Voices of resilience emerge amid pandemic
One year into the COVID-19 pandemic, the world has seen death, economic hardship and anxiety on an unprecedented scale. But it has also witnessed self-sacrifice, courage and perseverance.
In India, Brazil, South Africa and other places around the globe, people are helping others and reinventing themselves.
“I’ve been adaptable, like water,” said a woman whose dream of becoming a U.S. boxing champion was dealt a blow by the crisis, though not necessarily a knockout punch.
Their voices and images can inspire, even though the future is as uncertain for them as it is for everyone else.
The violinist
Mauricio Vivet’s talent as a violinist had earned him a route out of a slum in Rio de Janeiro. As a teen, he played classical music in the streets for money. He got noticed and received a scholarship to a prestigious music school.
After graduation, Vivet earned a living by playing at events and giving lessons. He moved out of the neighborhood and planned to open a music studio.
COVID-19 put a stop to all that. Concerts, weddings and other events were canceled. Vivet, 27, now struggles just to pay for food. He left his apartment and moved back to his mother’s house in the favela.
Vivet’s biggest fear is not having money to provide for his 4-year-old son, Angelo.
Vivet has gone back to square one.
On a recent day, he carefully wrapped his violin in a red cloth, placed it inside a battered black suitcase and made his way to Ipanema Beach. There, he sat on a stone bench and played his violin, the sweet notes amplified by a speaker. Passersby stopped to listen. Some dropped money into the red cloth.
“It is the only stage that I have, the only thing that they have not prohibited,”
Vivet said. “It’s the only way I can make money.”
The boxer
On a recent day, Melody “Mel” Popravak was in a boxing gym in New York City, her arms tattooed, her hands wrapped in yellow tape. Three years ago, she started boxing and was a finalist in two national tournaments.
After the shutdown, she trained in a friend’s garage.
“I’m determined not to give up and to continue to move on to be a professional boxer,” the 35-yearold said.
She has also started an online personal training company where she gives tips on staying in shape.
“I’m checking in with people all over the country who are going through various situations related to COVID,” she said. “I think I’ve been staying strong. I’ve been adaptable, like water, melding into the situation.”
The burial worker
Yehuda Erlich, a worker with Israel’s official Jewish burial society, remembers the first signs that coronavirus had arrived: empty streets and deathly silence.
Then a surge of deaths overwhelmed his morgue, with bodies placed in the corridor.
“I really hope we are nearing the end,” Erlich said of the pandemic.
The doctor
Near the beginning of the pandemic, Gabriella Formenti, a doctor from the village of Tavernola Bergamasca in northern Italy, started feeling exhausted and had a high fever. Hit by the virus, she wound up intubated in an intensive care unit.
Eventually she woke up but could move only her head, having lost muscle mass. Today, Formenti undergoes rehabilitation and is often out of breath and weak. Forced by her condition to retire, she greatly misses her patients.
“This disease emphasized, even more, how close they are to me emotionally and personally,” she said. “They even celebrated when I came back home. They all came to see me and helped me. ”
The actress
Shikha Malhotra is a Bollywood actress whose Instagram feed highlights
her film and TV projects. During the pandemic, they have also featured her as a nurse.
It is a real-life role that Malhotra, who has a nursing degree, has taken on while volunteering at a crowded Mumbai hospital. Mumbai was one of the worst-hit cities in India, the country with the second-highest caseload of COVID-19 in the world.
“I am first a nursing officer, then an actress,” Malhotra said at her home, wearing a white nurse’s uniform, a white cap over her luxuriant black hair. Next to her was a poster of a movie she starred in.
After working in a COVID-19 ward for months, she became infected, spent a month alone in the hospital recovering, then suffered a stroke that paralyzed the right side of her body.
“It was a big setback for me,” the 25-year-old said, tears streaming down her face as she recalled believing that she would never walk again. She recovered and plans to continue her acting career while also staying ready to serve as a nurse whenever she is needed.
“Seeing life and death in the hospital changed me,” Malhotra said. “I became a more mature person, more grounded. Seeing the people in pain, every single second now I thank God for all that I have.”
The centenarian
At 101, Boris Novikov is one of the oldest survivors of COVID-19 in Russia.
A decorated World War II veteran, Novikov was hospitalized with oxygen support. Now recovered, he celebrated his birthday last week at a senior care center near Moscow, where he lives with his wife, Yelena, 93. They have been together 70 years.
Novikov told a visitor he feels “excellent.”
“We can’t complain about anything, for now at least,” his wife added. “We’re living it day by day.”
The vaccinator
Dr. Anil Mehta has been going with his small team of physicians and nurses to homeless centers in London to offer free COVID-19 vaccinations. The team has vaccinated hundreds of people.
“It makes sense to focus energy on groups that are underrepresented and those most reluctant to go to their doctors,” Mehta said.
