Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Following individual human stories in a sprawling event like a global pandemic is a challenging task. Making thoughtful connections between the two is even harder. But this long read from The California Sunday Magazine on America’s first COVID-19 epicenter, a nursing home in Washington state, does the job with compelling and tragic precision.
It focuses on two inhabitants of a single room in the nursing facility, the Life Care Center of Kirkland, part of the largest privately held chain of long-term care centers in the US. It tracks how the coronavirus spread through the facility “like a spectral haunting,” and how underpaid and overworked staff battled against the odds to bring it under control.