Being a sports writer is a dream job for many sports fans. You basi­cal­ly get to watch sports, write about them and get paid for it. The one caveat: You need sports to actu­al­ly be hap­pen­ing in order to write about them.

Nor­mal­ly, that’s not an issue, but these are not nor­mal times. Basi­cal­ly every­thing sports relat­ed has been can­celed for the past month due to the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic, leav­ing sports reporters on unsteady ground. Some are still telling play­ers’ sto­ries or break­ing down old games. Oth­ers are writ­ing about lighter top­ics like video games. But some, like Alex Put­ter­man of the Hart­ford Courant, have made the full tran­si­tion from cov­er­ing sports to cov­er­ing COVID-19.

Put­ter­man, the UConn foot­ball beat writer and a gen­er­al sports reporter for the Courant, said he was called into the editor’s office on March 4 and was told that he would be help­ing out on the coro­n­avirus cov­er­age for a few days. At that time, Con­necti­cut didn’t have any cas­es and the threat still seemed some­what low, so Put­ter­man said he didn’t know how long he would be cov­er­ing coro­n­avirus for and how that would inter­fere with his duties in the sports department.

“At that time, I kind of thought maybe the next few weeks … maybe I’ll just have to be bal­anc­ing sports with non sports,” Put­ter­man said. “I was get­ting kind of stressed think­ing about it, but then less than a week lat­er, basi­cal­ly sports were can­celed. And so from that point, it became clear. I was almost kind of lucky to be on coro­n­avirus cov­er­age because I wasn’t gonna have a whole lot to write about otherwise.”

Now, Put­ter­man is one of the lead reporters for the Courant on the virus, pro­vid­ing dai­ly updates and even main­tain­ing a Google spread­sheet with updat­ed data on cas­es, deaths and hos­pi­tal­iza­tions. He has also writ­ten sto­ries about hos­pi­tal pre­pared­ness, COVID-19 test­ing and the num­bers and spread of the virus among dif­fer­ent demo­graph­ics in Connecticut.

Put­ter­man said that despite not real­ly leav­ing his apart­ment, he is actu­al­ly even busier now than he usu­al­ly is cov­er­ing sports.

“Out­side of foot­ball sea­son, in terms of being a reg­u­lar sports writer, there are slow days when maybe I’m work­ing on some­thing that’s a lit­tle more long term or when I don’t have a whole lot to do,” Put­ter­man said. “With this, I don’t real­ly have slow days. Every day, I’m work­ing on something.”

For a lot of sports writ­ers, such a major tran­si­tion in role would be a tough adjust­ment. But Put­ter­man is a ver­sa­tile reporter who does a lot out­side of sports. In fact, one of his roles at the Courant is cov­er­ing things that are sports relat­ed, but are also per­ti­nent beyond sports, such as sta­di­um finances or the polit­i­cal debate of sports betting.

“I kind of pride myself a lit­tle on being able to do more than just gamers and pre­views and stuff,” Put­ter­man said. “I have tried to become good at a range of things because, frankly, I have a lot of inter­ests beyond sports … I actu­al­ly enjoy writ­ing about non sports things some­times, and I’ve been hap­py to be able to report on some­thing that’s so important.”

Even still, Put­ter­man said that it has been chal­leng­ing to cov­er some­thing so intense, and it has put a lot more pres­sure on him to get things right.

“It’s drain­ing emo­tion­al­ly,” Put­ter­man said. “I kind of feel the stakes of it a lit­tle high­er. With sports, I cer­tain­ly nev­er want to make any sort of mis­take, but it does feel like, okay, if you get the run­ning back’s yardage wrong or some­thing, like that’s bad and you want to avoid it. But it’s not real­ly an issue of life and death. Where­as with this stuff, there’s this cer­tain extra respon­si­bil­i­ty to make sure everything’s right because you’re try­ing to inform peo­ple on this real­ly seri­ous issue. It’s tough.”

Put­ter­man said the feed­back he gets in emails from read­ers means more with a sub­ject like the coro­n­avirus com­pared to UConn football.

Put­ter­man said he miss­es sports a lot. An avid base­ball fan, he is very dis­ap­point­ed that he hasn’t been able to have base­ball games on TV every day and play fan­ta­sy base­ball. But even more so, he miss­es his job of cov­er­ing sports.

“There’s just a cer­tain ener­gy to cov­er­ing sports,” Put­ter­man said. “In terms of being in the build­ing, the crowd. There’s a cer­tain adren­a­line writ­ing on dead­line. It’s fun, and it sucks that we don’t have that.”

With all his work focused on the coro­n­avirus, Put­ter­man hasn’t kept sports in his life as much as some peo­ple. He still lis­tens to some base­ball pod­casts and reads an occa­sion­al fun sports sto­ry, but his hunger for com­pe­ti­tion has been sat­is­fied by an unlike­ly source: the TV show “Sur­vivor.”

“I’ve been watch­ing old sea­sons and stuff, and I couldn’t real­ly fig­ure out why all of a sud­den it had real­ly cap­tured me and why I was get­ting so into it,” Put­ter­man said. “Then I real­ized that it’s kind of like a stand-in for sports for me because it’s peo­ple com­pet­ing, win­ners and losers and stuff. I think the same part of my brain that likes sports is now using [Sur­vivor] to fill that void.”

Put­ter­man has been doing excel­lent work in his new role as a COVID-19 reporter, but sports will hope­ful­ly come back soon­er rather than lat­er and allow him and all sports writ­ers to get back to doing what they love.