UNIDENTIFIED PERSON, BYLINE: This is PLANET MONEY from NPR.

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ROBERT SMITH, HOST:

I remember the last normal day I had - March 12, 2020. And I remember it so vividly because I spent most of it in a studio recording this lighthearted episode with Sarah Gonzalez about the strange new coronavirus and how everyone was dealing with it. We never played the episode, but here's just a taste from four months ago.

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SARAH GONZALEZ, HOST:

Like, not touching your face - turns out it's impossible to do.

SMITH: Or finding sanitizer or just going to work with your colleagues or public transportation.

GONZALEZ: Or even cleaning your hands properly. Most of us have been doing it wrong.

SMITH: You have never heard this episode because, by the time we finished recording it - by the end of the day even - it seemed like everything had changed. Cities shut down. The stock market plunged. Tom Hanks announced that he had the virus. The episode felt out of date by the time we left the studio, and we just put it on a shelf and forgot about it. But I think about that episode a lot because, at the very end, Sarah and I were talking about hand sanitizer, and I did something that I haven't done since.

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SMITH: Maybe for the last time in my life, I feel confident to do a high-five (laughter).

GONZALEZ: Oh. No...

SMITH: All right, the last high-five.

GONZALEZ: I don't know. I don't know. All right, let's do it.

SMITH: We're finally sterilized.

GONZALEZ: (Laughter).

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SMITH: The last high-five. It was also the last day I rode the subway, the last day in the office, the last day recording in a studio with another human being. In the four months since that, so much has happened - so many deaths, the worst economic collapse of our lifetimes. And we're still in the middle of it. But we wanted to stop for a moment, as a show, and take a look at what we've been through and how much of our lives have changed in such a short period of time.

(SOUNDBITE OF LE FAT CLUB'S "IBIZA POOL PARTY")

SMITH: Hello, and welcome to PLANET MONEY. I'm Robert Smith. Usually, we wait until the end of the year to do a special episode we call The Rest of the Story, where we check in on the people we met that year and find out how they're doing. We're going to do that show a little early this year because so much has happened so fast. Today on the show, we're going to go back over the episodes that we did about COVID and report the rest of the story. We'll track where the money went, who got it and who didn't, and we'll check in on some of the people we profiled over the last few months - the unemployed, the business owners, the nurses and the man who manufactured a tiny piston to save lives.

(SOUNDBITE OF LE FAT CLUB'S "IBIZA POOL PARTY")

SMITH: Some of the economic changes in the last four months have been staggering - tens of millions of people unemployed, bankruptcies skyrocketing. But just as extraordinary has been the response to this challenge.

Congress moved faster than anyone thought possible to provide $3 trillion in relief, money that went to states and hospitals and businesses but also to individuals - checks for $1,200, a $600 a week boost for unemployment checks across the country. So much money, in fact, that when you look at the charts, the total personal income in the United States went up. Income was higher than it was before the crisis, even with so many people not working. Those benefits are expiring in a week, and Congress is debating what to do next. A lot is on the line. So we wanted to take this moment to follow up with the people we profiled over the last four months and to see how they're doing.

First up, small businesses. Part of that $3 trillion package went straight to businesses with fewer than 500 employees. It was called the Paycheck Protection Program.

NICK FOUNTAIN, BYLINE: PPP.

SMITH: The PPE. That is Nick Fountain who's with me now.

FOUNTAIN: It's true.

SMITH: Nick and I interviewed a bunch of business owners who were applying for these loans from the federal government. They would eventually be turned into grants if they kept their employees. And we traveled out to Queens to meet one person in particular.

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AUDRA FORDIN: My name is Audra Fordin. I am the fourth generation and first female to take ownership of my family's auto repair shop here in Flushing, Queens, N.Y. It's called Great Bear.

FOUNTAIN: Yeah. And, Robert, just to remind people about Audra, we talked to her during the middle of New York's shutdown. And her business was pretty much devastated. She does car repair, but nobody was driving. So the amount of money her business was bringing in had gone down 75%. And she'd been talking with her employees about how she might have to lay them off or furlough them. She didn't really know what. But as a last-ditch effort, she applied for this PPP loan. And she asked for $25,000. And last we heard from her, she had been approved for the loan, but she hadn't gotten it yet.

SMITH: And there was a little bit of drama at the end of the episode because the rollout of this PPP plan by the federal government, it was an absolute mess. The computers were crashing. Nobody knew the rules. It was first-come, first-served, so there was a limited amount of money, and everyone was desperately, like, refreshing the site, refreshing the site, trying to get through to get these loans.

FOUNTAIN: And after we published the episode, things got a little smoother the computer system was worked out. Congress put more money into the program. But this other problem arose, which was that it turned out that people who had, you know, banking relationships, people who knew their banker and had them on speed dial, were the most likely to get those early loans. And some people without those relationships kind of just gave up. And so now when we look at the data - we actually have a lot of the data now - we can see that richer neighborhoods got more of these loans per capita than poor neighborhoods and Black and brown neighborhoods.

SMITH: Absolutely. And if you've followed Twitter any amount over the last few months, you know there's also been this backlash against businesses who took the loans.

FOUNTAIN: People have strong feelings on the Internet about who got PPP money. That is an understatement.

