COVID-19 isn’t overwhelming only health care facilities, forcing caregivers to ration their own personal protective equipment and, in some cases, the care their patients receive. It’s also causing massive economic pain, including unprecedented spikes in unemployment, missed mortgage and rent payments, and the shuttering of small businesses at an alarming clip.

These businesses, and the people who rely on them, are at the center of this week’s new episode. Despite a $2.2 trillion relief package from the federal government that set aside billions for small businesses, a growing number of people now find themselves forced into a series of wrenching decisions and impossible compromises.

Monica Perez is one of them. A California preschool teacher who was recently laid off, she has spent the past several weeks sequestered at home with her two children. But with bills looming and no income, she has struggled to navigate the baroque complexities of her bank’s mortgage relief options. Now she’s wedged in a harrowing dilemma: How do you “shelter in place” when your very shelter comes under threat?

Next up is an intimate portrait of the most vulnerable members of America’s $200 billion hotel industry. Ninety percent of the nearly 33,000 hotels across the U.S. are franchised. So as business dries up, franchise owners are having trouble maintaining payroll and keeping their employees on the job.

Finally, we visit a cluster of small businesses just south of Seattle, where proprietors are scrambling to stay afloat amid one of the nation’s earliest lockdowns. White Center is home to more than 200 businesses, many founded by immigrants. Its challenges are a window into what more than 30 million others are facing now and in the pandemic’s coming months. 

Hear the episode.
 

More from us ...

We asked grocery store employees across the U.S. to tell us what their employers are doing – or not doing – to keep them safe on the job. More than 600 responded, painting a picture of delayed action, lack of critical benefits and protections, and more. 

Earlier this month, we reported on pervasive rationing of personal protective equipment at the Department of Veterans Affairs, as well as a rising COVID-19 death toll among patients and employees. Last week, a group of lawmakers fired off a letter accusing the White House of withholding vital information from Congress related to conditions inside the VA.
 

What we’re reading

Hope, and new life, in a Brooklyn maternity ward fighting COVID-19: The New York Times

It is a deeply intimate and human story that also reveals the systemic challenges that health care workers and patients are facing. Reporter Sheri Fink (as always) got incredible access to the women at the center of the story and to the chaotic swirl of the hospital around them. It was tragic and painful, but also hopeful and sweet, capturing the magical bubble of childbirth in the face of the pandemic. And it offered such a stark contrast to the harrowing story from a few days before about childbirth in Venezuela. – Christa Scharfenberg, CEO

The coronavirus in America: The year ahead: The New York Times

Our pandemic summer: The Atlantic

Given the extraordinary uncertainty confronting us at every turn right now, I'm grateful for reporting that lucidly lays out the scenarios that experts and scholars from many different industries are anticipating. These two pieces do a particularly excellent job of both containing uncertainty and distilling what's known about the road ahead, and pointing readers to the evidence that underpins these expectations. – Matt Thompson, editor in chief

How 27 years in prison prepared me for coronavirus: The Marshall Project

Throughout these strange times, I've been doing my best to stay grounded in gratitude. This piece was another poignant reminder to be grateful for the many freedoms within the limits of shelter in place. – Priska Neely, reporter and producer

Despite federal ban, landlords are still moving to evict people during the pandemic: ProPublica 

When the CARES Act passed, it included a temporary ban on evictions that some experts worried wouldn't do enough to prevent evictions, in part because for a renter to know they're eligible for protection, they'd need to know their landlord had participated in certain federal loan or mortgage programs. This ProPublica story shows – in a way that is systematic and helpfully transparent about their reporting process – that this worry was well founded, as landlords in many states are indeed violating the new law to evict tenants. – Stan Alcorn, reporter and producer

For a grocery store employee, a hard life filled with work and happiness, suddenly gone due to coronavirus: The Boston Globe

Boston Globe reporters Katie Johnston and Marcela García go above the call of breaking-news journalism, penning a story filled with intimate biographical details of one of the many ordinary giants whose life was tragically cut short by the coronavirus. It's an inspiring piece of journalism and a gutting story. – JoeBill Muñoz, associate producer  

And because you probably missed it …

Fact-based journalism is worth fighting for.