In the wake of COVID-19 social distancingand stay-at-home orders, young couples may find themselves spending more time with each other than ever before.As a developmental psychologistwho conducts research on adolescent and young adult relationships, I’m interested in understanding how young people’s everyday social interactions contribute to their health. Past research shows that people who have higher-quality friendshipsand romantic relationshipsduring their teens and 20s typically have lower risk for illness and disease during adulthood, whereas individuals with early relationships character...
The next several months could bring hurricanes, floods and fire, on top of the pandemic currently raging through the country. How do you shelter in place during an evacuation?
Two and a half years ago Hurricane Maria ripped open homes across the southern Puerto Rican city of Ponce, destroying the rickety electrical grid and sending thousands of people into shelters or onto the streets. People were still rebuilding when, in January, a devastating earthquake jolted the island’s southern coast. Afraid of collapsing walls and showering concrete, people moved back outdoors, where they still spend cool, wet nights under blue tarps strung to poles and tied to cars packed with coolers and lawn chairs.
Now thousands brace for a wave of illness as the COVID-19 pandemic spreads insidiously across the island, threatening people without homes, without water, some struggling even to maintain basic hygiene. It’s the latest blow in a diabolical cascade of crises, striking Puerto Ricans at their most vulnerable. When the sickness comes, doctors and nurses will be scarce; the hurricane forced almost half of them to leave the island in search of jobs.
“Everyone is in hell,” said Abel Vale, a retired environmental consultant who lives north of Ponce, “or left forgotten.”
This is how cascading catastrophes can compound in effect, kicked off or made worse by climate change, which promises to amplify the harm and make even unrelated crises more painful.
And it may well portend what comes next for the rest of the United States.
The Roberto Clemente Coliseum in San Juan was crowded with evacuees on Sept. 19, 2017, as Hurricane Maria bore down on Puerto Rico. (Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images)
The flooding, hurricanes and wildfires that now regularly arrive in the U.S. each spring and summer, after all, are not on hold because we also face a health crisis. Changes in the climate have made the chance of a natural disaster striking during this pandemic significantly more likely, and its likely impact more severe. Today, hurricanes are larger, and more intense than ever. Fires are spreading faster and further amid drought, their total size having doubled in recent years. Meanwhile, precipitation across the Midwest — which suffered devastating floods last spring — has increased by more than 45% since the 1950s.
“Climate change is loading the weather dice against us,” said Katherine Hayhoe, a professor of public policy and law at Texas Tech University and one of the world’s foremost climate scientists. “We always have the chance of rolling a double six.”
When we do, disasters that might have otherwise proved manageable will compound and amplify COVID’s effects until the hurt — measured in lives, livelihoods and property damage — winds up worse than it might have been from any one disaster alone. Storms, floods and fires will greet a crippled nation, its people sequestered inside homes, its workforce locked down, unable to procure even basic emergency and building supplies. The authorities tasked with responding to it will already be consumed by other emergencies, their capacity to provide even the most fundamental aid limited, their budgets gutted.
Now, as a pandemic rifles through the lives of Americans, killing thousands each week, we’re looking down the barrel of hurricane season, which begins in less than two months. Gulf of Mexico waters are running unusually warm, setting up conditions for strong storms, and the researchers at Colorado State University predict there is a 69% chance that a major hurricane will make landfall in the U.S. this summer or fall.
The public health responses required to manage the pandemic run directly against what will need to be done to respond to such a hurricane. Large numbers of people may need to flee on short notice and be housed in shelters that are overcrowded, understaffed and undersupplied. In 2017 in Florida Hurricane Irma still forced some 191,000 people into crowded arenas and other shelters.
If that happens again, how will people maintain physical distancing? Will states still send evacuees into shelters? Will National Guard troops permit them to cross state boundaries? It’s easy to see how flight from the threat of nature could lead to a resurgence of contagion, starting a whole new wave of infections spreading across the country. “To say that we are not prepared for these concurrent disasters is putting it mildly,” said Irwin Redlener, a clinical professor of health policy at Columbia University’s Earth Institute and a leading expert in public health ramifications of catastrophic events. “I’m extremely worried.”
