- So, Tika, I feel like you're like me,
and you have some family on the frontlines.
I know my brother's a doctor of emergency medicine,
and he has been doing a lot of telemedicine
and doing a lot of, like, pop up testing in various areas,
inner cities in particular to target, you know, the fact
that black people are dealing with this at a higher rate.
But you have some people on the frontline, too, right?
I do.
I come from a long line of nurses.
And my cousin Deborah--
shout out to Deborah--
she is the head nurse of eight clinics in New York,
and she works in Brooklyn.
And she was actually part of a COVID clinic
literally just for people with COVID.
And she's just been seriously on the front lines, really
trying to help.
She's just super proud of them, and I'm so proud that I can
call her my family member, man.
I have a cousin who recently passed
away from COVID unfortunately.
He was older, but he was healthy.
And, you know, it happened.
He went in with a cough and never came out,
so it's really, really sad that, you
know, to know somebody died--
You know it's crazy to hear people--
it's OK, and I understand the valid--
the validity of people, like, I want to get out of my house.
I'm so over it because I understand that.
Right.
But I also understand people are literally dying and getting
sick who are trying to help.
Yeah, it reminds me of, you know, in New York during 9/11
and how there was--
like, a lot of people had the instinct to run away,
but those frontline workers have the instinct
to run towards the danger.
And those are the people that-- those are the people that
do the hard work, and they're keeping all of us alive,
you know.
THAI RANDOLPH: And sheltering in place is a privilege,
you know, lest we forget it, right.
There's so many people who don't have the option whether, you
know, they're on the frontlines or, you know,
you're trying to figure out how to feed your family
or you don't have a place to shelter in place.
So when I get super anxious about all of this,
I try to keep that in perspective.
And at the beginning of this whole thing, I got really sick.
And within a couple of days, it was uncontrollable wheezing.
I had every single symptom but a fever,
and I ended up self-isolating for I think it
was somewhere close to 13 days.
So I didn't see my husband, my son,
and, you know, thankfully I recovered
fully from whatever I had.
Wow.
That must've been so scary.
It was, and my biggest fear was, like, not getting,
you know, my son sick or my husband sick.
And the reason why, like, what if we both get sick?
What if we both end up in the ER?
Who takes-- who comes to get our child?
Where would he stay?
There are parents who've had to face that reality.
My dad is also--
is in a nursing home, and so when it first hit and you heard
about all these nursing homes and we didn't hear anything
from his nursing home, I kind of thought, OK, well,
he's going to be OK because they know now,
right, to keep an eye on the nursing homes.
And sure enough, my sister called and said,
you know, dad tested positive.
It went through his nursing home,
and they had to test everybody.
And what we don't realize--
and I didn't even think about this-- again,
it's those frontline workers, you know.
There are people who have no choice but to be out.
And, you know, those--
a lot of those workers are either working class
or, you know, lower wage earners,
and they don't always-- again, they
don't have the options of getting in their car,
sanitizing everything, and going home.
A lot of them have to take public transportation
to get to and from, so we don't necessarily think about that
until it happened to me.
Wow shout out to all-- again, like Susan said,
shout out to all the nurse-- the front line workers in general.
Shout out to all the people who are workers who are sometimes
invisible on the daily to us but are
needed more than-- not to us but to society in general.
And at least everybody is acknowledging now
they are more needed than ever, and they should be
taking care of more than ever.
So shout out to them.