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By Matthew Shaer
On April 20, 49 days after Georgia reported its first two cases of coronavirus and 39 days after the announcement of the first Covid-19-related death in the state, Gov. Brian Kemp convened a news convention on the steps of the Capitol in downtown Atlanta. Speaking to several masked journalists, Kemp opened his comments through a directory with recent top statistics from the Georgian Ministry of Public Health: 18,947 positive evidence since the start of the pandemic and 733 deaths. “We sense that these aren’t just numbers,” he said. These are Georgians we’re talking about. “
However, Kemp continued, he may no longer be in a position to allow the state to remain under lock and key. “Cultures rot,” he says. Small business owners are seeing their sales drop. “He announced that starting the same week, Georgia, nearly the last in the United States to factor in a stay-at-home order, would be among the first states to start lifting it. The reopening would be done in stages: Tattoo parlors, nail salons and bowling alleys may attract consumers that week, while restaurants and movie theaters deserve to wait until the following Monday. “In taking this measured step,” Kemp said, ” we will put Georgians back in the paintings safely without compromising the progress we have all made in the war against Covid-19. “
Among the Georgians who saw an excerpt from the convention was Sagar Alam. “I couldn’t hear what I was hearing,” Alam recently recalled. “Surely it didn’t make any sense to me at all. “Alam, 42, a local elder from Dhaka, Bangladesh, emigrated to Atlanta rule in 1994 at the age of 16 with the aim of following his father, who had arrived in the United States five years earlier, in local catering. In Georgia, Alam attended tables, washed dishes, made food. By the early 2000s, he had stored enough cash to buy a pizzeria, which he then sold for profit. In 2017, he and some Bangladeshi-American friends opened Monsoon Masala, a specialty dining spot in South Asia. cuisine. Alam has been appointed chef and director; it was usually his face, bearded and smiling, that visitors saw as he entered the dining room.
Monsoon Masala occupies the farthest corner of a shopping mall on Buford Highway, a busy room in DeKalb County, the northeast quadrant of Atlanta’s metropolitan domain, connecting middle-class communities Doraville, Chamblee and Brookhaven with the wealthiest suburbs of the Northeast. Buford Highway, a diverse neighborhood on the outskirts of a proudly diverse city, has long been a popular food destination. “If there’s a maximum number of food-obsessed consultations among Atlanta people,” Atlanta magazine said last year, “it’s this: “What do I deserve to eat on Buford Highway?” “On Friday nights before the pandemic, Monsoon Masala’s 35 tables were sometimes full.
“We got to the point where we raised $10,000 in a smart month,” Alam told me. “Then, in January I went to see a friend, didn’t I?He owns a Place to Eat Chinese on Buford Highway. I said, “Didn’t this guy come back from China?” Alam had read in the news about the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan city. “My friend said, “Oh, yes, he came to the house yesterday. “And he’s working! That’s when I’m afraid of the gravity of the situation. “
We were in early May and Alam’s mendacity in a cabin at the back of Monsoon Masala’s empty dining room. He spoke hesitantly, his voice extinguished through his white mask N95. “The business slowed down towards the end of February,” he recalls. and worse in March. “In early April, shortly after Kemp signed an executive order finishing bars and nightclubs and restricting meetings of more than 10 people in any type of advertising status quo, he absolutely reduced his size. Schools were closed, streets were empty, and others people were looking not to spend money. Nobody asked for takeaway. Alam stopped paying a salary and fired all the staff, however, he promised to keep paying his four full-time workers for as long as he and the other owners could. “I didn’t dare take them down empty-handed. “he said.