Flames from the Holy Fire outside Glen Ivy Hot Springs in Corona, California, loomed over a highway southeast of Los Angeles on Aug. 10, 2018. (Robyn Beck/AFP via Getty Images)
Those are the social costs. But the economic toll would also be compounded. Risk Management Solutions is one of the world’s largest risk modeling companies, focused on calculating the odds and costs of climate-related risk and other disasters for the insurance and finance industries and for governments around the world. For the first time, it has come up with a measure of what the compounded effect of cascading disasters might mean — at least economically. If a major hurricane makes landfall in Florida this summer, while COVID-19 social distancing measures remain in place and the pandemic rages on, RMS models forecast that the damages and recovery might cost as much as 20% more to clean up than usual. That could translate to tens of billions of dollars. The scale of impact would likely be similar for other types of disasters RMS has yet to analyze.
The models don’t predict how many more lives may be lost, but the issues of cost and health risk are intertwined. Insurers depend on speed of response to mitigate the cost of repairing homes after a big storm. The winds blow a roof off and contractors race to replace it before rain can rot out the walls and seep into the foundation. But what happens when plywood and other materials are unavailable? What happens when contractors are in COVID isolation and can’t work? The rains come, the houses rot, the costs rise, the people who are displaced remain grouped with family or in shelters and other vulnerable settings, exposed to the risk of the virus for longer. They miss work, or can’t get new jobs, spiraling into deeper financial hardship.
“It’s one plus one equals three,” saids Robert Muir-Wood, the chief research officer for science and technology at RMS.
Planning and proactive funding could avert the worst overlaps. Redlener suggests that states in climate-disaster-prone regions immediately excuse their disaster officials from day-to-day pandemic response and have them revisit their preparedness plans for concurrent hurricanes and wildfires in the context of what’s now unfolding across the country. Another RMS researcher suggested that states could revise their disaster plans to use thousands of vacant hotel rooms instead of large group shelters. But it’s not clear that states have either the forethought or the bandwidth to make such adjustments.
Florida’s State Emergency Operations Center wrote in response to emailed questions that the state is guided by its 240-page Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan, which is “designed to be flexible, adaptable and scalable.” Officials pointed to clauses in that plan that direct the state to consider and protect public health during the response to a disaster, to “maintain situational awareness,” and to, for example, “support sheltering of people with medical” needs. It contemplates the importance of paying close attention to “surge” needs, by ensuring that adequate medical staff and supplies are available. It even acknowledges that in some cases evacuation increases health risks to patients, stating that evacuation will only take place when the risk of staying in place is greater than the risk involved in evacuating.
But the document offers no specific plan for how to do those things, and does not appear to consider when the health-affected population includes all people, rather than a subset of patients. Much of what the plan suggests we already know from the past few weeks to be impractical in the face of the current pandemic. Was Florida suggesting, for example, that considering health risks, it would forego evacuations entirely in the face of a major hurricane this year, and if so, what would that mean for people’s physical safety?
The state wouldn’t say. It declined to answer those and other specific questions.
The first tests for the country could begin even sooner than hurricane season. After last spring proved to be the wettest on record in the Missouri River basin, more than a million acres of farmland were flooded and 14 million people were affected in what amounted to some of the worst flooding in the history of the middle part of the country, stretching from South Dakota and Iowa down to Nebraska and Oklahoma.
This spring could be nearly as bad. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s spring flood outlook, two-thirds of the continental United States faces elevated flood risk next month, with 25 states poised for “major or moderate” flooding. Along the Missouri, this winter set a new record for water saturation and soil moisture — a predictor of how much water the ground can absorb before it floods — signals that last year’s disaster could well repeat.
Floodwaters surrounded a farm on March 22, 2019, near Craig, Missouri. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)
The Plains states have until now been spared the worst of the COVID-19 outbreak, yet there are signs that the virus is spreading quickly into the heartland, and that peak infection, coupled with hospitalizations and death rates, could come weeks later than for the rest of the country, coinciding with the flooding and the forcing of people from their homes in late April and early May.
Next, of course, is fire season, which promises to return to the American West this August after a dry winter. California has received just 64% of its normal rainfall, meaning bone-dry hillsides and dehydrated vegetation will likely be waiting for the intense offshore, fire-driving winds that arrive like clockwork each fall.
