For days, Anu Apte-Elford, who owns or co-owns four of Seattle’s most celebrated bars, including the James Beard-nominated No Anchor, agonized over whether to shutter her businesses or keep them open. When it came to COVID-19, the region was already the most deadly in the U.S. Thirty-seven people in the county had died as a result of the coronavirus. The number of confirmed cases sometimes jumped more than sixty in a single day. Heeding advice from public-health officials to avoid crowds, Seattleites had increasingly stopped going out. In the span of two weeks, the Seattle Times reported, at least fifty restaurants closed shop. The establishments that didn’t close severely cut back employees’ hours. As of this past Sunday, Apte-Elford’s bars, most of which she co-owns with her spouse and business partner, Chris Elford, remained in business, though weeknight sales were down fifty per cent and weekend sales were down seventy-five per cent. She thought of her customers’ safety. She thought of her forty employees and their livelihoods. She thought of her need to make rent. The next morning, she thought, she’d make the call. “Of course, the government made that decision for us,” she said.
Back in February, the Washington State Department of Public Health distributed to officials its new “Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPI) Implementation Guide.” By the time the New York Times reported on it, on March 13th, the sixty-two-page manual had guided public policy for half a month.The document organizes its measures into thirteen steps, each more austere than the one before it, from the first rung (practicing exemplary hygiene) to the top (barricading entire portions of the population). We had been climbing a ladder and most of us didn’t know it; we quickly scaled rungs five through nine, concerning isolation and quarantine of those who felt sick or had contact with those who felt sick. No. 10, issued on March 11th, banned gatherings of two hundred and fifty people or more. Our elected leaders had issued the escalating measures depending on the severity of the pandemic, but to many of us the correlation wasn’t clear.
We were higher on the ladder now. On Sunday, at 7:21 p.m., Governor Jay Inslee tweeted, “Tomorrow, we will temporarily shut down restaurants, bars and entertainment/recreational facilities statewide.” The next morning, in a nearly empty briefing room in the King County Chinook Building, before a skeleton crew of camera operators, the bespectacled former Presidential candidate made the case for the proclamation he was about to sign: ordering the statewide closure of not only bars but also theatres and dance, fitness, and health clubs. Restaurants had to cease dining-room service but could still provide takeout. Additionally, gatherings of fifty or more were prohibited. This would be the status for at least the next two weeks. He called on every Washingtonian to do their part, to consider the lives of our most vulnerable neighbors, namely the elderly and those with compromised immune systems. If you go about life as usual, he let us know, you are negligent. “Normal,” he said, “is not in our game plan.”
It was the most extreme measure yet, and would spell, at least for a time, the demise of tens of thousands of jobs. It would also let more light through the cracks in the city, the fissures that have long divided service workers and those who relied on them. Inequality in Seattle is well documented (in 2016, a Seattle Times analysis found that fifty-three per cent of the city’s earned income went to about twenty per cent of its households), and in the first weeks of the coronavirus outbreak the gulf was harder to ignore than ever. On one side, you had new, work-from-home avatars and virtual, after-work happy hours. On the other, people were still hustling for tips. For every cat photo with a joke caption that chirped “My new officemate is the worst,” there was someone else who had no such luxury, who had to show up, clock in, expose themselves and others to potential contamination.
This new clampdown would exacerbate all that and more. Now the hourly workers didn’t even have hours. Iconic businesses would be boarded up, as if bulwarked against some invading army. Streets emptied out even more. “I do think it is in the greatest interest for public health that we close,” Apte-Elford told me. Even at the cost of the business she had spent the past decade building.
Jessica Tousignant thought she might have the virus. A fever—one of COVID-19’s key symptoms—had her calling in sick to the steak house where she worked as a server, in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. It was a big blow to someone already losing work hours due to customers not showing up, even before the governor’s closure proclamation. In self-quarantine, Tousignant, a cancer survivor who relied on her restaurant job for health insurance, had plenty of time alone to worry about how she and her colleagues—everyone in the industry, really—would be able to survive. She and a friend, Candace Whitney-Morris, eventually hatched a plan. They launched a GoFundMe campaign, the Seattle Hospitality Emergency Fund, with the initial goal of raising sixty thousand dollars to be distributed among the hardest-hit bar and restaurant workers. The campaign went live Sunday afternoon, and garnered modest attention. After Inslee’s closure tweet that night, it soared. Soon, Tousignant and Whitney-Morris raised the goal to a hundred thousand dollars, and then fifty thousand more.