Alam can simply be your generosity, at least to some extent. He had enough savings to cover his loan and food for his wife and two young children. And the owner of his business, an African immigrant who owned the entire mall, had agreed to halve the month of April. Thanks to a cash inlet from Sayem Motin, an owner of Monsoon Masala who had stakes in several local service stations, essential businesses that could operate at full capacity during closing, the place to eat under control to prevent bankruptcy. . But it was no longer profitable. The owners were behind a few days with the April hiring and more than two weeks with the May hiring. “Remember, our lease was six years old,” Alam said. Behind his glasses, his eyes shone in frustration. Do you want to get out of this lease, and guess what?He’s being sued for the balance. So, regardless of the number of months left (30, 32), it’s $6,600. “
Shortly after Kemp’s press convention on the steps of the Capitol, Alam and his partners gathered to plan the fate of Masala’s monsoon. In many ways, the prospect of reopening the dining room was more of a fear for the owners than the prospect of uninterrupted confinement. On the occasion of a lockdown, their owners had been willing to give them a break from their rent, and their various application accounts had been suspended. But after Kemp’s announcement, no room for manoeuvre would be expanded; all those deferred bills would expire. Not to mention the risks of physical fitness: already, a cook refused to show up for work. For ethical and advertising reasons, Alam was reluctant to put his workers on the trail of a virus that was still rampant in the “One of my other people gets sick, or I get sick, it’s going to be a problem,” he told me. “A consumer gets sick, it’s a big problem. It would be a ruin for us. “
Monsoon Masala owners have to keep the dining room closed and continue to settle for delivery and pick-up orders. Given the number of other restaurants on Buford Highway that opened their doors to dinners in person, it was a gamble, but Alam couldn’t find a better solution. He felt trapped. ” We have to live, you know?” He said: “We’ll have to stay alive. And I’m optimistic. I like to think everything’s going to be better someday. There’s probably going to be a vaccine. I think there’s going to be a vaccine. “
He stopped, rubbing his hands in a cup as if there was wood between them. “I know there will be a vaccine. I pray for that.
When the coronavirus arrived in the United States in January, it was briefly conimaginable to believe that Covid-19, for which there was no cure or remedy available, would be a major leveler of social and economic difference. After all, New York, the country,monetary capital, was also the most affected city in the early months of the pandemic. The rich hired Covid as easily as the poor; Retail branches have noticed that their activity erodes along with that of neighborhood cafes.
But as the number of infections increased, it has become transparent that the virus, far from ignoring inequality, was actually exacerbating it. “Emerging knowledge of morbidity and mortality,” according to a report by the medical journal The Lancet in April,” has already clearly demonstrated what many feared: a pandemic that has an effect on falls in already vulnerable American populations, and in which the country’s deep social, racial and economic disparities in physical fitness have been exposed. Employees can paint remotely. more (nurses, grocery staff, postal staff and janitors) did not have this option. “These frontline staff, disproportionately black and brown, are sometimes components of remote communities in residence,” Sharrelle Barber of Drexel University’s Dornsife School of Public Health told The Lancet. “They don’t have the privilege of quoting” staying at home. “
People of color and recent immigrants reportedly fell ill with rising rates than other Americans, died rising rates, and suffered more financially. The budget allocated through Congress also did not help balance the balance: by mid-April, the food and accommodation industries, in which many recent immigrants work, had earned only 9% of the $349 billion that were first handed over to companies to pay their workers, despite being decimated by the effects of the pandemic. , these same sectors have eliminated more than 60,000 jobs to date). A recent study through NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and Harvard TH The Chan School of Public Health estimates that approximately one in three white families in the United States face serious monetary problems similar to the pandemic. By comparison, 60 percent of black families and 72 percent of Latino families are also in trouble.
In late April, when Georgia was in the reopening stages, and coronavirus cases continued to increase, I started driving from my home through DeKalb County to Buford Expressway to communicate with citizens like Sagar Alam. The region, with its predominantly minority population and ascending cell population, seemed to offer a vital test floor for Kemp’s stated theory of recovery: that the dangers of the severe pandemic were offset by the importance of Georgia and Georgians returning to work.
The stretch of Buford Highway from Doraville to Brookhaven, which Atlanta residents communicate with when they communicate on Buford Highway, is just under six miles; At its wide width, it can accommodate seven car traffic lanes. It is mountainous but not charming and clearly American in its stretch strip. The roads cross it like laces in an old boot. Manicure salons join massage parlors, Chinese restaurants and other nail salons. Pink Pony Gentlemen’s Club gives way to a Microtel and then to a pizzeria called Big Bang. There are few trees. Almost no one walks anywhere, partly because there are few sidewalks and partly because of the unattended heat, which begins in mid-spring and does not allow it to pass until November.
Since the 1980s, thousands of recent immigrants have moved to the Buford Highway area, attracted by affordable rentals, the clientele offered by the abundance of car traffic and a sense of community. For many Atlantaers, the region is not so much an artery or a neighborhood, but a concept: the purest distillation of the “international city” that Mayor Andrew Young boasted about on the eve of the Olympics. summer 1996. In 2002, a researcher named Susan Walcott randomly distributed a survey to local entrepreneurs; among the 26 respondents who knew their ethnicity, he later reported, were represented thirteen other regions, from the Caribbean to Central America and Southeast Asia. Today, according to one estimate, more than 1,000 businesses on the road are owned by immigrants.
