I Began Overlaying the COVID-19 Disaster in Albany, Georgia. There Was a A lot Greater Story. — ProPublica

Final week, ProPublica revealed a five-part collection that I wrote with senior analysis reporter Doris Burke about Albany, Georgia, and its solely hospital, Phoebe Putney Memorial. We began engaged on the story 5 years in the past, when COVID-19 was racing across the globe and Albany — small, distant and barely touched by time — had the world’s fourth-highest case charge.

We initially got down to write a David-vs.-Goliath narrative concerning the city’s response to the disaster. However, as I write within the collection, there got here a turning level at which we realized there have been extra enduring questions and challenges going through Albany than COVID-19. They have been about race and energy.

Within the weeks instantly following the outbreak, when the pandemic made it too dangerous for me to journey, I monitored the town’s each day press briefings and the hospital’s flood of social media posts on Fb. That, I believed, was the place the primary draft of Albany’s COVID-19 story was being written, and the narrative that was being pushed in them felt disturbingly acquainted.

Albany is a majority Black metropolis of some 67,000 folks. Nevertheless, whereas Black residents have been dying in disproportionate numbers, the officers main the response have been white: the mayor, the chair of the county authorities and the senior executives at Phoebe. At each briefing, officers introduced the quantity of people that have been sick with COVID-19 and the variety of who’d died.

Then, in early April 2020, for the primary time, they introduced a reputation, not a quantity. The one one that merited private recognition was Decide Nancy Stephenson. She was white.

The chief medical officer on the hospital, Dr. Stephen Kitchen, choked up when he introduced her demise. Mayor Kermit “Bo” Dorough took to the rostrum to ask for a second of silence to mark the second, saying it “brings most of the folks on this group to the following part of this battle as a result of now we all know somebody who has been a sufferer of COVID.”

The chair of the county authorities on the time, Christopher Cohilas, proclaimed, “We’ve misplaced an amazing jewel of this group. A jewel to the folks.” Then he added, “I believe that her passing highlights precisely how deadly this illness may be.”

I’m not going to lie. I cringed at what I used to be listening to. Some 38 folks had died by then. The overwhelming majority have been Black. There hadn’t been any named mentions or moments of silence on the press briefings for them. How might or not it’s, I believed to myself, that it wasn’t till Stephenson’s demise that the town’s leaders understood how deadly the illness might be?

The feedback that got here pouring into the dwell chat of the video briefing made clear I wasn’t the one one asking that query.

One learn, “Let’s not overlook all of the others who’ve handed, and who’re identified by others in our group.”

One other learn, “So that you lengthen condolences to the choose, however not your residents.”

After which there was this: “So now it hits dwelling.”

That second resonated with me as a result of 20 years earlier I’d written a bit as a part of a Pulitzer Prize-winning collection for The New York Occasions about how histories written by folks in energy — most of them white — are inclined to erase, decrease and misrepresent the experiences and contributions of those that aren’t.

That story was additionally set within the South. The collection, titled “How Race Is Lived in America,” was meant to point out how the systemic divisions that form our society and every particular person’s place in it are pushed by day-to-day interactions at work, at college and in hospitals.

What I used to be seeing play out in Albany and at Phoebe felt just like the stuff of a brand new installment. Not solely did it appear that metropolis leaders had failed to acknowledge the magnitude of the disaster till considered one of their very own had died, they’d additionally made these bearing the brunt of the pandemic really feel answerable for their very own demise. In response to the official narrative, the outbreak began at a Black funeral, and the explanation Black folks have been so weak to the virus was as a result of they didn’t maintain themselves.

On my first go to to Albany, I met Pastor Daniel Simmons, the chief of Mt. Zion Baptist Church. He made clear he was skeptical of the prevailing narrative and inspired me to not fall for it both.

“If Albany, Georgia, had finished issues otherwise through the years, our group wouldn’t have been as weak because it was,” he mentioned. “If the well being care system was totally different, if it had a distinct relationship with poor folks and other people of shade, the result would have been totally different.”

The principle lesson that he hoped I and different folks would take from Albany’s COVID-19 disaster was: “It didn’t should be this manner.”

What he and others informed me had been not noted of that narrative was how onerous it had been for African Individuals in Albany, significantly those that are poor and uninsured, to get protected and inexpensive well being care in a metropolis whose dominant establishment is a hospital. Phoebe Putney Well being System will not be solely the most important supplier of well being care in southwest Georgia, it is usually Albany’s largest employer and property proprietor. The well being system’s CEO, Scott Steiner, mentioned the hospital’s mission is to offer care no matter race, faith and skill to pay, “however we’re at all times making an attempt to steadiness that out with paying the payments.” 

Doris and I spent the next 4 years exploring that a part of Albany’s story, interviewing greater than 150 sources and poring over 1000’s of pages of information. We realized that Phoebe was the one hospital on the town as a result of it had labored onerous — even stealthily — and spent hundreds of thousands of {dollars} to drive out its outdated competitor, earlier than lastly managing to accumulate it. The price of care went up and high quality went down. In the meantime the extra Phoebe grew, the extra economically dependent Albany grew to become, and the more durable it was for sufferers to carry the hospital to account.

The CEO that oversaw Phoebe through the interval of its most important development and the well being system’s former legal professional didn’t reply to detailed lists of questions. After we requested Phoebe’s present leaders for responses to our findings, a hospital spokesperson accused us of deliberately excluding constructive affected person tales. “Most sufferers have constructive experiences at Phoebe,” he mentioned. “Ignoring that truth is mistaken.”

As for Doris and me, we have been decided to deal with the individuals who are inclined to get not noted of Albany’s, and the nation’s, tales as a result of we believed they’d resonate with anybody who has struggled to get the well being care they want. We hope you’ll spend time with the entire collection. You’ll be able to learn it right here. Or you’ll be able to hear right here to an audio model, produced in collaboration with actors from Theater of Warfare.