‘Midland is trending on Twitter, and Donald Trump is tweeting about us’

This is the ninth episode in The Post’s coronavirus podcast series, which each week brings listeners inside a different person’s experience of the pandemic. Previous episodes have chronicled a week in the life of an emergency room worker, an NBA player, a blues guitarist, a rancher, a minister, a librarian, a city council member and a recent college graduate.

In this episode, we peer inside the life of Jacob May, a 17-year-old from Midland, Mich., as he finishes his last days of high school. Because of the pandemic, his classes went online. But in a devastating twist of fate, he and many of his classmates returned to school in late May as masked volunteers. The high school became an emergency shelter when flooding destroyed the homes of many people in his community.

Listen to May’s experience, in his own words.

Share your story

Tell us how your life has changed due to the coronavirus outbreak, and help us share first-person accounts of life during the pandemic.

• Submit a voice recording (desktop 
• Email us a voice memo (from 

Previous episodes:

• 'Good luck, everybody'
• 'You never signed up for this’
• ‘I cannot hold it all’
• 'For me, it’s all the blues'
• 'First thing's first, I gotta beat this game'
• ‘It is a pretty significant hole in the system’
• ‘We grew up in agriculture—we’ve had a lot of experience of going without’
• ‘I’ll be getting my degree in the mail, but that has me feeling hollow’

Get vital coronavirus news from The Post for free: 

• Sign up for the newsletter: washingtonpost.com/virusnewsletter
• Read the latest coverage: washingtonpost.com/coronavirus
• Subscribe to our daily news podcasts: washingtonpost.com/podcasts

Explore more first-person accounts of the pandemic:

A multimedia oral history of the virus's impact