“I think of Buford Highway as a confusing tapestry, where you bring other people around the world to live their dreams,” Rebekah Cohen Morris, a member of Doraville City Hall, recently told me. “Public transport is good, so you don’t want a car. The apartments are cheap. But it’s also a position where, long before the pandemic, many other people were in precarious situations,” he said. They had low-wage jobs, they earned a little rent. They were already reeling.
Cohen Morris is tall and thin, with a pierced nose and a pair of twisted tattoos on each forearm, one that says “redemption” and the other “reconciliation” in Greek. Born in Manhattan, Cohen Morris grew up in Georgia, where his evangelical parents moved to open a leather repair business. In 2014, she and her husband bought their first home in Doraville, and Cohen Morris took a homework assignment as an English teacher at nearby Cross Keys High School. Later, he founded a nonprofit organization called Neighbors, or Neighbors, which he argued on behalf of the citizens of the low-income apartment complexes that line the Buford Highway. His paintings have caught the attention of the Latin population of Doraville, and last fall he put his call to the city of Doraville. Council Vote: He swore on January 4, two days before the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a travel warning to Americans planning to travel to Wuhan.
“I don’t forget in March, when all the schools were closing, I said to my husband: ‘Well, this is something that goes to all of us, all over the world,” Cohen Morris told me. His own naivety: “We will be all together! We will help each other. “But new infections in Doraville, Chamblee and Brookhaven temporarily outpaced those in the wealthiest areas of DeKalb County. In April, the unemployment rate in DeKalb was 13. 3%, higher than the rate. 12. 6% statewide, the highest in Georgia in Cohen Morris was inundated with text messages from friends who had lost their jobs in cleaning or services.
Doraville is 55% Hispanic, and speeds along the highway are populated largely by recent immigrants, many of whom are undocumented, according to Cohen Morris. The citizens of Doraville have discovered that a new risk has emerged: “If you are undocumented,” Cohen Morris said, “you can’t get food stamps, you can’t get assistance from HUD,” the Department of Housing and Urban Development, “and you can’t get stimulus money. “
When the state reopened, some members of Cohen Morris’ electorate saw hope that if business, restaurants, hotels, and structure sites resumed, they would support the desire for reasonable work. But others were terrified. ” My friends used to say, “Well, I’m stuck, because I want to work, I don’t have enough savings to stay home, but I don’t want to get sick,” Cohen Morris recalls. On April 20, DeKalb County reported more than 1,500 cases of coronavirus. overall had increased to more than 2,000.
For Cohen Morris, the fact that Kemp canceled the lockdown was pretty alarming. States like Minnesota kept citizens at home until June; In Massachusetts, Gov. Charlie Baker, a Republican, did not allow the state to enter the final reopening phase until July. Some of Georgia’s southeastern neighbors were implementing what Cohen Morris felt were more practical measures: Tennessee, for example, reopened in late April, but allowed counties to contribute to the progression of their own plans and protocols. Even President Trump seemed skeptical, suggesting after Kemp’s announcement that Georgia could “wait a little longer. “Just a little, not much. Because security will have to dominate».
Kemp’s technique left no room for municipal governments to be flexible: local regulations, he ordered, may not be “more or less restrictive” than the state’s mandate. “Our orders aimed to clarify state restrictions on Covid-19,” Cody Hall, Kemp’s spokesman, told me recently, and said that divergent local regulations across the state were confusing. But Cohen Morris said, “It was a wonderful general directive, and it didn’t leave us firm to do what was right for us. “She added: “The governor sought for business to go over, but he didn’t really care what happened to the other people who had to paint there. He then sought to wash the state’s hands so he wouldn’t have to help them. “
In May, in the parking lot of a taqueria near Buford Highway, I met a woman named Maria, whom Cohen Morris knew from his past paintings with The Neighbors, with small black hair, rounded features and giant almond eyes, Maria, who asked to be known only through her first call because of her family’s migratory prestige – was 60 years old. She and her youngest daughter arrived in the United States from Monterrey, Mexico, in 2003 to enroll in Maria’s husband, then caretather in a Stayed Mary and daughter, whom she asked to be known only for her first initial, G. , Maria’s ex-husband did not. “We were fighting for money, we fought over everything,” he said. After she left, she did a number of jobs: housekeeper, cook at McDonald’s, cashier at a popular hairdresser’s on Buford Highway.
In 2018, G. , which has Down syndrome and disease from the center, graduated from high school. “While G. was still at school, he had friends, he had his teachers,” Maria said. “I may just do unpaid internships at Putt like Kroger and Pizza Hut. It made him feel beautiful. This made her feel necessary. But he has no papers, and after graduation, everything is gone. I thought, what pictures can we make together so we could be there for my daughter??»
