the care teams at LIJMC were indeed he-
roic. When met with a scene of New Yorkers
banging pots and pans at their windows in
celebration of health care workers, viewers
of this documentary may feel like joining in
anew. Such moments provide relief from the
film’s unflinching and intimate look at death,
suffering, and grief.
The film closes with the same imagery
with which it opened—the Manhattan sky-
line cloaked in a miasma. Notwithstanding
the rapid development of highly effective
vaccines in the interim, this closing vista
reminds viewers that the COVID-19 pan-
demic is still very much with us. Watch-
ing The First Wave also reminds us what is
at stake. j
10.1126/science.abn2200SCIENCE science.org 24 DECEMBER 2021 • VOL 374 ISSUE 6575 1567PHOTO: NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
By Robert S. KraussT
he opening shot of The First Wave is an
aerial view of New York City’s skyline
enshrouded by a miasma of low-lying
gray clouds. The ominous sensation
conjured is apt, as the film returns
viewers to March 2020, a time when
doctors and nurses were faced with great
unknowns as they cared for patients with
COVID-19 and New York’s hospitals were
stretched to the breaking point. Between
March and June, director Matthew Heine-
man and his team were granted extraor-
dinary access to Northwell Health’s Long
Island Jewish Medical Center (LIJMC) in
Queens, a location that was hit particularly
hard at the outset of the pandemic. The First
Wave brings viewers directly into the lives of
LIJMC doctors, nurses, and patients as they
navigated an acute public health crisis. The
film is distressing, graphic, heartbreaking,
and hopeful, and it is a must-see.
The First Wave proceeds chronologically,
documenting, as they unfolded, the travails
of health care teams, patients, and their fami-
lies. Two patients hit very hard by
COVID-19, Ahmed Ellis and Brussels
Jabon, are followed at length, and
their experiences provide a window
into the jarring ups and downs en-
countered during the course of the
disease and how care teams and
families endured the associated uncertainty
and anxiety.
Ellis, a Black 36-year-old school safety of-
ficer, was on a ventilator for a prolonged pe-
riod of time. His recuperation was buoyed by
steady and loving—albeit remote—communi-
cation with his wife and two young children
and by the dedication of those who cared for
him. Ellis develops a palpable bond with his
physical therapist, Karl Arabian, who banters
with him during his long recovery, eventually
prompting Ellis to make jokes of his own.
Meanwhile, Jabon—a nurse originally
from the Philippines—worked in the North-
well system and was 9 months pregnant
when she contracted COVID-19. Her baby
was delivered by emergency cesarean section
just before Jabon was placed on a ventilator.
Jabon lives in a multigenerational household,and her husband and parents are also nurses;
to ensure the safety of her newborn, the fam-
ily made the difficult decision to send him to
live with cousins.
As Ellis and Jabon slowly recover, small
things—the movement of a hand, a look of
alertness—loom large, and the nursing staff
develops hopeful customs that celebrate
progress and ease tension, such as playing
“Here Comes the Sun” whenever a
patient comes off a ventilator.
Another central figure in the film
is Nathalie Dougé, a first-generation
Haitian American physician born
and raised in the Bronx. Dougé’s
naturally upbeat presence is tested
by the nearly inexorable deaths of patients
whose families cannot be present at the hos-
pital. She proves resilient in the face of the
constraints of the time, taking joy in a sur-
prise Zoom birthday party organized by fam-
ily and friends. Nevertheless, the burden she
shoulders is made heavier by the fact that
people of color, many with backgrounds simi-
lar to her own, make up an outsized share of
those hospitalized and dying.
As the emotional toll on Dougé mounts,
the murder of George Floyd occurs, and
New York’s streets go from nearly deserted
in March to full of protesters in May. She
joins marches wearing a mask on which she
has printed “I can’t breathe,” words spoken
by both Mr. Floyd and many of her patients.
Nearing her own emotional limits on two
fronts, she still manages to bring her bedside
manner to the streets, talking down a pro-
tester confronting a police officer before the
altercation turns violent.
Despite their protestations to the contrary,A new film documents the fraught first days of the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City
The reviewer is at the Department of Cell,
Developmental, and Regenerative Biology, Icahn School
of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY 10029, USA.
Email: [email protected]SCIENCE & RACEDispatches from the front lines
COVID-19The First Wave
Matthew Heineman,
director
Neon, 2021.
93 minutesPODCASTThe First Wave follows health care workers and patients grappling with COVID-19 in the spring of 2020.The idea of race is rooted in historical conceptions
about identity and human diff erence. It has changed
over time and is likely to continue to change. In the nal
episode of our series on science and race, Tade Thomp-
son discusses his novel Rosewater, which imagines a
future society with a radically new understanding of
humanity that is still grappling with the cultural lega-
cies of racism and colonialism.
https://scim.ag/3EGErwo
10.1126/science. abn0868Rosewater
Tade Thompson
Orbit, 2018.
432 pp.