The First Wave Shows What We Haven’t Seen of Covid-19 – The Intercept

At Long Island Jewish Medical Center, a loudspeaker announces an emergency in one of the rooms.It is March 2020, and the Covid-19 pandemic has just begun to take hold in the U.S. Ateamof nurses and doctors in the hospital is preparing a patient for intubation. A doctor leans over the patient, whose name is Patrick George.

George, the doctor shouts, do you want to be put on a respirator?

Put me on, George responds weakly.

Well let your family know, OK? the doctor says.

George is struggling to breatheand knows its his last hope.

Put me on now, he says.

If you have survived the pandemic without going inside a Covid ward, you will likely be stunned by the grim intimacy of this scene and the fact that you are witnessing it, with real-time urgency, in Matthew Heinemans new documentary, The First Wave. The scene offersthe kind of life-and-death drama that medical staffs have staggered through every daywhile the rest of us rarely or never saw it. We were and are isolated from the traumatic realities inside U.S. hospitals as more than 750,000 souls perished from the virus.

Thisopening scene, not yet 30 seconds long, twists in ways you cannot forget.

A nurse puts a phone, encased in a plastic bag, in front of Georges face. On the other end, seeing him via FaceTime, is Georges wife.

I love you, baby, she cries out.

I love you too, George responds.

OK, be strong.

Bye, George says.

I love you, she repeats.

Bye bye, George says. Bye bye bye bye bye bye.

Thisscene is not done with us but I wont say what happens next. What I can say is that The First Wave is necessary to watch. Unless you have already seen and heard the kinds of events it shows, you have an incomplete understanding of the pandemic and of what three-quarters of a million deaths mean when instead of astatisticin a news story, the casualtiesare a man on his back, his wife on the phone, and the nurses and doctors doing everything they can to save his life.

The saving grace of this film, if thats the right way to put it, is that it journeys aroundthe epidemiological trenches at this New York City hospital and brings back a variety of stories, some of them uplifting, and they thread into an effective narrative. There are patients who seem on the verge of death and struggle back, there are family members urging them along on those plastic-encased phones, and there are medical staffers whose trauma-filled work is getting the attention it deserves in our less troubled lives.

It sounds strange to say, but there is art in this film too. The way the camera lingers just long enough at the right moments and not too long at others, the way the lifted brow of a nurse speaks louder than words, the way the film breaks out ofLong Island Jewish and moves into the streets of New York City, taking us from the gasps of Covid patients to the I Cant Breathe chants of the Black Lives Matter movement this is masterful work.

Heineman is no stranger to documentaries. He directed the Academy Award-nominated Cartel Land, about the drug trade on the U.S.-Mexico border. He also directed City of Ghosts, an award-winning film about citizen journalists in Raqqa, Syria. Those films demonstrated a willingness and ability to work in dangerous areas and gain the confidence of people who otherwise might not let an outsider into their worlds. Those talents are what went into the making of The First Wave.

Heineman used his experience and contacts to gain unparalleled access to Long Island Jewish. Across the U.S., hospitalswere shutting their doors to journalists as the pandemic began. Only a handful gained entry, and their visits were short, usually just a few hours or a few days at most. Heinemans team was at Long Island Jewish for months. Hospital administrators have cited safety and privacy concerns for keeping journalists out, but as Heinemans experience showed, they could work insideCovid wards without getting in anyones way or spreading the virus.

Thats what makes the footage in his documentary so extraordinary. I worked for months on an investigative article that delved into the way hospitals cracked down onreporters in the U.S., and I spent a lot of that time scouring through theimagery that was published by journalists, including filmmakers,and bymedical staffers (some hospitals even threatened doctors and nurses who shared photos or videos). Ive seen nothing that comes close to Heinemans graphic portrayal of Covid victims.

The onlyvisual documentation of the pandemic thats in the same league comes from far away. Thedirector Hao Wu, working with Chinese journalists in early 2020, got relatively unfettered access to four hospitals in Wuhan, where thevirus originated. His powerful documentary, 76 Days, came out last year and won an Emmy. Until the emergence of Heinemans film, which opened Friday, Americans who wanted a visceral look inside a Covidward had to watch a film shot in China.

It is hard to categorize The First Wave because it crosses boundaries: It is a documentary thatalso feels like a horror film, an expos of social injustice, and a love letter. In its review of The First Wave, the Washington Post has a line that manages to be insightful and off-kilter at the same time. The film feels like a viscerally effective time capsule from the recent past, wrote Michael OSullivan, yet one whose arrival in theaters may still be too soon for many.

A time capsule is filled with the familiar objects of a civilization. But whats in The First Wave is unfamiliar to most of us; we have not seen it before and perhaps have been unable to imagine it. There is the anguish ofpatients as theylaborto breathe, themedicalinstruments warning of hearts no longer beating, the body bags zipped up and hauled away, and the moments of silence beforenurses rush to the next room to try to save another life. Stumbling onto this time capsule, we arevisitors from another world who are seeing for the first time whatthe Covid pandemic really meant.

This film has not come too soon. It has come too late.

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The First Wave Shows What We Haven't Seen of Covid-19 - The Intercept