The coronavirus pandemic of 2020 is already making history. Now, there’s an effort underway in Michigan to document it for future generations. WKAR’s Kevin Lavery talks with Michigan History Center director Sandra Clark about a new project called “Collecting COVID-19.”
Sandra Clark
This is about doing some collecting of what we know is truly a historic time as it happens. Phase one now is digital. We are asking people if they have objects and written things and other documents that we might want to collect later, when stay at home and stay safe is no longer in force. And then down the road, we'll probably do some reflective interviews with people as well. But we wanted to get started now so that we got that kind of firsthand, ‘what does it feel like to be in the middle of this?’
Kevin Lavery
How early on during this crisis did it occur to you and your staff to ask the public to document what they're going through?
Clark
I think as soon as we got over working from home with all of the technical transformations that we had to make in our lives and settled down and had a conversation about what should we be doing now. This pretty quickly came to the top.
Lavery
What kind of response Have you had so far?
Clark
We’ve had a great response. We have a gallery where people can see what other people have posted, and I think there's some relief in that. I think we have close to 100 submissions on the digital side already. We've had some people sending us some ideas for objects that they connect with what's going on now, some of which are very interesting. Down the road we will want to be collecting those. So we've really had a really positive response and there’s some really poignant stuff out there.
Lavery
Yes, there really is. Have any pictures really had an impact on you?
Clark
There's a photograph of a health worker kind of lying back on a gurney, resting, taking a five minute nap. There’s some text that goes with it, just talking about what it's like to be in a hospital in the middle of this. The combination of the picture of this exhausted nurse and the words that go with it really touched me.
Lavery
That’s exactly the same picture that I'm looking at. It struck me also. As you said, there’s some text that goes with this. Here’s an excerpt:
This is what COVID looks like. It's pure exhaustion. It's wearing an N95 mask for 12 hours straight, only taking it off for maybe 20 minutes to scarf down some food that God bless our community was delivered, because had it not you wouldn't have had time to go down to the cafeteria and get food. This is what COVID looks like. It's needing to put your head down for five seconds because the weight of holding the phone while a family says goodbye to a loved one while holding that patient's hand so he doesn't die alone is heavy on your brain.
Clark
What could touch you more deeply and be more human than that? Some of these photographs are surprising. There's a photograph of three absolutely adorable looking children, but the text with it is about grandparents worried about these children who are in foster homes right now. When I talk about the diversity we want to capture, that's exactly what we're looking at.
Lavery
How can people submit their entries to this project?
Clark
If they go to www.michigan.gov/mhcstories they will find our web page. That has directions for submitting ideas for artifacts, and even for many other things for the archives. It’s all on that page and you just click through, and we hope a lot of people will be doing that.