He started baking and began relearning some of his overdue mother’s favorite recipes: chocopast due flan, cupcakes, pay cheese (a Mexican cheesecake). His daughter enjoyed being his assistant and the other two immigrants who shared his two-bedroom apartment on Buford Highway were pleased to serve as taste testers. “They liked loose samples, ” joked Mary. My custard is very strong. “Three or four times a week, at night, Maria and her daughter would go to the taqueria that covered the street and sold new cakes and bouquets of flowers, Mary stood in the position of consumers who were queuing to take away.
“We’ve done very little,” Mary told me, “about $80 a day. “It was enough to cover his phone bill, his meds and groceries, as well as the monthly rent of his room, although he had to settle for a $200 rent relief from The Neighbors. “I don’t like to receive documents, ” said Mary. ” I need to be able to paint for my money. But rarely do you settle for being faithful to God.
In the first few weeks of lockdown, Maria and G. They did not spend more than an hour a week outdoors of his apartment, his only forays into the global were shopping in the supermarket, for which all the protective devices were put at his disposal: surgical gloves, sunglasses, homemade paper masks. Mary’s age and high blood pressure put her in danger and her daughter suffered from problems at the center. “Imagine one of us in poor health, ” said Mary last April. in poor health. Because we’re in combination every moment. We live in the same little room. Mary thought she could take care of him if G. Covid contracted; she was sure she could take care of her daughter however, the idea of poor health terrified her. So what would happen to your daughter?
By mid-May, Maria had spent her scarce savings, as well as the rental money of Los Vecinos. She had heard that with the end of the closure, the owners would resume evictions on Buford Highway, and she feared being next. “Sometimes when I feel desperate and desperate, I think about going back to Mexico,” she tells me. “But G. me stops you, because your life is here. She’s been here since she was in kindergarten. I don’t have my mom or father in Mexico anymore. Or they’re dead, why do we have to go back? She did not need to disturb her eldest daughters, who lived in the United States but not in Georgia, had their own circle of relatives to worry about, and the woman in Texas, too, suffering to pay her salary. Mary sighed. So I ask God every day and every day for Him to continue to take care of us,” he said.
Later that month, I asked Maria for some cakes and managed to pick them up at the same taqueria car park where I’d met her before. She had just finished a series of installments; I found her waiting in a friend’s car, revealed a dozen shells containing a cake, passed a truck and stopped. A despensed head emerged from an open window.
“How much does it cost?” Asked. The boy said.
“$10, ” Mary.
Through the fabric of his mask, his voice went out. She stretched a custard in the direction of the van, making it come and go, as if it were a gaming exhibition prize. Without expression, the guy slowly retracted his head, lifted the window. and walked away.
Maria told me earlier that she had finished promoting cakes on the road. “Most of the time, we take traditional orders over the phone,” he said. “And I probably wouldn’t faint like I used to. Here and there. Besides, he pointed out, G. would stay in the apartment.
When I asked him what had replaced his mind, he shrugged. The state reopened, her landlord asked for a rent and she had to work. “No choice, ” he said at last. I don’t have a choice.
Maria qualified for assistance under the CareS Act passed by Congress and signed through President Trump in March, which issued one-time checks of up to $1,200 to others whose families earned less than $100,000 a year, but Maria had no computer or English knowledge.
Rolfy Bueso had both. Originally from Honduras, Bueso, who has a block jaw and is very tattooed, black hair collected in a coupe, owns two hairdressers on Buford Highway. On the diversity of the neighborhood’s monetary security, he sat on the opposite side of Mary: her business had been successful for years, long enough that, until the pandemic erupted, she was looking for a third location. He was a U. S. citizen, naturalized in 2018; owned his space and a rental unit at the time; He spoke fluent English and was able to temporarily discharge a loan from the Payment Check Protection Program, the $669 billion fund that the CARES Act created to help companies and organizations continue to pay their staff for the pandemic.
In mid-May, I saw him cut the hair of a normal client, who had driven two and a half hours from Birmingham. “I’d drive 15 hours to see you, Rolfy,” said the guy, who called Isaac Aguirre, laughing. “That’s my smart boy, my boy here. ” Her hair violently pink. When Bueso approached him with a pair of meddle, a snowy cake spread over his shoulders.
“Did you get P. P. P. money?” Bueso asked. Aguirre owned a nightclub in Birmingham; Alabama still forbade the reopening of restaurants and entertainment venues, so he and his circle of family members lived on savings.