A difficult fire season will demand thousands of firefighters, but current infection rates among firefighters and other first responders suggest that as many as 10% of some departments won’t be available to respond. In California, firefighting training, brush reduction efforts and the prescribed burns critical to reducing fire risk have all been delayed this spring. Exchanges of firefighting teams between states, and between countries, will be hampered, and many of the agencies tasked with coordinating fire response — the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Federal Emergency Management Agency among them — are also consumed with the COVID-19 response. The crews that travel to fight fires often crowd into vehicles and sleep in makeshift camps — ideal conditions for the transmission of disease, unless officials decide to drastically cut down on efforts to put out the flames.
Even in regions that don’t burn, air quality will decline, putting sensitive people at greater respiratory health risk. And if last year’s blackouts are repeated, the power may be shut off in some areas to avoid sparking wires, killing internet access in the process. How can the sixth largest economy in the world recover from economic depression spurred by the pandemic when millions of people working from home lose power, grinding their work, as well as online schooling, to a standstill?
Once again, ProPublica found little evidence that such scenarios were being planned for. A spokesperson for the California State Department of Public Health, which manages disaster response, replied to questions with an email stating simply that “we’re not speculating on the overlap of coronavirus and wildfires.” And a spokesperson for the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services did not respond to a detailed list of questions about how the state’s plans could address cascading crises.
Trafficking in worst-case scenarios can seem like alarmist business, but people like Columbia’s Redlener say it would be irresponsible not to consider it. The price tag for economic relief is already more than $2.2 trillion. How much money is the federal government going to be able to expend to help large populations meet even their basic living expenses if they are unemployed in large numbers because of the pandemic and then lose everything they have left to a natural disaster?
People accepted relief items including water, food, clothing and animal food on Sept. 17, 2017, after Hurricane Irma passed through Marathon, Florida. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
“It sets us up for a level of misery that no living American has experienced — even during the Great Depression,” Redlener said. “There is no real equivalent to what I am worried about in terms of multiple large scale disasters in a country that is ill prepared.”
The last bulwark against this level of failure — the nation’s first responder — is supposed to be FEMA, which offers top-level management for major crises and approves emergency response if it’s going to be paid for with federal aid. Yet FEMA is already stretched thin by its lead position on the unprecedented pandemic response, and it has been notoriously ineffective in the past when called on to fight on multiple fronts. In 2017, for example, FEMA struggled to manage Hurricane Harvey in Houston, followed a few weeks later by Hurricanes Irma and Maria, and then five of the most destructive wildfires in California’s history. Today, many places in Puerto Rico are still waiting for paperwork to be approved and aid promised by the agency more than 24 months ago to arrive.
ProPublica sent FEMA a list of questions, including a request for its plan to deal with a multi-front disaster. We asked whether the agency or its leadership had ever been briefed on the potential ways a pandemic could multiply its other tasks, including climate-related disasters.
The agency declined to answer specific questions but stated, in its email response, “Even as FEMA is focused on responding to COVID-19, we are also preparing and maintaining the Agency’s readiness for other disasters to include spring flooding, severe weather, and the upcoming hurricane season.” In the email, a spokesperson said the agency was “evaluating” how its staffing needs might change, and preparing for a “surge capacity” in Homeland Security personnel that it relied on after Superstorm Sandy.
Those who know the agency best are skeptical, though, that it can handle what may be asked of it over the course of the next 12 months.
“Emergency response is a disaster, and we don’t learn from every experience,” said Judith Enck, who was the EPA’s regional administrator handling its response to Sandy in 2012, and whose region also included Puerto Rico. By design, FEMA is a reactive agency, unable to anticipate and fend off a crisis. Add to that, Enck said, that FEMA lacks the funding and the expertise. It parachutes into regions with little local knowledge and relies on its ability to quickly hire platoons of temporary employees — staff who during a pandemic are unlikely to be available. “I don’t think that model makes any sense any more.”
Puerto Ricans, of course, already know this. They’ve lost faith in their territorial government and in the current federal administration. They have come to accept living with frail health and civic infrastructure, and to rely on a culture of resilience, and nonprofit aid, over the uncoordinated and corrupt gestures of government. And while Puerto Rican politics may be unique within the country, they have a message other Americans must absorb: There is no cavalry.
“The lesson is, help isn’t coming” said Frances Colon, a former deputy science and technology advisor to the U.S. secretary of state, who now runs an environmental policy consultancy in Miami and works in part with Puerto Rican development. “We learned we cannot put our faith in the federal government.”