Mehta is driven by a desire to help everyone get back to normal as quickly as possible.
“Our lives have been turned upside down in the past year,” he said. “This is the most important thing any of us doctors have done in our lives.”
The tour guide
Shi Jinjie, a tour guide in Beijing, saw a 90% drop in business last year because of the pandemic. But he is confident domestic tourism will make a comeback very soon.
Already, a few customers are trickling in. He showed them around a park featuring centuries-old pavilions.
“Is Jingshan beautiful?” he asked them. As he took their photo, they responded: “Beautiful!”
The researcher
Sandile Cele was pursuing a doctorate at the University of Kwazulu-Natal in South Africa when the pandemic hit, creating an obvious research topic.
He made a splash when he figured out how to grow the South African variant of the coronavirus in the laboratory. That enabled the laboratory to test it and discover that people previously infected with COVID-19 don’t produce antibodies against the mutant version, which has spread to numerous countries.
Cele, 33, said it is every graduate student’s dream “to have a project for your Ph.D. that’s going to have so much impact in the world.”
The blast victim
On Aug. 4, Angelique Sabounjian was at a coffee shop in Beirut when a thunderous explosion at a warehouse containing a chemical commonly used as fertilizer rocked the city, blowing out windows and cutting Sabounjian’s face. She bled profusely.
On that day, she also became infected with the coronavirus.
“Catching corona and being in that isolation really helped me realize I was crying all day, every day, and I think I needed that,” she said. “I needed to have that release in some way.”
The survivor
Cynthia Archambault, of Woonsocket, Rhode Island, lost her brother Daniel Remillard and her father, Ronald Remillard, to COVID-19 within an hour of each other.
“It’s left a really big gaping hole in all of our hearts,” she said.
The soldier
In a front-line trench, the soldier in eastern Ukraine faces two enemies: the Russian-backed separatist rebels and the coronavirus that threatens to infiltrate the ranks.
“We are used to living with dangers,” said the soldier, who asked to be identified only by his call sign, Kram. “The pandemic has become another stress for me.”
At first, it was expected to be brief. At least that was the hope.
Instead, a once-in-a-century pandemic has ground on for a year, throwing millions out of work and upending wide swathes of the American economy. Delivery services thrived while restaurants suffered. Home offices replaced downtown offices. Travel and entertainment spending dried up.
The job losses were swift and harsh. But they hardly fell equally across the economy. Black and Hispanic workers fared worse than others. And many women, mostly mothers, felt compelled to quit the workforce to care for children being schooled online from home. Despite the job cuts, Americans as a whole socked away a record level of savings, buoyed by government aid to the unemployed and income that higher-paid workers, hunkered down at home, managed to squirrel away.
After a year of ghostly airports, empty sports stadiums and constant Zoom meetings, growing signs suggest that the economy is strengthening. Hiring picked up in February. Business restrictions have eased as the pace of viral infections has ebbed. Yet the economy remains far from normal.
Here’s where things stand at the one-year mark:
Job market
After a flood of layoffs last spring when the economy shut down, more than half the job losses have been regained. Yet hiring since the summer has slowed. The economy still has 9.5 million fewer jobs than before the pandemic — more than were lost in the entire 2008-2009 Great Recession.
Nearly every industry has been hurt but some far more than others. Restaurants, airlines and hotels have been devastated. The music industry, too, has taken a beating, with concert halls closed from New York to Nashville. The film industry has shed a huge proportion of jobs. Salons and dry cleaners have had to lay off many.
As more Americans have ordered dinners, groceries and household goods online, delivery drivers have emerged as the biggest
source of job growth in the pandemic. Online retail has also created more work, mostly by boosting warehouse jobs.
Small businesses
The “For Rent” signs on storefronts and offices around the world provided a sad illustration of COVID’s ruinous effect on small businesses. With government restrictions and fear of infection keeping consumers out of stores and restaurants, businesses that operate on narrow revenue streams struggled over the past year. Or they vanished altogether, putting millions out of work.
It’s not known how many U.S. businesses have permanently closed, but estimates from economists and the online review site Yelp suggest hundreds of thousands. Many more may still fail. Womply, a provider of financial and other services to businesses, estimates that one-third to one-half of all bars remain closed in many states, along with at least a quarter of restaurants and a third of health and beauty businesses.
Travel industries
Most travel-related industries suffered a horrendous 2020. Planes and airports were left all but empty. On April 14, the Transportation Security Administration screened just 87,000 passengers at U.S. airports — down a stunning 96% from the same day in 2019. Even early this month, screened passengers were still down 43% from a year earlier.
It’s not clear when — or whether — travel will fully recover. Southwest Airlines CEO Gary Kelly said in December that business travel, a major source of airline revenue, was still down 90%. Far fewer people need hotel rooms, too. In late February, U.S. hotel occupancy was just 48%, down one-quarter from a year earlier, according to the market data company STR.
