Get Sick Or Starve: How A Deep Cleaner Is Surviving The Pandemic
Photography by Rachel Woolf
Ezzie Dominguez estimates she gets around two hours of sleep every night.
The 38-year-old wakes up each morning at 6 a.m. to head to her first job as a building manager at a local nonprofit in Denver. She’s been designated an essential worker, making her the only employee who is still coming into her office during the coronavirus outbreak.
Afterward, she usually gets a few hours at home to nap and spend time with her husband and two sons before she heads out to her second job as a contract emergency deep cleaner for a large cleaning company. Dominguez, an immigrant from Mexico, says she cleans six to eight buildings seven days a week, including office buildings, airports and even hospitals ― many of which, she suspects, have been exposed to the coronavirus.
When she finally gets home from her deep cleaning job, she sanitizes everything inside and outside of her car. She strips down and puts her clothes in a bucket that she keeps by her front door to be washed immediately. Sometimes, she’s so tired she simply throws them in the garbage. In the shower, she scrubs her entire body ― praying she hasn’t been exposed to the coronavirus and is unknowingly giving it to her children.
Her head usually hits the pillow sometime around 4 a.m.
Before the coronavirus pandemic, Dominguez and her husband were making enough to keep them afloat. She used to work as a house cleaner on the weekends and she nannied two children in the evenings after her building management job on the weekdays. But all of her house cleaning and nannying clients have stopped offering work.
Now, Dominguez feels even more overwhelmed as the coronavirus spreads and she tries to survive. She’s immunocompromised — she beat cancer four times and has been in remission for only six months. She’s now the sole breadwinner in her family. Her few moments of downtime are spent contemplating the hardest decision of her life: Get sick or starve.
“I know that I’m...
