COVID Chronicles collects the short comics Ethan Sacks and Dalibor Talajic produced for the NBC News website earlier this year, coloured for this print edition by Lee Loughridge. Everything here is nonfiction and covers stories from the multiple frontlines of the 2020 pandemic.
There’s the 23 year old nurse having to reuse PPE for days at a time because of supply shortages, and worrying she’ll inadvertently go home and infect her loved ones. There’s a middle-aged mother who gets COVID-19 and almost dies but her faith and her will to be there for her kids gets her through. There’s a story about life during lockdown at ground zero, Wuhan, told from the perspective of a Chinese university researcher working in London but returning to Wuhan to visit his parents - what was meant to be a 2 week holiday stretches to 4 months before he can return to his life in the UK.
This is an amazing book about amazing people doing amazing things going through a time none of us have experienced before (and hopefully never will again). “Enjoyable” doesn’t seem a fitting word to describe this, but COVID Chronicles is a compulsively readable book, despite the all-too-real horrors on every page.
The only reason I put the book down every few chapters was because the stories are too emotionally draining. We’ve just gone through all of that and to relive it again - the fear, the paranoia, the misinformation - is still harrowing. So I can totally see people who aren’t ready to go through the dark days of March/April (when most of the stories take place) again not rushing to pick this one up, particularly if you’ve lost someone to the coronavirus.
That said, though there are numerous moments of jarring sadness - a nurse holding up a phone to a dying patient so their family can say their final goodbye; a journalist about to interview the mother of a COVID victim and realising she hasn’t been told her son is dead yet - the stories highlight the good that people do under extraordinary pressure. The Toronto ER doctor, under strict instructions not to test anyone except essential workers, testing a non-essential worker so that he has the peace of mind that he can go home and not infect his children. A street medic in Tulsa, helping the injured during this past summer’s Black Lives Matter riots. An ER doctor treating immigrants in Matamoros, Mexico.
The stories show the best sides of humanity - our resilience, kindness, ingenuity, compassion - and these medical professionals certainly deserve to be celebrated for doing what they do, and then going back the next day to do it all again. Talajic’s expressive art lends the stories a vivid humanism and the many photo references he used, including pictures of the real people these stories are about, are included at the back of the book.
COVID Chronicles is a tough read, not because it’s badly written - it’s not - but because the heavy subject matter is still so raw for so many. And we’re still not out of it yet either. We’ve now got the vaccines, so there’s light at the end of the tunnel, but there still feels like a long way to go before we’re out of it - and this winter promises to be a bitter one for too many, given the uptick of the second wave. These uplifting stories are a reminder though that there is hope happening every day somewhere, even amidst such overwhelming darkness, because there’s undoubtedly enough material from this year to fill thousands of books like this.
And COVID-19 will be gone one day but the memories and work of the medical professionals who saved so many during this time will live on, in part thanks to books like this that show us, amidst so much death, the life happening on the frontlines.
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