watch me play "fortnite" until my wife gets mad. i'll see you there. good evening. thanks for joining us. the pandemic has exposed many truths in the u.s. but it'sle also revealed this uy fact. if you are a person of color, you are far more likely to contract covid-19 and die from it. tonight we begin a three-night special event where "nightline" will examine all the complexities across the nation and begin in new york city. the epicenter, the bronx. >> you see people every day. and then all of a sudden somebody's not there. >> from front line workers to families, all fighting to survive. how hard is it to socially distance in an apartment with six children? >> it is impossible. >> how decades of racial

disparity and poverty are fueling the outbreak. plus, one on one with new york congresswoman, alexandria ocasio-cortez. how she plans to fight against inequality during the pandemic. even clashing over ideas within the democratic party. >> are you a lone democrat, voting against the c.a.r.e.s act. what was your rationale? >> this is a special edition of "nightline," pri "nightline," pandemic, a nation divided. >> transit runs 24/7, seven days a week. can't stay home. buses don't drive themselves. >> first light has yet to break. but at this bus depot in the south bronx, wayne lasarti has already been behind the wheel for hours, shouldering a heavier work load since the coronavirus. >> these extra buses running to compensate for the four hours subways aren't running. so i pick up a trip from 2:00 to 5:00.

>> his bread and butter, shuttling essential workers across new york city at all hours, now a covid front line. >> we're all putting our lives out there. if you were going to tell me that we were going to have a pandemic in 2020 and you're going to be out there and you could very possibly die, would i have signed up for it? i don't think anybody would have signed up for that. but we did. and we're here, and we're working. we got to do what you need to do. >> welcome to the bronx. >> this is a community full of richness and history. we are deliciously loud here. we are extremely festive. >> the northern most of five new york city boroughs, separated from manhattan by bridges and tunnels. home to yankee stadium, the bronx zoo and nearly 1.5 million new yorkers, many essential workers.

>> before covid-19, the bronx was known as the forest borough. it's now the essential borough. >> workers who didn't have a choice to shelter in place often people of color, earning low wages. and now this grim reality. the highest rate of covid-19 deaths. the epicenter of the epicenter. the bronx is the poorest borough, with a historically disenfranchised latino and black majority. twice as likely to die from covid than anywhere else in the city. >> hardly an accident that the bronx has become the epicenter. >> deadly pathogen exposing the stark divide of race and class. the haves and the have-nots. >> hey, baby girl. can you dig? sure, can you dig.

go inside. >> in the southeast bronx, community organizer, tonya fields has cultivated an urban farm where she and her six children and neighbors grow everything from herbs to fruit trees. >> here is an apple tree. >> even raising chickens. >> clockwise, counter clockwise. little bit of -- >> tonya's preparing to distribute fresh produce to her neighbors. weeks after recovering from covid-19. >> thomas, ball, inside, please. >> i got i have, very sick for about three weeks. unproductive cough. fever of 101. body aches and chills. >> within days, the virus stormed through the three-bedroom apartment shared by her family. how hard is it to socially distance in an apartment with six children. >> impossible. it is impossible. i was wearing a mask in my house, almost 24/7. i tried to stay out of common areas like the kitchen. but it's difficult. my eldest daughter who is 17,

college bound, she got the sickest of all my children. my 16-year-old who's chronically asthmatic was wheezing and having a lot of problems breathing. >> you refer to yourself as a cash-poor black woman. >> mm-hm. >> yet you're spending your money on these fruits and vegetables. >> yes. >> why. >> as someone who raised my children on welfare, i have been able to gain some things that some of my neighbors have not. i'm a college graduate and fought tooth and nail to raise two children and claw my way to graduate. so while i don't even make $30,000 a year, i am able to provide this to my community. >> are you worried that people in your neighborhood are going to go hungry during covid? >> people in my neighborhood have already been going hungry.