Researchers at Rutgers University now have a new tool to diagnose cases of COVID-19. With the authorization of the Food and Drug Administration, the school said on Monday, they now have clearance to use a new saliva test for coronavirus, which both expands the current testing options available and potentially signals a safer path forward for health care workers.The test, which will initially be offered through hospitals and clinics affiliated with Rutgers, has the patient spit several times into a plastic tube, with that tube then analyzed for coronavirus at a laboratory. Compared to the curre...
Here’s the dismal equation for food banks: Panic shopping and hoarding have led to supply shortages. Volunteers frightened of the virus have stopped showing up. And a newly jobless population has sent demand soaring.
For Carlos Rodriguez, CEO of the Community FoodBank of New Jersey, the spike in demand has been as dramatic as the arrival of the coronavirus. In a normal year, Rodriguez’s organization provides food for some 50 million meals through a network of 1,000 pantries, food kitchens and other affiliates. But the pandemic meant that some of his bigger food pantries saw 50% more traffic almost overnight. And people who had previously donated food were now, for the first time in their lives, asking for help feeding their families.
The disaster-like level of need is only one problem. Panic shopping by consumers has left grocery stores with little left over to donate, Rodriguez said, leaving the Community FoodBank without its most reliable supply of provisions. To keep feeding its clients, he said, his organization has been forced to vie with national grocery chains to buy basic items, paying 15% more than only a month or so ago.
Rodriguez estimates the Community FoodBank has clear access to about two and a half weeks of food. “I have to tell you, we are week by week,” he said. “The need keeps compounding.”
Around the country, as more than 16 million people have filed for unemployment in just three weeks, the nation’s emergency assistance food supply chain has come under rapid strain. Food banks are besieged by unprecedented traffic, even as the pandemic reduces the number of volunteers who help staff the operations. Supplies are harder to come by as consumers stock up more and donate less.
The result, in some cases, has been dramatic: hourslong waits for donated food. Images of multimile lines of idling cars are becoming the modern equivalent of the Depression-era photos of men in overcoats waiting for bread.
Calls into some food assistance hotlines have increased tenfold, said Katie Fitzgerald, executive vice president and chief operating officer for Feeding America, the nation’s largest food bank organization. Between 30% and 50% of the visitors to food banks in Feeding America’s network since the coronavirus are seeking food assistance for the first time, she said. “There’s a lot of desperation and fear out there.”
Data from state 211 help lines, which help connect Americans with social services, tell a similar story. Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis compared requests for food pantry information on 211 calls between March 12 and 25 to the same period last year. Those requests at least doubled in all 23 states the researchers examined. In New Jersey, 211 food pantry requests jumped 2,200%; in Alabama, 967%; and in Maryland, 963%.
Local food banks are under duress. The United Food Bank in Mesa, Arizona, served roughly four times as many families in the last full week of March compared with the first week, all while battling a 40% reduction in grocery store food donations, said Tyson Nansel, the organization’s spokesperson.
The consequences have been immediate. A fifth of local meal assistance programs in Feeding America’s network have already shuttered at least temporarily, according to a survey of the organization’s food banks.
The overall U.S. food supply, experts say, is plentiful. But a burst in demand because of pandemic fears has led to temporarily empty shelves, said Ananth Iyer, department head of management at Purdue University and an expert on supply-chain management.
That has reduced food bank supplies since unsold food with expired “sell by” or “best by” dates in grocery stores, which can still be safe to eat, is often donated to food banks. Cash donations help food banks, but Fitzgerald said it’s still tough to purchase shelf-stable supplies right now.
In the survey of her 200-bank network, Fitzgerald said, 20% worry they’ll run out of the necessary supplies in the next two to four weeks. “We estimate that there is a $1.4 billion gap in what the emergency food assistance system needs to meet this elevated need,” she said. Without that, Fitzgerald said, the organization may have trouble sustaining operations. “It’s a very big problem.”
Meanwhile applications for the federal government’s largest food-support program, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP — colloquially referred to as food stamps — are rising in most states, said Stacy Dean, vice president for food assistance policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The Families First Coronavirus Response Act, signed into law March 18, lets states increase benefits (with approval by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the SNAP program and gives guidance to state agencies and local offices administering it) for households not already receiving maximum SNAP benefits.
As prescriptions surge, Walgreens and CVS employees say they need more protective gear, cleaning supplies and sick pay. “Someone will come into work sick and there’s nothing anyone can do about it,” a pharmacist says.
