How America Handles Catastrophe

Read: Homeless during the coronavirus

As a reporter who covers disasters, I thought I’d become keenly attuned to them, prepared for them. When I first learned about a virus emerging in Wuhan, China, I remembered hearing the hum of generators and tasting the smoke of burned gasoline in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. Still, the threat of COVID-19 felt abstract. Having arranged my work life for a long time around the monolith of Katrina, I could not see other shadows in its shade.

Or so I tried to tell myself. Now I think some part of me simply had not accepted the conclusions of my own Katrina reporting: that power corrupts and American political leadership often fails; that the country’s deep-woven racial and social inequities will eternally resurface to punish the poor and the black; that magical thinking about American ingenuity will not save us from natural disaster and human folly. Despite everything I knew, my faith in this country ran deeper than I realized. Until that night, I still thought America—whether through some miracle drug or cosmic, city-on-a-hill blessing—would escape or vanquish the virus.

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And someday, surely, it will. But in the meantime, I don’t know when I will be able to see my immunocompromised mother again. I don’t know which friend or family member might end up stricken, or dead. Yesterday, I was reduced to witnessing the birth of my second child on FaceTime, because under quarantine rules I was not allowed in the delivery ward. I watch in despair as all across the country, yet again, poor folks and people of color bear the brunt of the economic and mortal costs of a disaster, a result of both historical political injustice and contemporary political ineptitude.

I’d like to think that COVID-19 has finally stripped me of my last illusions, as Katrina stripped New Orleanians of theirs. But whatever comes next, I will draw strength from the stories and memories of the thousands of Americans who confronted catastrophe before me—Katrina and Maria and 9/11 and the Great Depression and the 1918 flu and the Civil War and all the others—and persevered.

This article appears in the June 2020 print edition with the headline “The Disaster Beat.”

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Vann R. Newkirk II is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers politics and policy, and the host of the podcast Floodlines.