“They gave me a thousand dollars, ” answered Aguirre.
“No, it’s the stimulant. “
“Oh, ” Aguirre, seemingly hesitant. IArray “Oh, yes. Have you?”
“Yes, $2,000, ” said Bueso. It didn’t matter, but I asked for $10, 000. “
Aguirre nodded. ” Don’t do it,” Bueso deceived him.
Bueso’s shop had two rooms. The facade was for hired employees, who rented chairs in Bueso and tended to combine appointments and scheduled appointments. Bueso himself worked at the VIP at the back, available through a virtual security lock, guarded by several cameras and ruled through a full refrigerator. with beer and soft drinks and a 60-inch flat screen. It may only serve 15 customers a day. ” Right now it’s around 10, ” he said. “So I’m getting close to the traffic I had before the crown thing. Guys at the front, pedestrian traffic has declined. They’re suffering. “
Bueso wore a transparent face shield, which he lifted and lowered as a demonstration. “Nothing’s going to happen to me with this thing,” he says, smiling through the plastic. “Besides, I’m very careful, you know?” He disinfected the two rooms of the shop every morning and night; On his return home, he threw his clothes into his clothes and took a shower before hugging his 3-year-old niece, Camila, but he is also a businessman, he noted, and a realist. One month and part of the hairdresser’s: this had not been fatal to the results. A month later, I would have been in a hole I couldn’t dig.
Bueso tried to avoid speaking politically to his clients, but the pandemic had made it nearly impossible. During the time I spent with him in his tent, almost all the men who sat in Bueso’s chair seemed to need to talk about Kemp or the president. Bueso grunted politely, remembering the segments he’d caught on the cable news. He respectfully called Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as “Dr. Fauci,” but he also sympathized with Kemp: “The media talks bad about him, but he’s fine too. “
There is a blurry movement on the iPad used through Bueso to monitor the cameras in the hallway. He opened the door. ” It’s Fabian,” he says, introducing me to a little man in worn jeans and a buttoned-down shirt. Fabian originally from Venezuela and owned an electronics store in Plaza Fiesta, the giant covered to buy groceries on Buford Highway, where Bueso had its original store. “Your shop is now closed, ” said Bueso.
“But I sell, ” said Fabian. Get out of my truck. “
“What to the store?” I asked.
“I couldn’t afford the rent, ” said Fabian, reading his shoes.
Bueso hit his tongue. ” But it’s going to be better, man,” he said. I said, “It will be. “
Judging from the statistics from the state Covid-19 panel alone, there was, at this point, an explanation for the optimism. In early May, the Georgia Department of Public Health released knowledge that new instances appeared to be shrinking dramatically in several heavily affected countries, allegedly confirming Kemp’s claim that the state’s scenario was improving. . But others, adding state lawmakers and reporters from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, have questioned the unit numbers, pointing to apparent errors in timing and knowledge retention, and deviations from other studies that showed infection rates held higher. commonly solid during the month. “It’s hard for me to see how this happens without being deliberate,” said State Rep. Jasmine Clark, Ph. D. in microbiology and molecular genetics, she told the Journal-Constitution. Harry Heiman, an associate clinical professor at the Georgia State School of Public Health, went further and called the errors “criminal. ” An investigative report in an Atlanta magazine by physician and epidemiologist Keren Landman recently showed that as of May, state officials and epidemiologists had been locked in a protracted conflict, concluding that “far” from the fitness branch officials that they would be guilty of presenting the knowledge to the public.
On May 11, Kemp’s workplace apologized and promised that the board is now “corrected. “
On July 6, Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms revealed that she, her husband and one of her children had tested positive for coronavirus and, using her authority as mayor, instituted a masking order requiring all other people over the age of 10 in the city. Doraville Council members met in Zoom and discussed what to do in their own jurisdiction (they had abandoned the concept of assembly at the user after a member of Chamblee’s close council tested positive for coronavirus). At least one board member was afraid to engage in a political battle. However, “DeKalb’s numbers were frightening,” Morris said. “Our constituents were looking for a masked mandate. We seek to protect our constituents. An ordinance on the facial canopy was unanimously approved.
Tenure put Doraville, like Atlanta, in direct conflict with Kemp, who issued a new executive order in mid-July that prohibits any city or county from creating new mask policies and postponing all active terms. On July 16, after Bottoms said her term would continue, Kemp filed a lawsuit against the mayor in state court, arguing that she had no authority to overturn her order. Doraville’s advice met in Zoom and agreed to wait and see what was going on with the case. After a ruling was issued on Kemp and Bottoms’ order to move to mediation, Kemp told his lawyers to back down, publicly accusing Bottoms’ “refusal” to “overturn a compromise. “The lawsuit has been withdrawn. The Atlanta mask court order may stay.