SMITH: Well, there was this whole, like, you shouldn't have taken the money; I deserved the money. And then other people would be like, no, you shouldn't take the money. And the thing that really typified this was the Ayn Rand Institute, named after, of course, the famous author and philosopher Ayn Rand, who talked about the power of the individual and who railed against government handouts. Well, the organization named after her asked for a government handout.

FOUNTAIN: And, Robert, you and I have been sort of sending these articles back-and-forth - like, ah, ha-ha, Ayn Rand Institute got it. But all these articles really missed the point of the program, which was to get as much money into business owners' hands as quickly as possible so that they could keep people on the payroll. And at least for Audra, when I talked to her this week, that seems to have happened.

SMITH: Yes. You called Audra back. Tell me everything.

FOUNTAIN: Well, we FaceTimed. And quick side note - she was wearing one of those masks - have you seen these? People send in a photo of them smiling, and it's printed...

SMITH: No.

FOUNTAIN: ...On the mask.

SMITH: No.

FOUNTAIN: And so it's just very weird.

Hey, Audra.

FORDIN: Hi there, Nick.

FOUNTAIN: You at the shop?

FORDIN: Yes.

FOUNTAIN: How you been?

FORDIN: We're doing OK. You know, as far as - I guess you're asking with the PPE...

FOUNTAIN: Not the PPE, but the PPP.

FORDIN: PPP.

FOUNTAIN: I see that you're set with the PPE. You've got the mask. You've got the gloves. How about the PPP?

FORDIN: The PPP came through great. I got the money. It was timely.

SMITH: She got the money.

FOUNTAIN: Yeah. She asked for $25,000. She got all of it. And she says that it's been a huge help because business isn't actually at full strength yet, and despite that, she's been able to keep her whole team together.

FORDIN: There's a community that happened, and I can't make that up - the relationships.

FOUNTAIN: Yeah. It seems like you have such an awesome team, and it would've been such - so heartbreaking to lose any of those guys. And you didn't have to.

FORDIN: Well, not that I didn't have to. I chose not to.

SMITH: This is one example of a team that was able to stay together, which is good, which is exactly what this program was meant for.

FOUNTAIN: Yes, totally.

Are people working in the - on the floor right now? You want to...

FORDIN: You want to say hi to Cedric?

FOUNTAIN: Sure.

Robert, you remember Cedric Kang (ph), her lead mechanic, the guy who showed us all those drills?

SMITH: Yeah. (Imitating drill) - yeah. We recorded drills for 10 minutes, yeah.

FOUNTAIN: So many drills.

FORDIN: I'm sure he'll be happy to hear from you, too.

FOUNTAIN: Anyways, I got to talk to him for a second.

CEDRIC KANG: Hi, Nick. How are you?

FOUNTAIN: Hey, Cedric. What's going on?

KANG: All right. Not much. I have very good news for - you know, with my wife. We got a quarantine baby.

FOUNTAIN: You're having a baby?

KANG: Yeah, yeah.

FORDIN: Yeah.

FOUNTAIN: That's awesome.

SMITH: Such a happy ending. Thanks, Nick.

FOUNTAIN: You bet.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAWRENCE WONG'S "EYES ON YOU")

SMITH: The last four months were obviously hard for businesses that shut down. But in some ways, it was worse for the employees of the businesses that had to stay open. Those workers were essential. They weren't going to get fired, so no unemployment checks. And they had to show up for work in the middle of a pandemic. Sarah Gonzalez profiled some of those workers. Hey, Sarah.

GONZALEZ: Hey, Robert.

SMITH: Sarah, you visited a grocery store because you had to 'cause you were doing a story about grocery workers.

GONZALEZ: Yeah, essential workers.

SMITH: Tell us what the story was.

GONZALEZ: So about three months ago, I spent a morning at a grocery store in North Carolina with essential workers. And just to, like, remind listeners, this was a grocery store where everyone was a person of color, and mostly the people working there were women. I don't know if you guys remember this.

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FATIMA PAVON: Oh, no white people work here. No. We do have, you know, a little bit of everything except white people, yeah.

GONZALEZ: That was Fatima Pavon (ph). She works at Compare Foods supermarket. And when we spoke in April, she was trying to bring herself to ask for a raise because her job had gotten a lot riskier than she signed up for with the virus.

SMITH: And that was one of those interesting things about this story, is normally when a job is riskier, you get paid more for it. But in this case, no one had gotten a raise yet.

GONZALEZ: Yeah, no hazard pay. And Fatima made $9.20 an hour, which came out to about $300 a week.

SMITH: Which, we should say, is a lot less than she would've made if she had been fired and put on unemployment. Sarah, you called her back. What did she say?

GONZALEZ: Yeah, we checked in this week.

Hey, Fatima.

PAVON: Hey. How are you?

GONZALEZ: Hey. I'm good. How are you?

PAVON: Good.

GONZALEZ: So I was just curious what's going on with you.

PAVON: Nothing. I'm still at the - at my job. Only thing new is - so I got a raise.

GONZALEZ: You got a raise?

PAVON: Yeah. Yeah.

Read the original here:

Rest of the Story, Pandemic Edition : Planet Money - NPR