(soft music) - [Michelle] Tonight we meet Rhode Islanders struggling with long COVID.

- It's the random, sporadic pains.

It could be in my arm one day, It could be at the bottom of my feet.

- [Michelle] Then, the existential crisis surrounding UMass Dartmouth's brutalist architecture.

- What words do you hear students use to describe the buildings here?

- Um, spaceship, um, alien.

- And why Governor Dan McKee says voters should keep him in office for four more years with Ted Nesi.

(gentle music) (gentle music continues) Good evening and welcome to "Rhode Island PBS Weekly."

I'm Michelle San Miguel.

- And I'm Pamela Watts.

We begin tonight with a sobering anniversary.

- This week marks five years since the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic.

The virus has killed more than 7 million people worldwide.

Many have tried to move on with their lives, but for those suffering from long COVID, also known as long haulers, it's been difficult.

Much about the condition remains a mystery.

According to the Mayo Clinic, more than 200 symptoms have been linked to long COVID.

Tonight, Rhode Islanders living with this chronic condition, described the toll it's taking on their lives.

When we first met Liany Santos back in 2022 as she was dealing with the effects of long COVID.

- You look at me, you think, oh, she's just, she's fine.

There's nothing going on.

And it's like, a little do you know my back is like on fire right now.

- We met again recently at her home in Providence.

Three years later, how are you doing?

How are you feeling?

- I'm feeling better, still with some residual effects.

The big famous cough, that just doesn't go.

Body pains that were not there from before.

Literally they did come right after the COVID.

- [Michelle] While many have tried to forget about the pandemic, Santos says she is reminded daily how it's upended her life.

- It's like the constant soreness throughout my body.

It's like, I can feel it in my back, I can feel it in my knees.

It's just pushing through the pain on a daily basis.

- The most debilitating symptoms continue to be that I like, just can't even stand without issue.

- [Michelle] Ti Dinh spends most of her time at home in Providence where she likes to knit.

Getting up to do just about anything has been a challenge since last summer.

Soon after getting COVID, she began experiencing an onslaught of symptoms.

- For about a week after I had recovered.

I got, yeah, like a debilitating, like a light intolerance where I would just get really dizzy and faint if I saw any light.

- [Michelle] Dinh says the light intolerance is so severe she constantly wears sunglasses, even at home with the shades drawn.

She says her symptoms have changed over time making life more difficult.

- For a while it was more the light and some breathing issues and then I started getting kind of muscle issues where I just like was not able to really walk.

Standing was always an issue, I would fall.

- [Michelle] Dinh shared this video of her shaking uncontrollably as she tries to brush her teeth.

She says it usually happens at night, but on this day it carried over into the next morning.

- And I even only took that video because so many medical professionals are insisting on like more and more evidence to believe me.

- [Michelle] The causes of long COVID are still being investigated.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, studies have shown some groups of people are more likely to develop long COVID than others, including women, Hispanics and Latinos, and people who've experienced more severe COVID-19 illness.

- It can be frustrating because it is a long process sometimes by which to get that diagnosis.

- [Michelle] Brandon Theroux is a physical therapist at Spalding Outpatient Center of Kent Hospital in East Greenwich.

He understands the challenges many long COVID patients experience, especially since there's no way to test if a person's symptoms are caused by long COVID.

- A lot of times we'll go through a lot of testing and for a long period of time that may ultimately not give them any specific results or might not give them any more information than they had before.

- [Michelle] Theroux works with patients who have long COVID.

Many of them were referred by their primary care physicians - On people's first day here, you know, we'll do a little more exploring and try to make a more specific diagnosis.

Try to identify what limitations or impairments they might have and ask them what their goals are and what their, you know, hope is to return to, or what we can do to make their life a little easier or better.

- From there, Theroux will measure different baselines like motion and strength and help patients establish a plan to return to their prior level.

What has been the most challenging part of treating patients who have long COVID?

- I think the most challenging thing is, especially for the individuals, is that a lot of times it takes a long time.

- [Michelle] Santos received physical therapy several years ago and says it helped her regain her strength.

She recently went back for treatment.

