How 60 Minutes was able to deliver comprehensive pandemic episodes with a staff working remotely

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"Week in and week out, we keep looking at each other and saying, ‘We’re two steps ahead of the devil. We did it again somehow,’" says executive producer Bill Owens. "We had to develop a theory of how we could produce remotely. We had never done it before. In March, in the moments after CBS had to shut down its building and facilities, our editors, our director, our associate director, the people in our control room and the people who actually cut the stories basically put together packages of the things that they would need to work from home. We wouldn’t be on TV if it wasn’t for the way they planned. It was things like media that was on the hard drives of our Avid edit machines, making Macs and computers at home into editing machines. They were speaking a language that I didn’t understand, but I knew that they thought they could do this. They were very sure of it. It involved literally setting up in people’s kitchens and working remotely, sharing information over the cloud. It had never been tried before. We ran some simple tests and it seemed to work. We had done a story the week before all hell broke loose about preparing for COVID. Then the next week we did the (New Rochelle, NY) outbreak of the first cases. While we were shooting that story, it was kind of a proof of concept."