President Trump held a news conference with the White House coronavirus task force on Thursday.

What happened when the coronavirus struck a conservative New Orleans suburb.

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As someone who has covered climate change, I’ve long been interested in the intersection of the political and the personal. So I was hoping to find someone who could help me show what that intersection looks like in the time of the coronavirus, when the early dismissiveness of conservative politicians and pundits may well have put a large number of lives at risk.

I found Heaven Frilot’s story through a mutual friend on Facebook. On March 14, she posted that her husband, Mark, had tested positive for the virus — something she felt compelled to share, she wrote, after “seeing a lot of posts about people taking this virus lightly and joking about it.”

In the conservative suburbs of New Orleans, many understood the coronavirus through the lens of Fox News or Rush Limbaugh. On social media, they wrote off the virus as part of a Democratic plot to take down the president. Then someone they knew contracted it, someone who wasn’t supposed to contract it (Mark is 45 years old and otherwise healthy), and perspectives began to change.