- I want to get better physically, but it's just so tough.

The breathing and pairing with like the knee problems are, it's really tough.

- [Michelle] It's been a struggle since April of 2021.

That's when Santos was placed in a medically induced coma at Rhode Island Hospital with COVID-19.

At the time, she was five months pregnant.

- Doctors wanted to take me off of the life support.

They did not believe I would survive.

They did not think that I would make it through it.

My family completely opposed it, you know, my husband definitely opposed it, and I thank God they held on longer because I did, I pulled through.

- [Michelle] Santos was in a coma for a month and a half.

When she woke up, she learned she had given birth to her daughter.

Charlotte lived for eight days and passed away while Santos was still in a coma.

- I feel like she gave up her spot so that I would still be here, and we just need to take care of ourselves and a lot better.

And I'm sorry, I still get emotional over that, but she was a trooper and she fought as hard as she could and she allowed me to be here, but she allowed my body to heal.

She allowed it and if she was there, it made it harder because my body would've been fighting for two as opposed to one.

- You feel like she saved your life?

- Oh, absolutely.

Absolutely.

- [Michelle] For Ti Dinh long COVID has been crippling.

She's currently on medical leave and says physical therapy would make her symptoms worse.

Her sedentary lifestyle is a different reality from what life was like before getting COVID.

At the time she was working in a metal shop shaping the material into different items.

But these days.

- I am completely dependent on care right now and sometimes I have to call specialists to see if they have cancellations that day to try to get in any sooner, 'cause some of their wait lists are like 10 months long and right now my watch is telling me that my heart rate is freaking out, which happens even when I'm knitting or just laying sometimes.

- [Michelle] Dinh sees several specialists and as part of a digital long COVID support group.

She says it's frustrating how some doctors have treated her.

- I've had those doctors too, where they're like, this is just anxiety.

Like, if you take these anxiety meds, you'll stand again.

You'll like walk again, which is just not true.

- [Michelle] Dinh says she's grateful to have a supportive partner and group of friends, but still, every day is a challenge.

- I'm getting a little, I'm getting emotional because I was supposed to go on my first home going trip to Vietnam with my family at the end of this month.

And I also was, yeah, I just, you know, it's just a lot of plans this year that we've had to cancel.

And a lot of people are like, don't worry, you can like, reschedule a flight for a year later.

And then I just, you know, I don't, I don't know how long this is gonna last.

- [Michelle] According to the World Health Organization, long COVID symptoms typically improve after four to nine months.

About 15 and 100 people still have symptoms at 12 months.

As for Santos, she's not dwelling on the difficult years she's endured.

She's focused on her recovery.

- Life does go on, can't stay stuck in the same place.

We gotta move forward.

That's how I feel about it.

Will I physically be the same?

Absolutely not.

Will I be the same mentally?

Absolutely not.

But we have to just keep moving forward.

I can't get stuck on yesterday when I already overcame it.

- Up next, brutalism is having a moment in the spotlight.

Adrian Brody just won the best actor Oscar for playing a tortured brutalist architect, and the film was also nominated for best picture.

In Washington, President Trump reissued an executive order deploring the raw concrete architecture.

Our Ben Burke brings us the story of an all brutalist college campus in southeastern Massachusetts where leaders are fighting to preserve this polarizing style.

(geese honking) - UMass Dartmouth is tucked away in the forest of an historic New England town, but the buildings here defy expectations of what college is supposed to look like.

What words do you hear students use to describe the buildings here?

- Um, spaceship, um, alien.

- [Ben] Elizabethe Plante is a social worker who helps students adjust to life on campus.

- [Elizabethe] The students you know, will say, this is unusual.

I don't know if they understand where it came from or brutal architecture, what that means.

(bell ringing) - [Ben] While some people find the architecture ugly and depressing, filmmaker Will Lepczyk sees it differently.

In his documentary "Concretetopia," Lepczyk captures what he calls UMass Dartmouth's intense beauty.

- [Narrator] Brutalism is perhaps the most striking brand of late modernism.

It's a style defined by imposing geometry, wrought in concrete.