A few days later, I had lunch with Cohen Morris at Monterrey Mexican, a taqueria on Doraville’s side of Buford Road. I hadn’t eaten on site to eat for 3 months and entering Monterrey was a confusing experience. There was a sign, at the door forbidding visitors from any kind of fever; In view, the waiters wore plates of tacos and bottomless daisies in gloved hands, their faces hidden by customer masks, all sitting at a full table away from the other closest customer. Spanish. ” I wanted to know the protocol for the yard: what to do to keep the company away when there’s nothing,” Cohen Morris told me after he left. Dark. Or they are trapped in the most unlikely situations, having to make the most implausible decisions. “
Sagar Alam had insisted that Monsoon Masala’s dining room would not open until he was sure that he could be sure of the protection of his consumers and staff, a rare resolution among restaurants along Buford Highway and that, in summer, he seemed unsustainable. By nature, Alam was a positive person, as were many restaurateurs. That summer may be worse than spring. He focused on the few positive aspects he can find. Until June, delivery orders increased. When a friend of the circle of relatives named Chang, who was reading marketing at a near-network university, volunteered to help manage the counter, Alam gratefully accepted; with Chang at the helm, you can spend more time cooking. Experimented with some new dishes, adding grilled steak and salmon. He cooked a lot of new cakes.
But Monsoon Masala was in red numbers. And despite Alam’s increasingly moving pleas, its owner continued to reject the same kind of disruption he presented during the first month of the pandemic. “He said, “Well, the state has gone back to business, the banks are back in business, ” Alam recalled. The owner had to repay his loan to the bank and Alam had to repay it. Ala and her partners emptied their savings accounts and then maximized their credit cards. They discussed the closure of the business.
In July, however, the dining room was opened. It hurt Alam to oppose his position in April: that he would expect a vaccine, which would not put anyone else in danger, adding his wife and children. I see no other way forward. He ran a small ad in a local newspaper, which offered discounts for in-person meals. In the restaurant, he never took off his gloves and conical mask, leaving deep grooves on the edge of his nose and a rash on his cheeks. . He was worried about kissing his kids for a good night’s sleep.
In June, Alam’s stepfather in Dhaka fell to Covid. A few days later he died. Alam and his wife Irine wept at home, privately; they cried in phone calls and video conferences with relatives; they were crying with other members of the prolonged circle of relatives who had also emigrated to Georgia.
One of those circles of relatives is the uncle of Irine, his father’s only brother. The two men were born two years apart and their bond, Alam told me, “extremely strong. “It’s almost the same person. When the uncle also went down with Covid in July and died in his sleep in his apartment in Chamblee, he had a kind of cosmic meaning. Still, Alam furious. It felt like I was living in a totally preventable disaster. If you had any concept of what would happen once the state started reopening, why not the officials, why not the governor?
When I went to see Alam at Monsoon Masala in late July, the place to eat was empty, unless it was for a young couple and their young son. “Something that’s not spicy, ” said the woman. Chang rubbed his chin. I was learning the menu. ” Saag paneer,” Alam advised in the other aspect of the room.
I asked Alam how business was going. In response, he started writing on a white notebook and then turned it to me: “$70,000,” he said. “This is what my partners and I have personally lost since March,” he said.
“How can you pass?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Until the end. “
“But how will you know when the end is?”
“That’s true, ” he said. “That’s exactly what it is. “
When I saw Mary in May, she swore that she and G. they would only sell their cakes and flowers outside, and only one or two nights a week instead of three or four. One of your eldest daughters laughed at this, wasn’t that the case?The virus was a hoax, he said, or wasn’t it disproportionate to the media?But Maria trusted the Centers for Disease Control, which walked past the huge Chamblee Campus on her way home from work. published through the agency. In July, the death toll across the state exceeded 3,000.
Many of his acquaintances already had the virus and heard them complain of their symptoms: pain, fatigue, shear throat. “Going out more than I am now doesn’t value risk,” he said in early June. Sick, G. will be alone, and I can’t let that happen. “She invested in additional mask and, after returning from trips to the store, dipped her vegetables and fruits in a bleach solution.
