effective. So while I I don’t want to ever dismiss people like that or their decisions, I guess I wish I could get to the place where, in spending so much time with somebody, I could really understand it. And I think all of us, right now, are kind of experiencing a version of that. How can we make sense of so much disinformation and how can we get to a place where we can say here’s what the root of the problem is and here’s how it goes away. I think I will still be trying to do that in my reporting for a long time to come.

Norcross: Eder, what are you missing that you really want to tell?

Campuzano: If I could go back in time and do one thing, I would want to spend time with Somebody who is in 8th grade right now. One of the more heartbreaking stories that I’ve heard from families with middle school students is that if they were at the tail end of their sixth grade year in March of 2020, they barely got time to get acclimated after elementary school to this new world. They spent an entire year learning at a distance and not really getting that social connection with their peers and now they’re all thrown back into the mix together. And coming from different schools to start their sixth grade year, they don’t know each otheR. There’s a lot of tension in middle school hallways right now, at a very formative time of a person’s life.

To touch on misinformation a little bit, I think one of the things that we don’t talk about enough is how, with all of the resources that newsrooms have and that we throw at debunking rumors and giving people good solid foundational information. The vast majority of it is in english and there are pockets of Spanish speaking communities, Russian speakers, people who don’t have access to as much credible information.  I’m usually the best source of information from my family coming from a Mexican immigrant household.

Norcross: Reading your book, I get a sense of how far we’ve come. It begins with the first woman to die in the state of Indiana in March of 2020 [which] seems like a lifetime ago at this point. What lessons can we learn from that early time that we still can apply today?

Saslow:  I think it does feel like it has been so long. And you know, one of the things I think, again, is our own fatigue, in fighting this virus, has worked against us a million different ways. So that’s really disheartening. The other thing, is what I remember then from that moment was still some hope right? In those early days what was going to happen was like the United States has done before. This moment would somehow bring us together to fight a collective thing that we were up against. That has not borne out. Tragically we’ve gone in a different direction.

One of the pieces later in this book, when you talk about where we went to from that first moment, is about a doctor in North Dakota, the only doctor in a really rural community. He felt like people around him were not masking, were not taking the virus seriously, were not likely to get vaccinated. He was then taking care of all of them as they were getting sick, including his parents.

And he kept telling me the story about his parents-how one of the proudest moments of their life was that they had delayed their own wedding during WWII because they wanted to wait until they could save up enough sugar rations to make a wedding cake. So you know this idea for them of collective sacrifice, we’re all in this together, we’re going to put off making this wedding cake to be a part of what everybody’s doing. It had been a big part of their life and a big part of this little North Dakota community. And then now during this crisis, both of his parents had been infected with the virus because nobody around them was masking. And this doctor was taking care of both of his parents as they were dying from this disease, because the community had not found any way to sacrifice or to bond together in this moment. So I think sometimes in this reporting that’s been the familiar disheartening theme is the way that it changed how people feel about their communities and their country and there’s much more weariness.

Audience Question:  I know you’re journalists not soothsayers or fortune tellers. But I am curious [to get] your perspective. We know that each major activity shapes people. The Depression has made our grandparents frugal. The financial recession of 2008 or wars all shape that generation. So based on what you’re seeing in our pandemic and our global supply shutdowns and all the things that have come through this. What do you think that’s shaping this next generation to be?

Saslow:  I guess I’m a little reluctant to guess. But I can tell you what I feel like it’s it’s done now, which is to make us more suspicious - more suspicious of each other, more suspicious of being in the public spaces where we like to spend time, more suspicious of the neighbors who live around us. You know, I think what honestly kind of frightens me being back out in the country over these last several months reporting is just how divided communities seem.

And you know, that little town in Washington, there’s one restaurant in town that decided their staff had to be vaccinated. Then every other restaurant in town started running recruitment ads saying ‘take the mask off your face. We’ll take you here’. One grocery store where people go if they’re vaccinated, one grocery store where people go to if they aren’t. So I really hope that the legacy of this pandemic is not in these divides for the long term. But right now, that’s what I’m observing.

Campuzano: One of the things that makes us have a hard time with this question is that we’re still in the middle of it, right. You see it on paper, from housing costs to academic disparities. So the real question that foments in any reporter’s mind is [whether] the people in power have the will to do what they need to do in order to address all of these things. I think we’re seeing those conversations playing out right now.

Templeton:  Yeah, like they say, it’s hard to know. We’re sort of in the middle of this moment and I think I try to remember that a year and a half ago, I had no idea if there would be a vaccine or how long this would last. And there have been some incredible lucky breaks in this for all of us. We have the tools to rebuild quality of life if we can figure out how to use them. So I try to stay optimistic. But I also think, in terms of my own life, of how much time I’ve spent afraid, how long it’s taken to teach myself not to feel that way, even just to come to an event like this, you know, is kind of more challenging.

And the other thing I would say is for me actually, in some ways, maybe the most defining event of the last year and a half was not the pandemic, but actually the heat wave. Because that was the event that really reshaped. I thought I was somebody who understood and cared about climate change. But in some strange way I subscribed to this specific Northwest exceptionalism. Because I grew up in Portland, I think this is a great place. And I’ve seen the melting glaciers on Mount Hood, I’ve climbed around inside them. But somehow it just did not sink into me that the changing climate is an existential threat to my children, their children and many generations to come. And living through that couple of days here in Portland, just changed the way that I think about everything. And I wonder if, for our kids, the pandemic will be like a footnote and the bigger story will be climate.

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