- [Ben] Every building on the main green at UMass Dartmouth is made of concrete.

Concrete pillars support a skyline of concrete rooms.

Inside, hallways are lined with textured concrete.

They open up into tall atriums with angular staircases and hanging balconies.

Every inch of every building on the main green is a connected mega structure.

On a recent visit, I talked to students who found the architecture both interesting and confusing.

- People didn't like the campus that much.

They were like, compared it to a prison of sorts and like "Star Wars."

But I learned that the architect that built it actually worked on prisons and it actually was just kind of his like, style that he went with.

- It was built to be able to withstand the bomb during like a time of war.

- I'm not really sure, that's one of the things I heard about it.

- Apparently the guy that designed it had some interesting ideas.

He actually wanted to land flying cars on the roofs.

- I've heard that people thought he was like a satanist, because there's a couple benches right over there that if you look at 'em from like, an angle from over there, it's like 666.

- [Ben] The man who designed the campus, Paul Rudolph was neither a satanist nor a prison architect.

He was a brutalist.

The term comes from the French words for raw concrete (Ben speaking in French).

Rudolph helped pioneer the brutalist style we see in places like Boston City Hall and the Barber Can in London.

- My campus, which I showed you at the beginning of my remarks, this is part of the library.

- [Ben] That's Rudolph lecturing at the Southern California Institute of Architecture in 1995, two years before he died.

- [Rudolph] The whole campus is built out of a special concrete block, I forgot to say.

- [Ben] To better understand who Rudolph was and why his reputation is so complicated, (car horns honking) I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan.

So this is one of the ones that got demolished, isn't it?

- [Abraham] Yeah, this is, this was his first architectural office in New York.

- [Ben] Abraham Thomas recently curated a retrospective of Rudolph's work.

- I love how just, it's just an architectural office, but he already gives you a sense of his inventiveness.

Paul Rudolph was what I would consider a second generation modernist and one of the, you know, most successful architects of his time.

- [Ben] The exhibit showcases what some would call Rudolph's genius, for envisioning how concrete could change the way buildings look.

Many of these renderings for clients were never constructed, but his master plan for UMass Dartmouth was.

- I think he at the time said this was his most important project in terms of having complete control over the kind of urban planning and the kind of architectural sort of intentions behind that project.

- [Ben] In the 1960's, Rudolph was getting the kind of control he wanted, when the state of Massachusetts handed him 700 acres of farmland to build a technical institute.

It was meant to support the textile factories in nearby cities like Fall River and New Bedford.

But Rudolph and the school's founding president had a grander vision.

They imagined a university for the children of factory workers that would stand the test of time.

Rudolph saw concrete as an affordable way to build this campus on a monumental scale that echoed classical architecture.

But time has not always been kind to the campus.

Some of the concrete at UMass Dartmouth is now crumbling.

- I think concrete is not necessarily the easiest thing to maintain and reconfigure.

- [Ben] Chancellor Mark Fuller noticed this immediately when he got the university's top job four years ago.

- [Mark] Sometimes you'd walk down a hallway and there'd be a bucket, and when there was rain you know, that was catching water.

- [Ben] And there are other complications that come with maintaining Rudolph's mega structure.

David Gingerella is the head of facilities at the university.

- [David] All the stairs have a little bit of an overhang to them.

It's how he designed them.

Over a period of time they start cracking and sometimes the overhang cracks off a little bit.

- [Ben] And he says it's also hard to make these concrete structures energy efficient.

- On the inside of the buildings, we can't add insulation and then sheet rock over it because it loses the integrity of the building.

- [Ben] These challenges have left many institutions questioning whether it's even worth preserving brutalist architecture.

- They're all sort of kind of millstones around the next of these institutions that now steward these buildings.

- [Ben] Many of Rudolph's buildings have been demolished, including this one in North Carolina.

A housing project in Buffalo also met the wrecking ball, and so did Rudolph's own architectural office in Manhattan.

And while Rudolph's buildings at UMass Dartmouth are still standing, the university estimates it has about $660 million worth of maintenance needs.

- A lot of the things that have come due in terms of trying to maintain the campus have come forward at one time.