>> the south bronx is ground zero for racially concentrated poverty. >> even before the pandemic, hunger was no stranger here. one in six residents experiencing food insecurity in 2018. >> one of those and one of these. >> much of my job is to ensure that they have access to food. i've never seen just a more overwhelming sense of desperation in my district. >> a city divided is an adage that's long held true for richie torres, city councilman. >> god bless you. >> we want to provide people with a warm meal, groceries, a mask. and water. >> he, too, recently recovered from covid-19. si nstuts has meant seeing a little less face. >> i can't recognize anyone with a mask. >> i know. >> youngest ever elected to new york city council at 25 now 32 and running to represent the poorest congressional district

in the country, vowing to improve public housing. >> i felt that public housing had become the forgotten city. i could advocate from a place of experience. i grew up hire hat at 2761. apartment 2apartment. my maternal family has been living here for two generations. my grandmother moved here, one of the first puerto ricans. hey, ma. love you. >> love you more, love you more. >> my mother is 60, has hypertension. so you have to maintain distance from your own loved ones for their own protection. >> her hypertension, one of the many invisible ties bonding poverty to poor health. this borough, home to waste treatment facilities and tucked between highways that for decades gave rise to unforgiving health consequences.

children here twice as likely to be hospitalized with asthma. than their counter parts just across the river. you were diagnosed with asthma at the age of 8. >> yes. when you live in conditions of mold and mildew and vermin, those are known triggers for asthma. i was repeatedly hospitalized as a child. >> poverty takes a toll on the body. >> the difference in life expectancy between the south bronx and manhattan is ten years. poverty is poison. [ speaking in foreign language ] >> for two decades, dr. ramon has been seeing patients from immigrant communities. his team one of the few lifelines to predominantly spanish-speaking patients. when the testing was slow to come, they took action. now partnering with the state to add 28 additional sites. >> from the beginning, we've been crying to get testing in our community, but we did it ourself.

we put out the line. a lot of money, the doctors, to ourself, and we want to continue for our own people. >> the doctor says his patients are more likely to be uninsured than the national average and can no longer be ignored. >> once you know what's going on for the people who are in the front line, like us, are you going to pay attention to us? that's different. that's negligent. >> many in this community often the last to be helped have been the first to be called to work. lasarti drives the same streets his father did. >> he drove for 23 years. i would ride the buses with him, just kind of people watch. and it was very interesting, you know, as a kid. >> but the onset of the outbreak transformed his outlook. >>we were very, very scared.

there's no line of defense out there. you're on the bus with ten, 15, 20, 60 people. i felt like i was a sitting duck. >> lasarti says many of his colleagues called out sick and soon he received word that one of his drivers from his very depot passed away from covid-19. >> shocking. shocking. you see people every day. and then all of a sudden somebody's not there. for a day, two days, a week goes by, and then we got word that he was sick. and he was out. and he ended up passing. >> veteran driver, leon mcknight was 49 years old, a father of five who loved to talk about his children. he's one of more than 120 new york city transit workers who have lost their lives to the coronavirus. protections for new york city

bus drivers have improved. >> there were barriers put up. they did start providing us with masks. the buses that are coming in being sanitized every night. >> but fears of contracting the virus are never too far. >> am i still nervous now? we all are. we have a lot of people that we move, and there's some people that come on with no mask. they're coughing, and it's only getting worse out there. more and more people are out riding these buses. >> and yet determined to do his part for the city that never sleeps. >> i'm going to keep working until god forbid something happens. >> when we come back, one on one with alexandra ocasio-cortez. why she calls poverty and inequality preexisting conditions in the time of covid-19.

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earlier today, i got a chance to speak with congresswoman, alexandria ocasio-cortez, a frequent lightning rod.

