THE BIG STORY

Working in healthcare, without healthcare

It’s hard to imagine a more essential worker right now than the people keeping our health system running. And while the doctors and nurses we celebrate as heroes are the public faces of the medical world, there’s a huge number of working people supporting them — and many don’t even earn a living wage or qualify for health insurance.

Emmanuel Felton spoke to three of them about life in the working-class trenches of the healthcare industry. One clerical worker at a hospital in New Orleans got seriously ill as coronavirus cases began multiplying among the patients she dealt with. She still hasn’t fully recovered, almost two months later, and because she’s not a full-time employee, she gets no paid sick leave or vacation time, and she doesn’t qualify for health insurance. In fact, the only reason she hasn’t been crippled with medical debt is that she made so little money from the hospital job that she qualified for Louisiana’s Medicaid program for low-income adults.

Sepia Coleman, healthcare worker in Memphis, has been in the industry for 30 years and now works two hourly gigs: as a home health aide making $10.50 an hour, and at a nursing home where she makes $12 an hour.

"We are in the room when no one else is,” Coleman said. “Doctors and nurses only come in to do things like administer medications; we're there all the time. We have to make sure their vitals are OK. We have to watch them to see if they have any change in behavior or color. We are beyond essential. We are the main component of the healthcare system, but we get no credit for that.”

STAYING ON TOP OF THIS

Escape from San Francisco

Earlier this week Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey made waves by telling staff that they won’t be required to come back to the office ever again. Even when Twitter’s headquarters in downtown San Francisco reopens, its staff will be allowed to keep working remotely.

The news led to much chatter among San Francisco’s tech workforce, many of whom have been dreaming of being able to keep their jobs and salaries without being required to live in the most expensive city in the country. The digerati are now openly talking about how the coronavirus pandemic could be the moment that triggers a new wave of opportunities to work remotely — and an exodus out of San Francisco, where rents are more than twice the national average and the cost of living has quickly outpaced the quality of life.

“The average call center manager in Houston, probably has a higher material quality of life than does a director level executive in Boston or certainly in San Francisco,” one venture capitalist told Alex Kantrowitz. “If there's an arbitrage opportunity, at least for a while, where you could get the San Francisco salary and live in Nashville or Minneapolis, or any of these cities that have a cool cultural vibe, but extraordinarily affordable housing — it doesn't strike me as implausible.”

SNAPSHOTS

Facebook banned ads for masks, citing price gouging and shortages for essential workers. This company ran them anyway, and made a killing.

Hair and beauty salons will struggle to survive without government support, owners and workers say. “I want to see them considering the beauty industry as a real industry worth saving,” said one salon owner.

President Trump is in a high-stakes Supreme Court battle to prevent the release of his tax returns. Presidents Nixon and Clinton each made similar attempts to shield their personal records, and failed.

Campaigners who have long agitated against LGBTQ people are using the coronavirus as a new excuse. Anti-gay activists around the world are accusing them of spreading the virus.

BuzzFeed News / Getty Images

HELP US KEEP QUALITY NEWS FREE FOR ALL

BuzzFeed News is throwing everything we’ve got at covering the coronavirus pandemic, and more than ever before, we need your help to keep all this going. You can support our global newsroom by becoming a BuzzFeed News member. Our members help us keep our quality news free and available to everyone in the world, and you can join for just $5 a month (or whatever you can afford). If you’ve enjoyed our work and want to support it, please sign up.

RIP

What we learn from obituaries

Like many of us, Katherine Miller has been reading a lot of obituaries lately. They inspired this beautiful reflection on what’s been lost in the last couple of months, which I can’t recommend enough. It’s the details in every obituary that catch you, she writes — all those unique fragments that can barely be captured in words, but make up wondrous individual lives.

“The combined effect is to want to meet and know these people, even if you know they are pure strangers and it is now too late,” Miller writes. “Even if you wanted to, there'd never be enough time to find everyone and read about them — a hopeless scale thrown into relief by how big people’s lives are in each individual story.”

EVERYONE IS ROLLER SKATING NOW

The hottest footwear of 2020 has wheels

Nobody was roller skating, and then suddenly, everyone’s roller skating. What’s that about? Google Trends shows there has been a surge in people searching for roller skates, and Moxi Skates and Impala, two companies known for making trendy skates, told Lauren Strapagiel that sales are booming.

Ana Coto, an actress and dancer in Los Angeles, has been blowing up on Tik Tok with videos of herself skating around. A recent one, complete with a soundtrack by J.Lo, got more than 10 million views.

via @anaocto

Marician Dedeaux Brown started skating recently after seeing videos online. "I was scrolling through TikTok and saw these great women skating, and it just inspired me to buy a pair of skates and I just fell in love with it," she said.

via @oh.thatsreese

Her advice to all the newbie skaters out there: be prepared to spend some time on the ground — just make sure not to go down face first. . No pain, no gain. "It’s not about keeping from falling,” she said. “It’s about how not to fall.”

Learn how to not fall today,

Tom