- In 2024, the university's maintenance consultant recommended gut renovation or demolition of many of the brutalist buildings.

Is this campus in danger of not securing the resources it needs to get over that big hump of maintenance problems coming in all at once?

- That's a good question.

And whether we're in danger of not getting them, I tend to be an optimist, I'll be honest with you.

- [Ben] The university plans to begin a renovation of Rudolph's liberal arts building this summer at a cost of almost $100 million.

Three other brutalist buildings on campus needs similar renovations, but the university hasn't secured the funding yet.

Chancellor Fuller says he's determined to get that done.

- I think my job is to make the case about our uniqueness in terms of the need because of the way the campus was built, but also our uniqueness in terms of the campus itself.

You would have to drag me kicking and screaming out of here to let somebody demolish it.

I mean, we have conversations all the time about how to maintain the integrity of the campus.

- [Ben] At the end of the day, Fuller hopes people will see UMass Dartmouth as a national treasure of brutalist architecture.

- People need to just understand how distinctive this place is.

You'll never see another campus like this.

I don't believe ever.

Nobody's going to build this now, ever again.

So I think we have to maintain it, and I think that's the story we have to tell people.

- On tonight's episode of "Weekly Insight," Michelle and our contributor, WPRI 12's politics editor Ted Nisi, explain why a lawmaker's health is a big topic of conversation at the Rhode Island State House.

But first, Governor Dan McKee makes it official.

He's seeking reelection.

- Ted, welcome back.

It's good to see you.

The top three leaders at the Rhode Island State House have been in the news recently and I wanted to start with Governor Dan McKee.

No surprise, he announced in a video on March 3rd that he is seeking reelection after a lot of speculation, and I'm curious what you make of the timing.

Did you think it was too early?

Is it spot on?

- Well, it's certainly early, Michelle.

Usually incumbents actually try to wait as long as possible to get out of kind of rose garden mode and start to be in the campaign frame.

But I think the context probably pretty obvious.

McKee knows there is some speculation, maybe he won't actually run for another term and his team wanted to get something out there early to say, no, I'm running and I'm gonna be on the ballot next year.

- And that video came one week after a poll showed that 48% of Rhode Island voters believe the state is heading in the wrong direction.

It was interesting to hear his rather upbeat take when asked about that by one of your colleagues at channel 12.

Let's take a listen.

- Less than half the state of Rhode Island saying we're headed in the wrong direction.

That's progress.

What we're doing is you're showing a actual trend right now that more and more people are understanding we're heading in the right direction, and less and less people are saying that we're heading in the wrong direction.

- And it's worth noting only 29% of Rhode Island voters believe the state is heading in the right direction.

So less than one third.

- Right.

So that's the difficult context, Michelle, that McKee is facing as he kicks off this reelection bid.

You know, if the poll showed half of Rhode Island voters thinking the state was moving in the right direction, we'd probably be having a different conversation.

But the McKee administration has just had a lot of high profile challenges in the last year.

Of course, people think of the Washington Bridge fiasco, the state is facing budget deficits once again.

There was that long mess with the pallet shelters, finally getting those open for people who are homeless.

And then you have the context politically, where former CVS executive Helena Foulkes, as we've discussed before, already has raised almost twice as much money as McKee for next year's race.

She's definitely running.

You have other top Democrats like House Speaker, Joe Shekarchi, Attorney General, Peter Neronha, Secretary of State, Greg Amore all at least flirting with the idea of running.

So, I think it just shows, McKee knows he has work cut out for him if he wants to run and win this race.

- And let's talk about age.

So Boston Globe columnist Stan McGowan, who works in the Rhode Island Bureau, pointed out that if McKee does win, he will be almost 80 by the time that term is up.

We've seen on a national stage, look, age is top of mind for a lot of Americans.

- Yes, absolutely.

- And speaking of which, Senate President, Dominic Ruggiero's health issues have really been a major topic of conversation at the State House.

What is the latest with the Senator's health?

- Well, the context, as I'm sure a lot of viewers remember, Senate President Ruggiero is 76.