This gives no boost to the poorest families, who already receive maximum benefits, according to Dean. “I’m very disappointed that they locked out the poorest families from emergency allotments,” she said. Dean and other advocates say the USDA could do more.
Under the Families First act, SNAP households are receiving a total of $1.7 billion each month above the previous total, the USDA said in an emailed response. The agency added that it is “leveraging all of our programs’ services, built-in flexibilities, and new flexibilities to ensure people have access to food.”
The USDA estimates that some 37 million Americans were food insecure in 2018. An additional 17 million people are now at risk of going hungry, according to projections by Feeding America.
SNAP applications are rising in states such as Georgia, Utah, Louisiana and Connecticut. In Alabama, online applications for food stamps spiked 155% from February to March. California’s applications more than doubled between the first and fourth weeks of March.
In many states, there are fewer staff processing more applications, because of social distancing and coronavirus-related telework, Dean said. In California, Los Angeles County’s Department of Public and Social Services closed its offices and expanded teleworking, according to spokesperson James Bolden. He said that the department hasn’t heard about issues with its online portal, but that some customers have had longer-than-usual wait times for its telephone Customer Service Center.
The Families First act was intended to be an immediate relief response, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities wrote in a recent post. The package includes other benefits, like one piece that lets states (with the USDA’s signoff) give meal-replacement benefits to households with children who’d otherwise receive free or reduced-price meals at school. States, including Michigan and Florida, are starting to get approved for this.
On April 6, 140 representatives — all but one a Democrat — signed a letter to House and Senate leaders urging them to increase the maximum SNAP benefit by 15%, bump up the monthly minimum benefit from $16 to $30 and put a hold on Trump administration rules that would weaken benefits and eligibility for food stamps. (The 2009 Recovery Act increased the maximum monthly SNAP benefit by 13.6%.) Charitable groups like Feeding America have called for a boost to SNAP to aid the millions of newly unemployed Americans, calling it the best short- and long-term solution to help food access.
In most states, SNAP benefits can’t be used to make online food purchases, though a pilot program has opened up this option in a handful of states. It hasn’t yet made it to Virginia, where the roadblock has frustrated recipients of food stamps like Erika Schneider, a 42-year-old in Charlottesville who is unemployed because of a respiratory and neurological condition. Schneider, who doesn’t drive, started a Change.org petition to broaden online grocery delivery and pickup options for SNAP users.
She relied on daily Meals on Wheels food delivery, which stopped daily deliveries a few weeks ago and instead has been dropping off shelf-stable items every two weeks. Schneider is on a special diet and said she couldn’t eat everything that was dropped off recently. She resorted to eating cans of plain tomato sauce and rice. “All of a sudden, I was like, ‘Oh my god, I’m almost out of food,’” Schneider said. “And then I ran out of food and completely panicked.”
She was finally able to restock her cupboards with the help of community donations and organizations, she said, and a few days ago, Meals on Wheels dropped off a box of food.
“I guess I just got lucky this time,” Schneider said. “But we shouldn’t have to get lucky in a crisis. We should have the infrastructure for equal access to food at any time.”
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Even though the coronavirus has killed more than 23,000 Americans in the span of just a month, many Fox News personalities are pivoting back to calling the virus an over-hyped media creation designed to damage President Donald Trump.
MSNBC's "Morning Joe" on Tuesday hammered Fox for once again putting people's lives in danger by downplaying the threat of the virus.
"Now, they're going back to the whole yarn that, 'Oh, it's just the flu. it's just the flu,'" said co-host Joe Scarborough. "I wish that all of these White House people and all of the Trump people that say "it's just a flu," I'd love for them... to get all their family and all of their loved ones together. They can throw a huge party in a barn, they can invite 1,000 other people, film it, if they really believe that. Of course, they're not going to do that."
Guest John Heilemann was even more scathing in his assessment of Fox News.
"It's sick and pathological," he said. "The lesson is we shut the economy down, we shut down most of the states in the country, it worked to flatten the curve in those places! Not that the virus wasn't as dangerous!"
According to conservative campaign consultant Rick Wilson, Donald Trump's nearly two and half hour press conference on Monday, ostensibly about the coronavirus pandemic that has now claimed over the lives of over 23,000 Americans, was nothing less than rantings of a "failed man" lashing out at his perceived enemies.
