- 98% Of people feel that
homeless people are junkies and alcoholics.
And I'm none of those.
Tonight, I think it was, what, yeah, 36 out.
And I mean, I was fairly warm back there.
Were you warm, kiddo?
- Kinda. - Kinda.
Trying to maintain my family and get into housing,
Coronavirus, until it directly affects me,
I really wanna stop hearing about it.
(soft music)
- I'm Rose Arce,
and I'm the director of "Pandemic in Seattle".
- I'm Soledad O'Brien, I'm the executive producer.
- [Rose] "Pandemic in Seattle" is really the story about
how public health reacted to the biggest crisis
that we have had in generations in this country.
It takes a look sort of behind the scenes
at the decisions that are made
to try to shut down the city and stop the pandemic.
But particularly with the most vulnerable people in mind.
- We were doing a project on homelessness
in the United States, and focused on Seattle.
When all of a sudden there was just another story.
And it was affecting homeless communities,
so we were very interested in looking at
what happens to people who are constantly in crisis
when another crisis hits.
- [Man] We are at a critical moment in this crisis.
People who are homeless can't shelter in their own home.
They can't isolate, they have nowhere to go.
- We checked in with our photographers
and our producers on the ground in Seattle,
that they wanted to stay on.
We created the rules around it
so that everybody could stay safe.
- Every time they went out, they always wore masks.
They traveled in their own cars.
They had hand sanitizer with them.
They have a good six to 10 feet of distance
from anybody they were shooting.
The last thing we wanted was for them to get sick
or for them certainly to get anybody else sick.
And we were successful.
Nobody got sick in the making of
this documentary, on any end.
- Stevie, who's kind of the centerpiece of our doc,
and her daughter, and her boyfriend Corey,
the daily survival issue was so in front of her,
like here, every single day.
How am I gonna work?
What am I going to do?
Is that job coming back?
- She had some almost insurmountable challenges facing her.
And those challenges were so heavy
that Coronavirus was almost an afterthought, at times.
There was a decision for the kids to go to remote learning.
Where do you go for remote learning when you live in a car,
and you're a kid without wifi and a computer?
- [Stevie] Being homeless,
I feel like I'm failing my daughter.
I feel like I'm failing as a mother.
That I'm not a good mom because we've lost everything.
I'm scared.
(saw whirring)
- The other thing that we thought was interesting was
the number of homeless people who told us,
a little bit bitterly I would say,
about now people wanna give us bathrooms,
now they want sanitation.
When we've been asking for these things,
pre-Coronavirus, there wasn't such a sense of urgency.
But now that somebody else's health is at stake
everybody's lining up to give us these things that,
from a humanitarian perspective,
we've really needed for quite a while.
And that was pretty heartbreaking.
And I think for many of the homeless people
that we interviewed, I think they felt like,
as soon as this passes those'll go away.
No one's gonna care.
- The moment, like the absolute moment
the crisis is over, a lot of homeless people
are gonna be back on the street.
(dynamic music)
- When I heard that this outbreak was in the facility,
my first thought was, oh (beeps).
Hey Pops.
- [Rose] Katherine Kempf is somebody we found
by going repeatedly to the nursing home
and talking to the families
that had gathered outside demanding answers.
- [Katherine] When the building's on fire, what do you do?
You get out!
- There's been 29 people that are dead
from this place, 29, as of last night.
- Her story was just so compelling.
'Cause here she was caring for her two young kids at home,
trying to get her degree.
- This is Pop-Pop before his stroke.
- Her father is in there and she can't help him.
- Hey Pops. - Hey Pops.
- And she's trying to advocate for him
while she's on the outside.
And of course her dad is elderly, and frail,
and losing his facilities.
- And he's waiting, and waiting, and he's perfectly healthy.
And she said at one point,
he's just sitting there waiting to get sick.
- They weren't testing everybody at first
because they didn't have enough tests.
They called me back the next day
and told me that he had tested positive.
- [Child] Pop-Pop, are you okay?
- [Katherine] Can you breathe?
- Pop-Pop, I love you.
- Pop-Pop, we love you.
- I'm having a hard time trusting the system right now.
So much of this could've been avoided.
- Very rarely do we report on public health.
We have a great scene where Patty Hayes,
who runs public health in Seattle,
is at a meeting about how to stay safe, and wear masks,
and everybody needs to use hand sanitizer.
And then as she's heading to the elevator,
she hits the Purell.
- It's empty.
- I love that scene because it's a real symbol
of kinda how this works all the time.
There's some ideas, but if you don't have Purell
in your Purell hand sanitizer, then what was the point?
People talk about doctors and nurses,
and doctors and nurses aren't really public health.
That's the healthcare system.
And by the time you've made it into the hospital,
public health has kind of failed you.
So the goal is to not get into the hospital
when we're talking about public health.
How do you think about the health of communities at large?
- The lesson to take away from this
is move swiftly and decisively,
and listen to public health, listen to the doctors.
Listen to the people in health
that are learning as they go along,
but delivering very important information.
- If we would have been paying attention
to public health over the last 20 years,
we would've been in a lot better space to respond to this.
(dynamic music)