He revealed about a year ago now that he had been diagnosed with cancer.

He had that very dramatic break with his then majority leader, Ryan Pearson, when Pearson privately broached his health and whether he could continue.

The argument last fall by Ruggiero's team when he beat back challengers to his leadership was that he was strengthening then and was gonna be in much better shape for 2025.

That just really hasn't been the case, Michelle.

He's missed multiple Senate sessions so far.

We learned in late February, he was actually, he has been hospitalized with pneumonia, obviously his immune system is compromised and then his chief of staff told me he'd be out in a couple of days.

Then it comes out, he's actually gonna be in the hospital until March 12th.

So, his aide still continues to say he's getting better, he's strengthening, he's okay to lead.

But the next few weeks, I think are gonna be telling.

- So despite that, you don't foresee any changes with senate leadership, at least not for now?

- Not right now.

There's no sign yet.

There's no sign a majority of senators are ready to move on to someone else, but there's a lot of tension around it.

- Okay, let's turn now to House Speaker Joe Shekarchi, he has really become synonymous with the housing crisis in this state.

In late February, he released his fifth annual package of housing legislation and you spoke with him on that date.

Let's take a listen.

- [Ted] You get any exhaustion from your caucus, from your reps who say speaker, another round of votes on housing.

Sometimes maybe my mayors, my council members get mad about some of it or anything like that.

- Yes, I get that all the time, but it's not just limited to housing.

I get that for a lot of issues.

But I will tell you that my housing package, I have 20 reps who wanna sponsor eight bills.

So there's a lot of people who want the housing legislation, housing polls very high.

If you do any polling in the state, and I know you're a big student of polling, housing and healthcare.

And healthcare and housing, one in two issues, depending on how you poll.

Significant, the single largest housing bond in the history of Rhode Island, $120 million last year passed by almost 70% of the vote or close to 70% vote.

Very strong numbers.

It is a need people want to address, and representatives that I deal with every day wanna be part of the solution.

- So really, full speed ahead for Shekarch.

- Yes.

You know, he said this year's bills are maybe more closer to technical fixes in a lot of cases and some of the more dramatic things he did like ADU's before, but he says as long as home prices are still high and apartment rents are still going up so fast, he thinks this is a live issue he needs to continue to deal with.

- People wanna see those prices go down.

- [Ted] They really do.

It's gonna be difficult.

- Yeah.

Thank you so much, Ted.

- Good to be here.

- Finally tonight, we want to introduce you to one of our chief content officers, Sally Isley, who is heading up our Rhode Island PBS and the Publix radio reporting project "Breaking Point, The Washington Bridge."

- "Breaking Point, The Washington Bridge" is our most ambitious journalism collaboration to date.

We are looking at every angle of the story that has been with us since the bridge was closed down in December of 2023.

This is a business story.

It is a political story.

It is a money story.

It's a transportation safety story.

And above else, it's a human story, because at the end of the day, this is a story that has dramatically affected daily life in Rhode Island.

We have our entire content team in one way or another, involved in the conceptualization and the reporting and the production for this project.

We're going to be reporting this story out on every platform at our disposal online, on the radio, on television, through our local programs.

We already have a robust digital page built out, RhodeIslandPBS.org, or at PBS.org/breakingpoint where you can find out more about the project and how you could become involved.

- As Sally mentioned, we want to hear from you.

Please send us your stories and ask us your questions at ripbs.org/breaking point or scan the QR code at the bottom of your screen.

And on March 23rd, we will have a special edition of "Rhode Island PBS Weekly."

My story will focus specifically on accountability, how transparent are state officials being and looking at the moments leading up to the closure.

- And with this continuing project, I'll be heading out into the community to talk with business people about how the bridge has been affecting them.

And that's our broadcast this evening.

Thank you for joining us.

I'm Pamela Watts.

- And I'm Michelle San Miguel.

We'll be back next week with another edition of "Rhode Island PBS Weekly."

Until then, please follow us on Facebook and YouTube and visit us online to see all of our stories and past episodes at ripbs.org/weekly, or listen to our podcast on your favorite streaming platform.

Goodnight.

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