for the right, advocating against racial and economic inequalities during the pandemic. >> out of the top tens of codes that have been impacted by covid, five of them are here. it was one part tragic, but on the other part, it actually wasn't as shocking. >> alexandria ocasio-cortez, at 30, the youngest woman to ever serve in congress, representing one of the most diverse districts in the country. >> we're just a bridge over from manhattan, yet, we have twice the infection rate. >> the bronx native knows the added burdens that fall on children of immigrants. when you graduated from college, cum laude, you came back to tend bar, wait tables, why? >> my dad had passed away while i was in college. my mom was a single mom, also a domestic worker. we were barely clinging onto our house. >> poverty correlates with a lot of these problems, hypertension,

diabetes, what should be done about these systemic inequalities? >> inequality and poverty are of themselves preexisting conditions. when you don't have health insurance and you're scared to go to the doctor, your decisions around your own health become primarily financial decisions. and it becomes gambling, and so, you know, we talk about what the solutions to systemic inequality is, it needs to be systemic solutions. >> a hero to the left, a villain to the right. her progressive views igniting controversy. this march, when even congress was united, she voted against the massive covid-19 relief bill. >> you were a lone democrat voting against the c.a.r.e.s act. what was your rationale? >> knowing that it had a half trillion dollars that would be leveraged to $4 trillion to a bailout for wall street with virtually no strings attached

that would be preferenced to the wealthiest, i knew that that bill was not structured to solve our biggest problems that we had. >> she gets plenty of attacks from the president on twitter, but that doesn't stop her from speaking her mind. >> he's virulently fighting. against health care protections for immigrants. he's made people afraid to go to the doctor because they're afraid i.c.e. will pick them up in the er. you have all of these workers that we rely on. few of them are getting tested and the help that they need but still going to work because they so economically desperate. >> your mom drove a school bus, cleaned houses. what does an essential worker mean to you? >> any person in this country that is helping keep the lights on and helping us live day by day, whether it is the farm workers picking the food, an mta

bus driver. the great irony of essential workers is that they have typically been underpaid, under-recognized and undervalued in our economy, and if there's one thing that i hope that this crisis shows us is that our essential workers deserve so much more. >> many companies are reportedly ending hazard pay at the end of this month or in the next few months. how does losing two or three dollars an hour impact these workers? >> it's shocking. they're saying okay we're taking away hazard pay, covid is over. not a single public health official would say that. $2 is everything to a worker that is choosing between milk and their prescription drugs. $2 an hour means the world to workers. it means nothing to jeff bezos. so why don't we just give folks the actual wages that they deserve. >> with congress not in session and the economy of her district

in tatters, alexandria ocasio-cortez has been on the ground focussed on her constituents. do you think enough was done to protect essential workers? >> enough wasn't done. i don't think we can look at this crisis, i don't think we can look at the numbers and say that we have done enough. >> what do you think sh required to sort of comprehensively fight covid? >> we need free testing, whether you're insured or uninsured. why shouldn't health care be treated as a human right in any condition? >> and what do you think, now that covid has exposed those divisions? >> it's kind of like a fork in the road where on one end we can say everyone around us is dangerous. or disagrees with us. we could take the other path and realize that covid doesn't care if you're rich. it doesn't care if you're poor. it doesn't care if you're

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and tomorrow night in part two of our three-night special, byron pitts takes us to mississippi, the poorest and blackest state in the nation where we meet some of the most vulnerable caught up in the racial divide of the pandemic. thanks for staying up with us, goodnight, america. pandemic. thanks for staying up with us, goodnight, america. ♪ ba, da, ba, da, ba, da, ba, da, ba, da, ba, da, ♪ jimmy kimmel live! this is ridiculous, from his house. >> jimmy: hello and thank you for joining my quaran-ted talk. i'm jimmy, the ol' hermit from up in the hills. we are in week nine thousand of

lockdown. of stay-at-home. people are getting restless craving other human beings. and i want to address something that i believe may be the cardinal sin of quarantine. maybe you have experienced this. it's the random unannounced drop-by. a friend calls you says, "hey, i'm pulling up in front of your house. come outside and say hello." and what are you gonna do? you're trapped. they know you're in there not doing anything. there's no getting away. so you put on pants and a mask and you go out in front and you have a weird, muffled conversation next to your mailbox for eight minutes. that has to stop. and while we're at it, family zoom calls? let's max those out at 12 minutes. 12 minutes. there's nothing going on you can't cover in 12 minutes. at that point you say, "okay, zip it, grandma, we've heard enough!" here in los angeles county officials have announced that they are hoping to open things up by the 4th of july. the way it'll work is everyone