![]() Then she climbed into the lime-green cab of her 15-ton truck, squeezed into the middle seat between two of her co-workers, pulled on a white mask and rode toward a neighborhood of seven-figure rowhouses on Capitol Hill. So, after French parked her car, she retrieved a pink Victoria’s Secret hoodie and slid on an extra pair of gloves. That’s why she decided to think as little as possible about the deadly virus consuming the nation and its capital city - her city. But would she have to risk her life to keep it? She didn’t know who would care for her son, a first-grader, if she got sick, or worse. ![]() Now she made $45,000 a year, and French was proud of that salary. She remembered what it felt like to lose a job, to apply for unemployment. French, 27, was a single mom with rent to pay. Octavia French, pulling into the lot just then from her nearby apartment, didn’t want to hear those stories. His father said the Navy veteran, a diabetic, had a fiancee and a 5-year-old son. Just three hours earlier, he had learned that his only child, named after him, had died in a Detroit hospital. “I just want to let y’all know this is serious, you know what I’m saying? I just lost my son this morning with coronavirus,” said Thomas Fields Sr., 51, as dozens of eyes turned toward him. Monday, a bearded man in dark-rimmed glasses raised his hand. On the edge of the crowd at the parking lot, just before 6 a.m. (Erin Patrick O'Connor/The Washington Post) Sanitation workers in Washington, D.C., keep the city running by emptying trash and recycle bins, but are now exposed to the coronavirus every day they go to work.
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