This is the final part of the series by our reporters on how they covered the news at the onset of the novel coronavirus last year.

ONE of my earliest assignments after Jamaica recorded its first case of the novel coronavirus in March last year took me to the streets of downtown Kingston to talk with homeless Jamaicans who, on top of having to sleep out on the cold concrete, had to endure an all-island 8:00 pm to 6:00 am curfew that the Government had announced late that month. Little did I know then that curfews were the beginning of a new normal.

During those initial days, the seriousness of the pandemic and the implications for our small island had not yet sunk in for me. This was even more so for the homeless people I met that day.

One of them, a man who had forfeited his spot at the Government’s night shelter on Hanover Street just so he could watch over his belongings, chose to sleep on the sidewalk across the road on Sutton Street. The man was weary that his small radio, which he needed to keep abreast of the news, would get stolen inside the facility; so indifferent was he to the invisible threat that loomed over our city and our world.

I was struck, more so, by the living conditions of these homeless people, many of whom had taken up occupancy in the old, dilapidated buildings that are prominent on that side of downtown Kingston. It was immediately clear to me that they had more pressing needs, like shelter and access to proper sanitary facilities.

In one of the buildings, I met a young couple who showed me around the place. They had no running water, no bathroom, no electricity, and no roof. I noticed that the woman, who was with child, was limping and had blood dripping from one leg. When I enquired, she told me she had stepped on a rusted nail, and that it wasn’t unusual for that to happen since there were a lot of old scraps of iron lying around.

The panic-mongering among more well-off Jamaicans, who had gone in a mad rush to the supermarkets to stock up on toilet paper, simply paled in comparison to their plight, and it dawned on me that a severe lack of housing for our country’s poor would undoubtedly be exacerbated by the pandemic.

But, more was to come. As the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases piled up, and the Government mobilised to contain community spread, lockdowns of entire neighbourhoods soon kicked in. I was sent to Cornpiece in Clarendon where the first death was recorded. I went to find out how residents there were coping with stay-at-home orders, and what assistance the Government was providing for the most vulnerable, like the elderly, who were ordered to stay indoors.

While there, I met a blind, 70-something- year-old man who said he was a childhood friend of the deceased. As he laid on his veranda bench, the man explained that while he was sad for his friend, he was not going to worry himself about the pandemic. He had nowhere going after all, he said, and was quite use to being at home.

His outlook was the stark opposite of a much younger man from the community, who I also met that day. Quite inebriated and upset that he was being restricted in his movements, the man shed tears. He bawled, saying that he had a wife and children to feed, and that the four pounds of rice and other canned food that the Ministry of Labour and Social Security was providing per household would not suffice for his family of six.

Talking with residents, however, made me realise there was more to his story. It wasn’t all about feeding his family. He also just wanted his freedom to go and come as he pleased, a restriction which many more Jamaicans, and just about everyone across the globe, had to grapple with as the pandemic progressed – the loss of freedom.

I remember the feeling of being teleported into one of those dystopian, end-of-the-world flicks when I saw the incredibly long lines of people waiting to buy food at shops and supermarkets across Portmore when confirmed cases of COVID-19 spiked there, and the Government placed the parish of St Catherine under lockdown.

The day I went to talk with shoppers, they complained that they could not get any bread; that the shoppers before them had taken all of it. Meanwhile, vendors peddling ground produce on the sidewalk outside the Portmore Mall could only dream of making the sales the supermarkets and wholesales were making.

Food security soon became a dominant theme of the pandemic. As a vicious hurricane season would have it, I was in St Thomas almost every week at the height of the rainy season in October, talking with farmers who were reeling from major losses. The pandemic had already stymied their livelihood, and there came tropical storms Eta and Zeta causing some of the worst floods the parish had seen.

Roads were impassable, entire crops were lost, and the nation watched as Mother Nature unleashed her wrath. To paraphrase Prime Minister Andrew Holness in a speech around that time, the nation was facing a “double-crisis” of multiple dimensions.

Landslides from weeks of rain resulted in the shocking deaths of Romeo Leachman and his 15-year-old daughter, Sanique, in Shooters Hill, Bull Bay – again raising the issue of a lack of housing for many Jamaicans who aren’t so fortunate to own a home. And in a country where enslaved Africans were sent out from the plantations without access to land, Jamaicans watching comfortably at home, railed against their countrymen and women, calling them squatters.

The pandemic for me highlighted many of the social and environmental problems our country and the planetary collective, on a whole, was already facing.

I suppose it is fair to say that the novel coronavirus, that pesky clump of RNA that we’ve all come to hate, and which, to date, has taken the lives of two million people worldwide, came and did so much more than that. It was a reckoning, a catalyst to show us our ways – a bringer of change.

— Sharlene Hendricks was last weekend named by the Press Association of Jamaica as Young Journalist of the Year for 2020