Courtesy: Scientific American
Albany, GA is one of the nation’s most drastic and most unheralded coronavirus hotspots. Profiled by the New York Times and CNN in less than 72 hours, the story of how two funeral services in the city may have led to more than 490 infections and 29 deaths in less than a month — many of the deceased African American — offers a frightening tale of how rural areas across America will be in the crosshairs of a public health crisis, political gamesmanship and the power of misinformation.
From the Times:
The 14 medical intensive care unit beds were filled within two days of the first wave of coronavirus patients; they converted 12 cardiac I.C.U. beds, but those, too, were filled two days later; 12 beds in the surgical I.C.U. were filled three days after that, Mr. Steiner said.
For a few days, the hospital was so short of staff members that employees who had tested positive but did not yet have symptoms were asked to work.
“If I had 1,000 nurses sitting at home, and could send the ones testing positive out, I would, but we don’t have that, and nobody has that,” Mr. Steiner said. “You get to the point where you say, ‘If I don’t have the staff, I can’t care for the patients.’”
Not mentioned in either the Times’ or CNN’s story on the virus outbreak was the potential of where its victims go once hospital beds are beyond capacity and personnel are scarce. Two miles from Albany’s Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital is Albany State University, likely to be one of the city’s largest spaces for staging additional makeshift healthcare areas should the casualties and infections become too much to manage.
But beyond being a place where bodies can be stabilized to sustain life or staged to prepare for burial, Albany State is an institution that could have been the essential asset to support the city in a historic crisis shared by the city and the world.
ASU has programs of strength in nursing, emergency medical technology, healthcare management, and supply chain. In a perfect world, those programs would’ve been the centerpiece of professional training in Southwest Georgia by way of Albany State, dispatching graduates and certified experts in these fields who would’ve likely been employed and proximate to the region, and able to respond to this unprecedented public health maelstrom.
That would’ve been HBCU excellence in a perfect world, but Georgia has a bad habit of reveling in perfect stupidity. Weeks before word of the coronavirus ever reached domestic shores, the state produced a report on the growing problem of its nursing shortage.
The major factors contributing to the high turnover and vacancy rate trends include non-competitive salaries, the aging workforce and a broader range of competing career choices. Low salaries keep nurses from applying for jobs in public health. Many potential applicants do not complete the application process when they learn about the salary. Surveys and anecdotal information document that job applicants report a salary difference of $10,000 – $25,000 in the rural settings of Georgia as well as in the metropolitan areas of the State. Local public health agencies cannot offer sign-on bonuses and similar incentives offered by other health care employers.
It is projected that as many as 50% of the nurses in county health departments will be retiring within the next 5-10 years.
Instead of using ASU as a magnet to attract students from rural and low-income communities throughout Georgia to elevate their individual earnings and career potential through nursing or public health careers, the state by way of the University System of Georgia has mangled Albany State through strategically harmful presidential hirings and firings, mergers, promoting the university’s “struggles” with enrollment with stories devoid of context, and failing to invest in its potential.
Albany is a cautionary tale for communities throughout the United States. The Scientific American yesterday published a report on the secret coronavirus hotspots throughout rural America.
For example, many county clusters—such as those around Albany, Ga., Detroit, Nashville, Tenn., and parts of Mississippi and Arkansas—had relatively large numbers of cases per capita. As of March 29, the county cluster encompassing New York State, New Jersey and Massachusetts still had the most confirmed infections both overall and per capita: 76,273 cases, or about 22 per 10,000 people. Yet Albany, Ga., had the second-highest number per capita: 13 cases per 10,000 people. That figure was much higher than those of other well-known hotspots, such as Seattle, which had about eight cases per 10,000, and San Francisco, which had two per 100,000.
For decades, advocates of Albany State and Georgia’s other public HBCUs have made the claim that the state would harm itself by failing to expand education and training for black residents through its black colleges. And while those claims were always legitimate, we now see that a single virus and the socioeconomic destruction it will leave in its wake deeply underscores how policy-based segregation will set back rural communities and states throughout the south beyond the parameters of race.
State governments and systems nationwide were for generations all too comfortable with ignoring black and poor people, but the great equalizer of a faceless virus has exposed more than inadequate healthcare infrastructure; it exposes how the negligence may destroy state and regional economies at large.
Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee; regions in these HBCU stronghold states will have virtually no relief for rural counties, cities, and towns within their borders. HBCUs, which could have been significant recruiters and trainers for the healthcare personnel and emergency management professionals now needed to literally save not just lives, but municipalities, have been generationally underfunded and maligned by partisan efforts.
And now when HBCUs are needed most, many of them which should’ve been in a position to respond and support with human and capital resources aren’t stable enough to offer support in a time of crisis. Even with a financial infusion from the federal government, many of the smaller public and private HBCUs in underpopulated areas of the south cannot spare the cost or liability of being on-site resources for medical intervention or outreach in the midst of the pandemic.
And when this pandemic is over, how do HBCU staff, faculty, and students return to cities where commerce may be wiped out, where healthcare will remain stressed for an indefinite period of time, and to campuses that will never go back to business as usual? This isn’t like a one-off natural disaster where municipalities, states and the federal government can share the burden of rebuilding after a 100-year hurricane or tornado; this is a bill the entire nation will take years to pay off and at the expense of areas that are inconsequential in comparison to metropolitan centers.
The worst is ahead for many of America’s forgotten cities and towns; places where a lot of us grew up, where many of us still have family, and where many HBCUs carry the biggest load in their prospects for survival. The words of the day now are “look ahead,” but if you take the time to look back and to see what could’ve been with more support for black colleges in these areas, you’ll find that a look into the future presents a picture that we could’ve easily predicted, but one that may be also more harrowing than even the global pandemic we never saw coming.
