A Maryland family battled covid-19 at the same time as Trump. It devastated them.
Michael E. Miller Oct. 29, 2020 at 12:58 a.m. GMT+2
Marine One landed on the White House lawn just before dusk. As its rotors came to a halt, the helicopter’s door swung open and out stepped Donald Trump.
The president had just spent three days in Walter Reed National Military Medical Center recovering from covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. And in a scene that would be set to dramatic music and tweeted to his 87 million followers, he climbed the steps to a White House balcony, took off his face mask and recorded a video urging the country not to fear the deadly disease.
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“Don’t let it dominate you,” he said into a camera on the evening of Oct. 5. “. . . We have the best medical equipment. We have the best medicines. All developed recently. And you’re going to beat it.”
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Thirty miles away, Carlton Coates Jr. sat in an Annapolis funeral home, staring at the casket that contained the body of his older sister.
Carol Coates had battled covid-19 at the same time as the president. But instead of a suite at Walter Reed, the 46-year-old Black teacher self-isolated in the basement of her family’s home. And instead of the experimental cocktail of antibodies that Trump was given, she received get-well cards from her fifth-grade students.
Carol had taught nine miles from the White House. But her illness unfolded in what seemed like a different universe than the one the president described.
The virus has killed more than 227,000 people in the United States, but it has hit some communities harder than others. Blacks and Hispanics are nearly three times as likely as Whites to contract the disease, according to the Centers for Disease Control. And African Americans are more than twice as likely to die of it.
Yet for many people of color in the United States, the coronavirus has already taken the life of someone they loved.