Final week, ProPublica printed a five-part sequence 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 price.
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 sequence, there got here a turning level at which we realized there have been extra enduring questions and challenges dealing with Albany than COVID-19. They had 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 assumed, 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 individuals. Nonetheless, whereas Black residents had been dying in disproportionate numbers, the officers main the response had 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 had 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 Choose Nancy Stephenson. She was white.
The chief medical officer on the hospital, Dr. Stephen Kitchen, choked up when he introduced her loss of life. Mayor Kermit “Bo” Dorough took to the rostrum to ask for a second of silence to mark the second, saying it “brings lots of the individuals on this group to the subsequent 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 have now misplaced an amazing jewel of this group. A jewel to the individuals.” Then he added, “I feel that her passing highlights precisely how deadly this illness could be.”
I’m not going to lie. I cringed at what I used to be listening to. Some 38 individuals had died by then. The overwhelming majority had been Black. There hadn’t been any named mentions or moments of silence on the press briefings for them. How may or not it’s, I assumed to myself, that it wasn’t till Stephenson’s loss of life that the town’s leaders understood how deadly the illness could possibly be?
The feedback that got here pouring into the reside chat of the video briefing made clear I wasn’t the one one asking that query.
One learn, “Let’s not neglect all of the others who’ve handed, and who’re recognized 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 residence.”
That second resonated with me as a result of twenty years earlier I’d written a bit as a part of a Pulitzer Prize-winning sequence for The New York Occasions about how histories written by individuals in energy — most of them white — are inclined to erase, decrease and misrepresent the experiences and contributions of those that are usually not.
That story was additionally set within the South. The sequence, 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 one in every of their very own had died, that they had additionally made these bearing the brunt of the pandemic really feel chargeable for their very own demise. In response to the official narrative, the outbreak began at a Black funeral, and the explanation Black individuals had been so weak to the virus was as a result of they didn’t deal with 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 in another way 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 unique relationship with poor individuals and folks of coloration, the result would have been totally different.”
The primary lesson that he hoped I and different individuals would take from Albany’s COVID-19 disaster was: “It didn’t should be this fashion.”
What he and others instructed me had been omitted of that narrative was how exhausting it had been for African People in Albany, notably those that are poor and uninsured, to get protected and reasonably priced well being care in a metropolis whose dominant establishment is a hospital. Phoebe Putney Well being System isn’t solely the most important supplier of well being care in southwest Georgia, it’s also Albany’s largest employer and property proprietor. The well being system’s CEO, Scott Steiner, mentioned the hospital’s mission is to supply care no matter race, faith and talent to pay, “however we’re at all times attempting 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 hundreds of pages of information. We discovered that Phoebe was the one hospital on the town as a result of it had labored exhausting — even stealthily — and spent thousands and thousands of {dollars} to drive out its previous competitor, earlier than lastly managing to amass it. The price of care went up and high quality went down. In the meantime the extra Phoebe grew, the extra economically dependent Albany turned, and the tougher 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. Once 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 fallacious.”
As for Doris and me, we had been decided to concentrate on the individuals who are inclined to get omitted of Albany’s, and the nation’s, tales as a result of we believed they might resonate with anybody who has struggled to get the well being care they want. We hope you’ll spend time with the entire sequence. You’ll be able to learn it right here. Or you possibly can pay attention right here to an audio model, produced in collaboration with actors from Theater of Conflict.
