It may not have started here, but the novel coronavirus became a US tragedy

9 min readDec 11, 2020

On Feb. 29, hundreds of people packed into the Pullman Christian Reformed Church, a squat, beige brick building on Chicago’s South Side. An attendee began the ceremonies by blasting a shofar, the trumpet made out of a ram’s horn. Somebody played keyboard. And a long line of people waited to speak into a microphone about their memories of Angeli Demus.

The lifelong Chicagoan, who had died a month earlier at age 59, insisted she didn’t want it called a funeral. “Donate, cremate, celebrate,” had been her credo to her family near the end of a gutting battle with lung cancer, and with her eyes donated and her body cremated, all that was left was this party.

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Her husband, Earl Demus, billed it as “Angeli’s Joyous Celebration,” and thought that the crowd it gathered spoke to his wife’s beloved nature. “Standing room only,” recounted Demus, who estimated there were more than 450 people there. “I stopped counting after a while.”

The disconcerting news story that seemed recently to creep into every conversation, particularly after it tanked the stock market the previous week, didn’t make it past the doors of the church. Nobody wore a mask or kept their distance, and for the most part nobody even talked about the novel coronavirus. It had only started to trickle into the United States, as far as anybody knew, and the few cases in Illinois were said to be isolated and controlled.

A top health official had a week earlier assured Chicagoans that “the health risk to the general public from novel coronavirus remains low,” and the outlook from the highest levels of government was that, nationally, the few instances of the virus were disappearing. President Donald Trump had said three days earlier there were 15 cases in the country, and “the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.”

In a room off to the side of the church, people sipped soft drinks and picked at a spread catered by a neighborhood chef: finger sandwiches, sliders, fruit and cheese, chicken and Angeli’s favorite dessert, cheesecake. This room was where her father, Charles Dungill, spent most of the event.

Gina Jere shows pictures of her father, Charles Dungill, and other family members at her home in Orland Park, Ill., on Sept. 28, 2020. Dungill…SEBASTIÁN HIDALGO FOR USA TODAY

Everybody called him “Cookie,” a throwback to his days as a drummer in a family band that toured everywhere Black performers were allowed in Jim Crow’s America. Cookie shook hands, hugged and chatted with relatives and friends, some of whom had traveled from California, Michigan, Georgia, Ohio and Nevada. A family friend was fresh off a golfing trip to Arizona and another had recently returned from South Africa.

It was the West Chatham diaspora, a testament to the lasting bonds of the tight-knit Chicago neighborhood in which Cookie and his wife, Barbara, had raised Angeli and her three surviving siblings: brothers Sevil and Kyann, and sister Gina.

A couple of days after the celebration at the church, Sevil stopped by Cookie’s house to check on him. The kids were worried about their dad. They’d noticed little changes in his appearance: a slight droop to his posture, something different in his eyes.

It wasn’t just his daughter’s death with which he was reckoning. Barbara, his wife of 63 years, had died less than a week before Angeli’s celebration, after suffering from multiple ailments, including cancer.

But Sevil found his dad in good enough spirits, having enjoyed the event at Pullman so much that he wanted to plan the same thing for Barbara. Father and son chatted for about three hours, during which Sevil noticed that his dad had a slight hitch in his throat.

Probably post-nasal drip.

The next day after work, Sevil was driving back to his dad’s house, bringing him Barbara’s ashes from the crematorium, when he realized: Now he had a little cough, too.

BEFORE THE NEARLY 300,000 DEATHS, the widespread financial devastation, the isolation from loved ones and the fatigue of a daily disaster with no clear end, there was this: A tickle in a throat in Chicago. A woman’s sudden crash to the floor of her kitchen in the Bay Area. A playwright in Manhattan with three-quarters of a lung left in his chest, sensing doom and fleeing down the coast with his husband.

The virus shouldn’t have been able to sneak up on the United States. The world’s most powerful nation, historically among the most successful at stymieing infectious illnesses, had ample lead time during which the deadly pandemic was rampaging through Asia, and then Europe.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, speaks about the COVID-19 outbreak during a White House press conference Feb. 29, 2020, flanked by President Donald Trump, left, and Vice President Mike Pence.ROBERTO SCHMIDT, AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

But in an early vacuum of leadership at almost every government level, with the message from the White House that the virus was not anything to worry about, Americans unwittingly spread the lethal virus to loved ones and strangers alike.

