In late March, Jason Hargrove, a public bus driver in Detroit, posted a live Facebook video about a woman coughing on his bus several times without covering her mouth.
“That lets me know that some folks don’t care,” he said, in an emotional live stream. “You all need to take this shit seriously. There’s folks dying out here.”
Less than two weeks later, he died of coronavirus, Detroit’s mayor announced in a press conference on Thursday.
The president of the local transit union told the Detroit Free Press that Hargrove had started feeling sick just a few days after he posted the video. Hargrove’s death “should touch everyone in the country”, Mayor Mike Duggan said. “Everyone in Detroit and everybody in America should watch it,” he said of Hargrove’s video. “I don’t know how you can watch it and not tear up.”
The mayor pledged to extend additional safety protection measures to all public bus drivers, similar to ones already in place for the city’s police officers and firefighters.
In his 21 March Facebook live video, recorded outside and inside a bus, Hargrove, visibly shaken, describes a female passenger in her 40s or 50s who coughed “four or five” times on the bus without attempting to cover her mouth.
“I feel violated,” he said. “I feel violated for the folks that were on the bus when this happened.”
There were at least eight or nine passengers on the bus while the woman was coughing, he said, and she made no attempt to cover her mouth. There was no excuse for that kind of carelessness, he said. “They’re telling you every day what to do: if you cough, cough in your arm. Sneeze in some tissue,” he added.
“For us to get through this and get over this, man, you all need to take this shit seriously,” he warned.
He said in his live stream that he was not trying to blame anyone else – not the mayor, not the city, not the state of Michigan, not the president – except the woman who coughed. “It’s her fault,” he said.
Hargrove said he had tried to disinfect his bus afterwards, and promised that he would take off all his clothes and shower as soon as he got home so he wouldn’t bring the virus home to his family.
The day after Hargrove posted his video he updated his Facebook profile picture with an icon of a bus as a reminder that he was serving on the frontlines of the epidemic: “I cannot stay home,” it read. “I’m on the road 4 u.”
Michigan is emerging as one of America’s troubling coronavirus hotspots, with nearly 11,000 confirmed cases and more than 400 deaths as of Wednesday. The virus has taken a toll on many public employees in Detroit, including the city’s police chief. The mayor said on Thursday that 106 members of Detroit’s police department, and 24 members of the fire department, have tested positive for Covid-19, while hundreds more are in quarantine.
Public health data from the state of Michigan shows coronavirus is having a disproportionate toll on the state’s black residents. In a state where only 14% of the total population is black, at least 35% of people who have been confirmed to have coronavirus, and 40% of the dead, are black.
Four days before Hargrove’s live stream, Detroit’s public bus drivers had shut down most of the city’s bus service for the day to protest for safer conditions for themselves and their passengers.
In response to drivers’ concerns, the city announced on 17 March, the day of the protest, that all bus fares would be eliminated during the pandemic, that buses would be cleaned more regularly, that drivers would receive gloves and sanitary wipes, and that passengers would be required to board and exit at the back door of the bus, rather than the front door, directly by the drivers.
Duggan announced additional protections for bus drivers on Thursday, including daily temperature checks for drivers, closer health monitoring and the option for drivers with vulnerable family members at home to stay free of charge in a hotel room, so they would not put their families at risk.
Hargrove leaves behind a wife, the Amalgamated Transit Union said in a tribute to him on social media.
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