Financial markets
Wall Street soared through much of the pandemic after righting itself from its initial terrifying plunge. Now, nearly a year after its rocket ride began in late March 2020, many fear that stock market gains might have gone too far, too fast.
Give much of the credit — or blame — for the market’s rally to the Federal Reserve, which slashed interest rates to record lows to help support the economy and financial markets. Ultra-low bond yields lifted hopes for corporate profits and fueled interest in stocks, especially the shares of the largest tech companies.
Some have dubbed the stampede into stocks the “There Is No Alternative,” or TINA, trade, whereby investors felt that with bond yields so low, they had no choice but to load up on stocks. Surging enthusiasm for stocks among a new generation of investors, some of whom were stuck at home with time to fill and free trading apps on their phones, played a role, too.
Critics warned that stocks have become too expensive, particularly when measured against the quarterly profits that companies have managed to produce. Those fears have been magnified by a recent surge in longerterm interest rates, which could erase support for stock prices.
Entertainment
Movie theaters, concert halls, and sports stadiums stood largely empty last spring and summer in an initial attempt to help quell the pandemic. The absence of paying attendees cost the jobs of tickettakers, concession-stand workers and lighting and sound technicians.
Performers were hurt in other ways, too: For musicians who made money performing at weddings or other private events, those side gigs also dried up.
Even as movie theaters have slowly reopened, often at limited capacity, their revenue remains deeply depressed, with many Americans still reluctant to spend two hours indoors with strangers.
Food delivery
The pandemic emptied malls and restaurants and accelerated a trend toward online ordering and delivery. It’s far from clear that shoppers and diners will ever fully return to their old habits.
U.S. e-commerce sales have grown 22.5% faster than overall retail sales since the pandemic, according to Retail Metrics Inc. That’s up from 6% in the decade before the coronavirus.
Online services like curbside pickup, already embraced by discounters like Target and Walmart, were adopted by more stores, including Macy’s and Kohl’s. At the same time, U.S. demand for restaurant meal delivery jumped 137% last year, according to NPD Group. JustEatTakeaway.com, a leading platform in Europe, said its delivery orders more than doubled last year.
Experts say traffic to stores and restaurants won’t likely fully return — a trend that could have dire consequences for workers in those industries. Despite surging sales, for example, Best Buy last month laid off 5,000 full-time store workers as it focuses more on its online sales.
Government aid
With jobs decimated and many households’ incomes plunging, the federal government has stepped in with a flood of financial relief. That assistance has included over $1 trillion in direct checks and steppedup unemployment aid, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
In a series of legislative packages that have doled out just over $4 trillion, the government has also provided forgivable loans to small business, rental assistance and support for health care providers. An additional $1.9 trillion is on the way with President Joe Biden’s economic rescue bill having just won congressional approval.
About $550 billion was spent in support of those out of work in 2020, more than triple the total spent in 2010, when the unemployment rate topped 9% for the entire year. (By contrast, unemployment has stayed below 7% for the past five months.)
Some economists fear that as the virus recedes and consumers ramp up spending, the gusher of cash will accelerate inflation, potentially forcing the Fed to raise interest rates and limit the economic recovery. But Fed Chair Jerome Powell has suggested that any significant rise in prices would likely prove temporary.
Savings soar
Much of the financial aid from the government has ended up not as consumer spending but as savings in Americans’ bank accounts, setting up a potential spending boom that could, in turn, speed economic growth.
The distribution of $600 stimulus checks in January, along with $300 in supplemental unemployment benefit aid, helped balloon Americans’ stockpile of cash saved to $3.9 trillion in January. That’s triple the pre-pandemic level.
Poorer households have been spending more of their aid. When $1,200 checks were distributed last spring, along with $600 in weekly federal jobless aid, Americans in the poorest one-quarter of households initially saved a portion of it. But by October, these households had spent most of it, according to research by the JPMorgan Chase Institute, suggesting that they needed the money for rent, food and other necessities.
Higher-earning families, by contrast, cut back spending on travel, entertainment, gym memberships and other services, leaving their level of savings consistently higher last year.
Home office
For years, experts predicted that faster broadband internet connections, video conferencing software and cloud computing would free many employees from the confines of an office and enable them to work from anywhere. It took a pandemic for that vision to become reality.
Before the pandemic, just 7% of Americans were doing their jobs from home, according a Labor Department survey. By last month, about 23% of employees were working remotely because of the pandemic, the government found. (That figure excluded people who had been telecommuting before.)
Remote work seems sure to become more common after the pandemic. Many companies, mostly tech firms like Salesforce and Spotify, have said they will continue to allow remote work. Others, such as Goldman Sachs, expect a full return to the office.
A report by PwC found that while most employers have found remote work to be productive, nearly nine in 10 expect at least half their workers to be back in the office by October. That’s a faster return than employees expect.