Tousignant, who eventually tested negative for COVID-19 (she had the flu), poured herself into the campaign’s second phase: determining who, specifically, the funds should go to. The priority was the most vulnerable. “We’re looking at indigenous folks, people of color, transgender folks,” she told me, “everybody else in that rainbow—the L.G.B.T.Q.I.-plus spectrum—immunocompromised folks.” In the hundreds of applications she received, Tousignant bore witness to the economic struggles caused by the coronavirus. There was the single mother who had lost both her jobs and said that she and her kids could get by on beans and rice but needed fifty dollars for medicine; the two restaurant workers who said that their employer was withholding their final paychecks; the countless stories of people who had applied for unemployment but, owing to one loophole or another, had yet to qualify. Mostly, Tousignant was struck by the applicants’ humility. “Everybody’s being so vulnerable and humble in their asks,” she said.
One of those applicants was Jose Contreras, the sous chef at Steelhead Diner, one of Pike Place Market’s most storied seafood restaurants, which closed because of the coronavirus, a week before the governor’s tweet. He’d struggled in the days since Steelhead shuttered. Unemployment hadn’t come through and rent on the apartment that he shared with his girlfriend, who is also in the industry, loomed. “It’s very surreal,” he told me over the phone, late one night. “It’s apocalyptic without the apocalypse.” In the background, I could hear the bus he’d just boarded, as it pushed through the city. He rode home from a teriyaki takeout place where he had recently landed a temporary cooking gig. “Just through luck,” he said. “I had a friend.” He hasn’t received his first paycheck yet. “When that day comes, it’ll be great.”
The Seattle Hospitality Emergency Fund kept growing, blowing past its early goals. So far, it’s clocked more than a hundred thousand dollars, from nearly a thousand donors. Tousignant is careful not to get too excited. “Most people are asking for about a thousand dollars, to make sure that they can make ends meet for the month,” she told me, on Tuesday night. At the time, the fund had four hundred and thirty applicants, a number that has since grown to more than seven hundred. “If you were just to do that simple math, of five hundred people needing roughly a thousand dollars,” she said, “we’re not going to be able to get to everybody.”
On Tuesday, March 17th, the first official day of the closure mandate, Capitol Hill, the city’s densest neighborhood and home to its highest concentration of bars and restaurants, looked prepared for a natural disaster. Plywood covered the windows of Linda’s Tavern, reportedly the last place Kurt Cobain was ever seen in public. Up and down Pine and Pike Streets, the neighborhood’s thoroughfares, were identical scenes of bars and restaurants boarded up. Nearly every door brandished a new sign, often handwritten: “We are closed until April 1st. Sorry for the inconvenience.” Those businesses that could pivot to the new reality tried: “Pick up and to go only.”
The toll was clear. And not just just among bar and restaurant employees. This week, the state’s Employment Security Department reported a hundred-and-fifty-per-cent increase in unemployment claims. In a single day, the agency received more than nineteen thousand calls, an eight-hundred-and-twenty-seven-per-cent increase over the previous week. While there has been some economic response from elected officials—Inslee ordered more flexible unemployment rules for companies and their workers, and Seattle’s mayor, Jenny Durkan, announced a million dollars in spending for small-business stabilization—most measures have remained focussed on containing the spread of the virus.
Down the hill, in Belltown, Apte-Elford, whose four bars were closed, was brainstorming ways to keep at least some money coming in. One idea: pre-batched cocktails, sans booze, sold for pickup or delivery. She spent the morning pleading with the landlord of Rob Roy, the classic-cocktail lounge she’s owned for the past decade, not to evict. “There was no answer at the end of the two-hour phone call,” she said. “We’ll just hope.”
On the ladder, we were at rung eleven. There was no telling when we would climb higher. The number of confirmed COVID-19 deaths in the county is sixty-seven, thirty more than when Inslee announced his closure proclamation. The next rung: the residents of an entire city confined to their homes. Not in the polite way we’re all self-confining now, but a mandatory order. The final step, thirteen, means cordoning off portions of the state and allowing no one in or out. As of this writing, Inslee says we’re not there yet.
Meanwhile, the plywood keeps going up. Around noon on that first day of the closures, two men pulled planks from a U-Haul parked near the intersection of Pike Street and Tenth Avenue. They lifted the big, pale rectangles overhead and walked a few yards toward the pub on the corner. They gently leaned the wood against its outer walls. They’d soon cover all the pub’s windows. When a passerby asked why, one of the men looked around and gestured with his chin toward the whole neighborhood. “I don’t know when we’ll be back down here,” he said.
A Guide to the Coronavirus
- How to practice social distancing, from responding to a sick housemate to the pros and cons of ordering food.
- How people cope and create new customs amid a pandemic.
- What it means to contain and mitigate the coronavirus outbreak.
- How much of the world is likely to be quarantined?
- Donald Trump in the time of coronavirus.
- The coronavirus is likely to spread for more than a year before a vaccine could be widely available.
- We are all irrational panic shoppers.
- The strange terror of watching the coronavirus take Rome.
- How pandemics change history.