Writing for the Daily Beast in his typically colorful, but direct, way, Wilson got right to the point by starting: "If you watched President Donald Trump’s daily press briefing Monday, you know that even by his abysmal standards this was the loudest siren yet, a warning that the man occupying the Oval Office is more suited to a very long, involuntary stay in an inpatient mental-health facility than the presidency of the United States."
Calling the president an "angry, needy man not looking outward to the needs of a nation in crisis," the conservative strategist said Trump's performance on Monday where he viciously attacked reporters and claimed he had "total authority" over the U.S. left no doubt that he is a now completely out of control.
Pointing out that the press conference was a "meltdown sh*tshow on the top of the dumpster fire at the peak of Burning-Tire Mountain," Wilson wrote of the president, "It was a manic, gibbering, squint-eyed ragefest by America’s Worst President, a petty display by a failed man who long ago passed the limits of his competence and knowledge. It left little to cling to for even his most fervent lackeys but the grunting media animus that replaced conservatism as the motivating force of the Republican Party."
" Trump just gave the nation a performance that was so manic, so furious, and so utterly unhinged that anyone watching it walked away thinking the 25th Amendment has been too long unexercised and the proof is behind the podium every damn day," he wrote. "What you saw was the real Trump, unbound by facts, reason, logic, the law, or the Constitution, a petty bitch picking petty fights with reporters, a bard of his own songs of grievance and anger."
According to Wilson, what was particularly notable about the president's rant was his claim of "total authority."
"This is of course par for the course of what Trump really is. I’ve said it from the start. He’s not a conservative, he’s a narcissistic authoritarian statist, and Monday was a big fat QED for even the slow children in the class. Nothing about this man was ever conservative," he wrote. " What Trump described Monday was a lot closer to monarchy than a representative democracy. We know this about the man: He fetishizes royalty, strongmen, dictators, kings, warlords, and others who don’t have to work within the bounds of a representative democracy or a republican form of government bound by a constitution and laws."
"Burn this truth into your mind: The best-case scenario from Monday’s press conference is that Trump is out of his damn mind, wrong on the law, wrong on the Constitution, and wrong on the intent of the Founders as to the power of the chief executive. The best case will mean his insistence that he can 'reopen the economy' will be smothered by one crisis after the next, a victim of the pace of events and a staff that realizes he’s crazier than a sh*thouse rat," he added before issuing a chilling warning.
"It’s a common trope among conservatives to talk about the intent of the Founders. Monday should be a reminder that those Founders approached executive power with enormous caution and were diligent in the creation of a constitutional system in which no branch held 'absolute authority,'" he wrote. "When authority is total, so too is the madness of the man who declares it, and the potential for abuse of power."
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A long time ago (late December) in a galaxy far, far away (a Seattle movie theater), I had an idea (a bad one).For the premiere of “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker,” the theater was screening all nine movies from the Skywalker Saga, in numerical order, front to back. I pitched this story to my editor: What’s it like to watch such an ungodly amount of “Star Wars”? And what could compel folks to spend more than 20 waking hours in a movie theater?She liked the pitch, but by then, the theater’s marathon had sold out.Skip forward three months: A global pandemic keeps me in my house for 20 hours a ...
While most of the underlying conditions causing higher rates of COVID-19 infection and death among black and low-income populations can’t be cured overnight, advocates insist political leaders could make a big difference in people’s lives as the region recovers from the crisis.
“The ideological distaste for the Affordable Care Act by many of the South’s political leaders and the Trump administration, has put them at a significant disadvantage to respond to this crisis,” said Joan Alker, executive director of the Georgetown University Center for Children and Families. This crisis could force that to change, she said.
“People in the South don’t just need Medicaid to cover coronavirus treatment, they need it to deal with high rates of chronic disease and to keep rural hospitals afloat. The coronavirus crisis is going to subside, but the economic crisis will be around for a while.”
In general, Southern governors argue that their states can’t afford to expand Medicaid, because they don’t have the money in their limited budgets to pay for even 10% of the bill.
Delayed Shutdowns
The first COVID-19 cases in the country were detected in Seattle in late January, and the outbreak quickly spread throughout the state. New York and other major U.S. cities were next to experience outbreaks.
With the exception of New Orleans, most of the Deep South seemed to be spared initially. Even Atlanta, with one of the largest international airports in the country, did not appear to suffer immediately.
But in late February, two funerals in a small Georgia city 200 miles south of Atlanta set off a chain reaction that quickly overwhelmed local hospitals with COVID-19 patients.