However, just as the cases eventually forced Sagar Alam’s hand, forced him to reopen Masala’s monsoon when he learned that keeping it closed would have been safer for everyone involved, Mary was also discovered acting against her instincts. His wishes were immediate, his traits virtually non-existent. Kemp’s “personal responsibility” on television, his pleas to “stay away from other people in public,” were luxury items that the richest can afford. Maria had late fees, an empty bank account, some $10 expenses wrinkled on her bedside table.
She began going to the dining room again, taking her daughter with her, tried to be selective and relied on her WhatsApp network to tell her which taqueria were relatively un crowded and therefore safer, the ones that had many windows and a lot of air. Circulation.
One July night, at a place to eat in Doraville, a visitor gave him a $100 bill and Maria apologized for the change. When he replayed the series of occasions in his head later, he would be sure that this is how it happened: the woman on the record, mutual friends would later tell him, he had Covid-19, coughed through his mask, took the $100 and returned a wad of bills.
Later that month, Maria began to suffer severe abdominal pains and common diarrhea. At first, he was likely to forget about it, he had a delicate digestive system. He tried to eat bananas and drink Pedialyte, but had developed a bitter taste. He soon lost his sense of smell.
In the morning she would wake up exhausted and shivering. If she and G. they would have had a larger apartment, or even an apartment of their own, they could have tried to quarantine themselves, but the two women only had one room and their double bed. Mary opened the window for the air to flow and gave the bed to her daughter, who slept on the floor.
On July 30, G. developed a fever, which Maria dealt with with the maximum doses of Tylenol. G. se recovers quickly. Maria didn’t.
She saw a doctor as a last resort. I’d heard some scary things about hospitals, about how other people with coronavirus came in and never came out. What if someone starts asking about other people they’ve been in contact with?Questions like these can simply raise more questions about your child and her immigration status.
On August 6, two weeks after she began to feel sick, Maria collapsed in the hallway in front of her bathroom. Stunned, pale and covered in sweat without blood, she called G. , but her daughter may not just hear her. , visited a clinic known to be welcoming to Spanish-speaking clients. She and G. waited four hours in the car, in the sun, for an appointment. She felt sicker than ever and sure she was going to die.
At the clinic, a doctor tried to give you an intravenous infusion for dehydration. He then sought to call an ambulance to take her to the hospital, but Mary resisted; G. would not be allowed to travel with her. So he drove home.
Maria’s eldest daughter had temporarily moved to Georgia from Indiana with her circle of relatives to be close to her mother. Since Mary and G. se sick, they had stayed away from their apartment for fear of infecting their circle of relatives, but Mary left G. with his sister and took a taxi to the hospital, where he underwent a quick test of Covid, which proved positive.
Mary’s room in the Covid room at Northside Hospital was decorated with floral prints. A window overlooked the surrounding medical complexes and winding turn of Highway 285, the 10-lane highway surrounding the Atlanta metro. Mary learned to recognize doctors and nurses through all other identity traits were hidden layers of translucent plastic and blue non-public protective devices that wrinkled as they walked. All she can think about is G’s total life. Of her daughter, the two Women had never spent more than a few hours apart. She was the first thing Mary saw in the morning and the last thing she saw in the night before she finished her eyes. The idea of being separated from her damaged Mary to a degree she was unable to put into words.
G. se moved in with his older sister. The days were piling up. Mary was still in the hospital, with oxygen, her center and abdomen under constant surveillance. He called his daughter as he could. Your voice, he told G. crying, your voice gives me strength — it gives me strength.
While Maria was in the hospital, I met G. and her older sister in the parking lot of a grocery mall near Buford Highway, where G’s cousin was. After a speech treatment session. G. , just four feet and 11 inches, smiled at me, but clung to his sister’s waist as if he feared someone might see them to separate them. I asked her sister how G. Okay, “She answered. “She’s got her cousins and they help her take care of her. She added that G. had drawn a lot: drawings of her and her mother, together.
In mid-August, Mary texted me: “Matthew, prayers help me a lot,” she wrote, “because today they tested my heart, because he is about to fail. “Doctors, she said, had been frightened by her blood pressure, which was still dangerously high, her upper cholesterol was reaching her. He took blood thinners and continued with an intravenous infusion.
Every day, he called G. et his eldest daughter. I knew the eldest daughter was fighting too. Prior to Covid, she, her husband and their three daughters controlled to cope with the husband’s source of income as a day laborer. acquired another dependent at the worst time imaginable. Construction sites in Atlanta were down and developers were waiting to launch new projects. In mid-August, the husband boarded a bus to Indiana, where, as he learned, his former employers were hiring again. Mary’s eldest daughter stayed with the four daughters.
