{"id":398174,"date":"2021-11-20T12:00:48","date_gmt":"2021-11-20T12:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/?p=377516"},"modified":"2021-11-20T12:00:48","modified_gmt":"2021-11-20T12:00:48","slug":"the-first-wave-shows-what-we-havent-seen-of-covid-19","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/11\/20\/the-first-wave-shows-what-we-havent-seen-of-covid-19\/","title":{"rendered":"“The First Wave” Shows What We Haven’t Seen of Covid-19"},"content":{"rendered":"

At Long Island<\/u> Jewish Medical Center, a loudspeaker announces an emergency in one of the rooms.\u00a0It is March 2020, and the Covid-19 pandemic has just begun to take hold in the U.S. A\u00a0team\u00a0of nurses and doctors in the hospital is preparing a patient for intubation. A doctor leans over the patient.<\/p>\n

\u201cGeorge,\u201d the doctor shouts, \u201cdo you want to be put on a respirator?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cPut me on,\u201d George responds weakly.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ll let your family know, OK?\u201d the doctor says.<\/p>\n

George is struggling to breathe\u00a0and knows it\u2019s his last hope.<\/p>\n

\u201cPut me on now,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

If you have survived the pandemic without going inside a Covid ward, you will likely be stunned by the grim intimacy of this scene and the fact that you are witnessing it, with real-time urgency, in Matthew Heineman\u2019s new documentary, “The First Wave.” The scene offers\u00a0the kind of life-and-death drama that medical staffs have staggered through every day\u00a0while the rest of us rarely or never saw it. We were \u2014 and are \u2014 isolated from the traumatic realities inside U.S. hospitals as more than 750,000 souls perished from the virus.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

This\u00a0opening scene, not yet 30 seconds long, twists in ways you cannot forget.<\/p>\n

A nurse puts a phone, encased in a plastic bag, in front of George\u2019s face. On the other end, seeing him via FaceTime, is George\u2019s wife.<\/p>\n

\u201cI love you, baby,\u201d she cries out.<\/p>\n

\u201cI love you too,\u201d George responds.<\/p>\n

\u201cOK, be strong.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBye,\u201d George says.<\/p>\n

\u201cI love you,\u201d she repeats.<\/p>\n

\u201cBye bye,\u201d George says. \u201cBye bye bye bye bye bye.\u201d<\/p>\n

This\u00a0scene is not done with us but I won\u2019t say what happens next. What I can say is that \u201cThe First Wave\u201d is necessary to watch. Unless you have already seen and heard the kinds of events it shows, you have an incomplete understanding of the pandemic and of what three-quarters of a million deaths mean \u2014 when instead of a\u00a0statistic\u00a0in a news story, the casualties\u00a0are a man on his back, his wife on the phone, and the nurses and doctors doing everything they can to save his life.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

The saving grace of this film, if that\u2019s the right way to put it, is that it journeys around\u00a0the epidemiological trenches at this New York City hospital and brings back a variety of stories, some of them uplifting, and they thread into an effective narrative. There are patients who seem on the verge of death and struggle back, there are family members urging them along on those plastic-encased phones, and there are medical staffers whose trauma-filled work is getting the attention it deserves in our less troubled lives.<\/p>\n

It sounds strange to say, but there is art in this film too. The way the camera lingers just long enough at the right moments and not too long at others, the way the lifted brow of a nurse speaks louder than words, the way the film breaks out of\u00a0Long Island Jewish and moves into the streets of New York City, taking us from the gasps of Covid patients to the \u201cI Can\u2019t Breathe\u201d chants of the Black Lives Matter movement \u2014 this is masterful work.<\/p>\n

Heineman is no stranger to documentaries. He directed the Academy Award-nominated \u201cCartel Land,\u201d about the drug trade on the U.S.-Mexico border. He also directed \u201cCity of Ghosts,\u201d an award-winning film about citizen journalists in Raqqa, Syria. Those films demonstrated a willingness and ability to work in dangerous areas and gain the confidence of people who otherwise might not let an outsider into their worlds. Those talents are what went into the making of \u201cThe First Wave.\u201d<\/p>\n

Heineman used his experience and contacts to gain unparalleled access to Long Island Jewish. Across the U.S., hospitals\u00a0were shutting their doors to journalists as the pandemic began. Only a handful gained entry, and their visits were short, usually just a few hours or a few days at most. Heineman\u2019s team was at Long Island Jewish for months. Hospital administrators have cited safety and privacy concerns for keeping journalists out, but as Heineman\u2019s experience showed, they could work inside\u00a0Covid wards without getting in anyone\u2019s way or spreading the virus.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

That\u2019s what makes the footage in his documentary so extraordinary. I worked for months on an investigative article<\/a> that delved into the way hospitals cracked down on\u00a0reporters in the U.S., and I spent a lot of that time scouring through the\u00a0imagery that was published by journalists, including filmmakers,\u00a0and by\u00a0medical staffers (some hospitals even<\/a> threatened <\/a>doctors and nurses who shared photos or videos). I\u2019ve seen nothing that comes close to Heineman\u2019s graphic portrayal of Covid victims.<\/p>\n

The only\u00a0visual documentation of the pandemic that\u2019s in the same league comes from far away. The\u00a0director Hao Wu, working with Chinese journalists in early 2020, got relatively unfettered access to four hospitals in Wuhan, where the\u00a0virus originated. His powerful documentary, \u201c76 Days<\/a>,\u201d came out last year and won an Emmy. Until the emergence of Heineman\u2019s film, which opened Friday, Americans who wanted a visceral look inside a Covid\u00a0ward had to watch a film shot in China.<\/p>\n

It is hard to categorize \u201cThe First Wave\u201d because it crosses boundaries: It is a documentary that\u00a0also feels like a horror film, an expos\u00e9 of social injustice, and a love letter. In its review of \u201cThe First Wave,\u201d the Washington Post has a line that manages to be insightful and off-kilter at the same time. \u201cThe film feels like a viscerally effective time capsule from the recent past,\u201d wrote<\/a> Michael O\u2019Sullivan, \u201cyet one whose arrival in theaters may still be too soon for many.\u201d<\/p>\n

A time capsule is filled with the familiar objects of a civilization. But what\u2019s in \u201cThe First Wave\u201d is unfamiliar to most of us; we have not seen it before and perhaps have been unable to imagine it. There is the anguish of\u00a0patients as they\u00a0labor\u00a0to breathe, the\u00a0medical\u00a0instruments warning of hearts no longer beating, the body bags zipped up and hauled away, and the moments of silence before\u00a0nurses rush to the next room to try to save another life. Stumbling onto this time capsule, we are\u00a0visitors from another world who are seeing for the first time what\u00a0the Covid pandemic really meant.<\/p>\n

This film has not come too soon. It has come too late.<\/p>\n

The post “The First Wave” Shows What We Haven’t Seen of Covid-19<\/a> appeared first on The Intercept<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

This post was originally published on The Intercept<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you have survived the pandemic without going inside a Covid ward, you will likely be stunned by the grim intimacy of Matthew Heineman’s new documentary.<\/p>\n

The post \u201cThe First Wave\u201d Shows What We Haven\u2019t Seen of Covid-19<\/a> appeared first on The Intercept<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":391,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398174"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/391"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=398174"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398174\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":398968,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398174\/revisions\/398968"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=398174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=398174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=398174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}