Albany, Georgia, population 75,000, had the state’s first major outbreak, rivaling on a per capita basis those in New York, Seattle and other major cities.
Now similar hotspots are being detected throughout the South. And the virus is seeping into rural communities where many local hospitals are ill-prepared to treat more than a handful of patients at a time.
Lee County, Alabama, on the Georgia border, reported an early outbreak, as did Moss Point, Mississippi, a predominately black town on the state’s Gulf coast, among other small Southern towns.
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But even as it became clear that the South would not escape the virus and the Trump administration declared the coronavirus crisis a national emergency March 13, some governors waited weeks to shut down businesses. And in many Southern states, restrictions on businesses are looser than in other parts of the country and messages to the public are reportedly unclear.
Ivey, the Alabama governor, waited until April 4 to shut down certain businesses and order residents to stay at home.
In Georgia, Republican Gov. Brian Kemp issued a limited stay-at-home order April 2, and the next day his administration told local officials who had closed their beaches to reopen them.
In Arkansas, Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson is still refusing to issue a stay-at-home order. In an interview on PBS NewsHour, he explained that his state was taking a targeted approach to limiting the spread of the virus. Schools and shops — including bars, restaurants, tattoo parlors, barber shops and hair salons — are closed, but otherwise the state is open for business.
“We want to do things that actually work and make a difference,” Hutchinson said. “And our social distancing, our wearing masks is what is working in Arkansas.”
Racial Disparities
Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath laid bare the vulnerability of people living in poverty and highlighted huge health disparities between black and white New Orleanians devastated by the 2005 storm.
The coronavirus crisis is already spotlighting many of those same issues.
In the District of Columbia, black residents make up 45% of the population and nearly 60% of coronavirus deaths.
In Louisiana, African Americans are 32% of the population and more than 70% of coronavirus deaths, as of April 6.
And more than a quarter of black people in the United States are low-wage workers, compared to 16% of whites, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. This puts them at greater risk of exposure to the virus and income loss.
Before the crisis, 23% of black people had incomes below the federal poverty level, compared to 10% of white people.
Already, far more African Americans are losing their jobs as a result of the crisis compared to the rest of the population, Heiman said, which will make their chances of recovery even more tenuous.
In many Southern states, racial health disparities are stark. In Alabama, where maternal death rates are the third-highest in the nation, black women die at more than twice the rate of white women. And in every other key indicator of overall health, black residents score lower than white residents.
Nationwide, African Americans have higher rates of obesity, heart disease, hypertension, diabetes, asthma and other chronic diseases compared to the rest of the population. Making matters worse in the South are long-standing policies that prevent many African Americans from getting access to health care.
“In Alabama, poverty and poor health are a legacy of decades of racist public policies that have excluded people of color from health care,” said Jim Carnes, policy director of low-income advocacy organization Alabama Arise.
“We’re thinking of COVID as a high-stakes stress test on our system,” he said. “It’s revealing weaknesses and gaps we’ve always known were there. The question is whether the light will be bright enough this time that our officials will be forced to face the reality and address it.”
A Facebook group of far-right citizens have decided to hold a reopening of the state of Oklahoma to protest social distancing. Ironically, however, they encouraged people to socially distance.
With a graphic proclaiming "Let's get Oklahoma Open for Business!" the invitation announced, adding that people would convene at the Oklahoma state capitol on Wednesday, April 15 "to show the governor and the legislature that they are ready to get back to work."
"It's time for business owners and citizens to rise up to the un-Constitutional (sic) restrictions," the invitations proclaims.
The post appeared in a group from what appeared to be one of the organizers of the event.
"Folks, we'd love to have your attendance at a parade style rally we are doing at the capitol on Wednesday afternoon," said Eric Tomlinson, the Vice-Chair of the Wagoner County Republican Party. The event doesn't appear to be sponsored by the Oklahoma GOP, however. "We will have a solid attendance and some press coverage. Please let me know if you are interested and I can give you more info. This will be a socially distanced rally. We will be in our vehicles parade style."
The question, however, becomes, if the event is to urge people to get back to work, why is social distancing even needed at the event?
That did explain that they were following President Donald Trump's social distancing guidelines despite being under city and state guidelines, both of which are run by Republicans. Trump has said he doesn't intend to open the country back up for "a few weeks," so it's unknown why this group both agrees and disagrees with the president's social distancing guidelines.