The U.S. squandered its early advantage. Roughly one year after the virus first came into existence, the country has suffered a loss of life far worse than any other.

Dr. Megan Ranney, an emergency physician and professor at Brown University, said COVID-19’s traits made it a formidable opponent for even those large nations most competent at fighting it.

But, she added, in the United States in 2020, the virus found an ideal victim. “The virus could not have emerged at a better time for spread than this year,” Ranney said. “We were in an election year. We had a president who didn’t believe in science. We had underfunding of our public health institutions. It was a perfect storm.”

In an effort to better understand how the virus exploited the country’s strengths and exposed its weaknesses, USA TODAY interviewed biologists and studied scientific genomic analysis, federal reports concerning super-spreading events, county medical examiner’s data from around the country, and state-level death and infection data.

Reporters used those sources to find and report the stories, many of them previously untold, of Americans in the path of the virus.

What emerges is a portrait of misinformation and confusion leading to a devastating failure to unite against a common threat.

Piecemeal policies offered a dangerously hollow illusion of control and safety. Scientists, intermittently ignored and villainized, were powerless. As citizens protested and rioted in response to racist police tactics, others detected a more subtle form of prejudice in apathy toward a virus that disproportionately sickened Black and Brown Americans. Early ignorance about the spread metastasized into partisan conspiracy-mongering and threats, leading to that most American phenomenon: a health official with a bulletproof vest.

The novel coronavirus didn’t start in the United States, but we have made it our own.

Artist Suzanne Firstenberg walks through “IN AMERICA: How Could This Happen,” an installation on the DC Armory Parade Ground in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 23,…JACK GRUBER, USA TODAY

MLK Jr. Day: Zero official deaths

ON JAN. 23, Dr. Benhur Lee stayed up late in his Manhattan apartment, working through the global ramifications of the virus Americans had been told was not a threat to them.

“We have it totally under control,” Trump had said the day before when asked about the single known case in the United States. “It’s one person, coming in from China. It’s going to be just fine.”

But none of the early epidemiological research Lee was picking up from China, where the virus had killed thousands and brought life to a standstill, suggested that assessment was correct.

Lee runs a research lab at Mount Sinai’s medical school in New York City. He made a name for himself as an HIV researcher in the early 2000s before moving on to tracking emerging viruses, becoming an expert on viruses such as nipah, the bat-borne sickness featured in the film “Contagion.”

Dr. Behur Lee is a professor of microbiology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. Through August this year, his lab worked around the clock on nothing but COVID-19.SETH HARRISON, USA TODAY NETWORK

Lee was one of thousands of scientists throughout the world who had since December been piecing together small studies from doctors in other countries to understand the features of the virus that had emerged in Wuhan, with their clues as to how it could be stopped.

In early January, scientists from China and Australia released an initial genome sequence of the virus. It closely resembled SARS, the virus that much of the world barely dodged two decades earlier. And on this Thursday night, Lee couldn’t sleep because scientists had just released new findings estimating the human-to-human spread of the novel coronavirus.

It was as infectious as Ebola, slightly less infectious than the 1918 Spanish flu, and much less infectious than HIV and malaria. Lee tried to put the data in context by tweet. Over next few months, his Twitter account — @VirusWhisperer — would gain tens of thousands of followers.

Lee knew that the United States had previously benefited from a mix of luck and coordination between U.S. agencies and their international counterparts in stemming SARS and Ebola. That history was cold comfort to Lee, who knew that the factors making a virus dangerous were difficult to predict.

The scientific community was not yet in agreement that the virus was capable of asymptomatic spread. Because carriers often don’t know they have it and in turn don’t isolate, asymptomatic spread is a boon for a virus’s rate of infection.

It may not have started here, but the novel coronavirus became a US tragedy

MLK Jr. Day: Zero official deaths

Written by anikkumar