On August 13, Mary was released after seven days in Northside, her diarrhea had ceased, she was no longer dehydrated and her blood pressure had returned to moderate levels, returned to her apartment and noticed that one of her roommates was also sick and had recovered at home; the apartment was damp and moldy, the sink was full of crockery. Mary did what she could, cleaning one or two hours a day and sleeping 14 hours a night. After two more weeks, G. la joined. so long, ” recalls Mary. ” And I just thanked Dieu. Je thank you for answering my prayers.
The relief was short-lasting. In early September, Maria won her first bill from Northside Hospital, which amounted to more than $43,000, even without the cost of her lab tests.
In the fall, Georgia’s new daily infections fell below one hundred, showing consistent instances of another hundred,000 people for the first time in months, hitting the state in the so-called orange zone established through the White House Coronavirus Working Group. leading cases of coronavirus as recently as August, the state now ranks 33rd, well, new hot spots in the Midwest. “We needed Georgians to be a component of the solution, not a component of the problem, and I’m very grateful and very proud that Georgians have mobilized,” Kemp said at a press conference on October 7.
On Buford Highway, car traffic resumed, as did flights to and from DeKalb-Peachtree Airport, and every few minutes a small aircraft shuddered high, its wheels almost seemed to graze the power lines. a site of structure adjacent to Rolfy Bueso’s momentary hairdresser.
At Doraville City Council meetings, the main considerations were no longer masking orders or control centers, but building permits, noise complaints, code violations. “Let people get back to normal, ” said Rebekah Cohen Morris. “It’s all over. “
And yet true normality, in the prepandemic sense, seemed highly unlikely to imagine, at least until the arrival of a vaccine. A momentary increase in new infections can cause everyone to return to Buford Highway at the lockout, stopping construction, stopping traffic. and reversing the small profits that commercial homeowners enjoyed in September and October. There were already signs of concern: in a week at the end of October, fitness officials reported a 20% increase in new infections in the state, as well as a corresponding accumulating hospitalizations.
Even if the numbers are transmitted during the rest of the fall and winter, for many residents, the damage is done: tenants who owe thousands of dollars in late payments to their landlords, former hotel workers and closed restaurants, young low-income families, who occasionally do not have the Wi-Fi or laptops needed to attend distance learning sessions and enlist in the care of children while their parents work. “I think we made a commitment, and now we’re living with the consequences,” Cohen Morris told me, “We didn’t need to close our bars or cinemas. It was like, “Hey, maybe if we reopen and pretend that everything is happening to be okay, maybe it’s happening to be okay. “Instead of doing what we had to do, that is, snuggle up. And now you have an already vulnerable population that has become even more vulnerable. “
Researchers are only now beginning to see the effects of the pandemic and its official remedy on small businesses, but here too the early effects are disappointing. Robert Fairlie, a professor of economics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, recently published a study evaluating the effect of the pandemic on small businesses in the Journal of Economics and Management Strategy. Working from US Census data, it found that the number of active commercial homeowners in the country fell 22% between February and April, and immigrant commercial homeowners performed much worse, declining. 36%. Although many went back to painting in June, the numbers continued to decline to 18% from what they had been. Among the demographics studied through Fairlie, only black business homeowners fared slightly worse. The collapse of negotiations between the White House and Congress for a stimulus investment circular moment has not only ruled out the option of suing P. P. P. loans, but it also caused disruption to business homeowners who won the first circular. There is little clarity on how loans deserve to be taxed and how companies that are still suffering can ask for forgiveness.
The last time I went to Monsoon Masala in October, the dining room was dark and bloodless. Alam came out of the kitchen in an embroidered mask with a bear nose and whiskers, a gift from his daughter. “I’d give it to you, ” he said, when I admired him, “but he was given my germs. “
We sat at one of the tables. Alam slid a salt shaker back and forth into his hands. Like your wife?” Well, ” said Alam. NO’m going to do that. “Then it was corrected. ” Mal, we have the same verbal exchange almost every day. What can I do? What to do. “
Ten months earlier, Alam dreamed of opening a place at the moment in Monsoon Masala. Now that all he can do to keep the original place to eat afloat, he recalled that a few weeks earlier, he and his business partners had proposed a last-minute plan. resort: part of the area would still be a place to eat. The other part would become a living room and a bar with a hookael. They had written a plan and presented it to their owner. The owner refused due to a county ordinance: the area not giant enough. The furthest corner of the place to eat was still moored.
“Work in progress for tomorrow,” read a sign. “Visit again. “
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