Last week, ProPublica published a five-part series that I wrote with senior research reporter Doris Burke about Albany, Georgia, and its only hospital, Phoebe Putney Memorial. We started working on the story five years ago, when COVID-19 was racing around the globe and Albany — small, remote and barely touched by time — had the world’s fourth-highest case rate.
We initially set out to write a David-vs.-Goliath narrative about the town’s response to the crisis. But, as I write in the series, there came a turning point at which we realized there were more enduring questions and challenges facing Albany than COVID-19. They were about race and power.
In the weeks immediately following the outbreak, when the pandemic made it too risky for me to travel, I monitored the city’s daily press briefings and the hospital’s flood of social media posts on Facebook. That, I thought, was where the first draft of Albany’s COVID-19 story was being written, and the narrative that was being pushed in them felt disturbingly familiar.
Albany is a majority Black city of some 67,000 people. However, while Black residents were dying in disproportionate numbers, the officials leading the response were white: the mayor, the chair of the county government and the senior executives at Phoebe. At every briefing, officials announced the number of people who were sick with COVID-19 and the number of who’d died.
Then, in early April 2020, for the first time, they announced a name, not a number. The one person who merited personal recognition was Judge Nancy Stephenson. She was white.
The chief medical officer at the hospital, Dr. Stephen Kitchen, choked up when he announced her death. Mayor Kermit “Bo” Dorough took to the podium to ask for a moment of silence to mark the moment, saying it “brings many of the people in this community to the next phase of this battle because now we know someone who has been a victim of COVID.”
The chair of the county government at the time, Christopher Cohilas, proclaimed, “We have lost a tremendous jewel of this community. A jewel to the people.” Then he added, “I think that her passing highlights exactly how lethal this disease can be.”
I’m not going to lie. I cringed at what I was hearing. Some 38 people had died by then. The overwhelming majority were Black. There hadn’t been any named mentions or moments of silence at the press briefings for them. How could it be, I thought to myself, that it wasn’t until Stephenson’s death that the city’s leaders understood how lethal the disease could be?
The comments that came pouring into the live chat of the video briefing made clear I wasn’t the only one asking that question.
One read, “Let’s not forget all the others who have passed, and who are known by others in our community.”
Another read, “So you extend condolences to the judge, but not your residents.”
And then there was this: “So now it hits home.”
That moment resonated with me because two decades earlier I’d written a piece as part of a Pulitzer Prize-winning series for The New York Times about how histories written by people in power — most of them white — tend to erase, minimize and misrepresent the experiences and contributions of those who are not.
That story was also set in the South. The series, titled “How Race Is Lived in America,” was meant to show how the systemic divisions that shape our society and each individual’s place in it are driven by day-to-day interactions at work, at school and in hospitals.
What I was seeing play out in Albany and at Phoebe felt like the stuff of a new installment. Not only did it seem that city leaders had failed to recognize the magnitude of the crisis until one of their own had died, they had also made those bearing the brunt of the pandemic feel responsible for their own demise. According to the official narrative, the outbreak started at a Black funeral, and the reason Black people were so vulnerable to the virus was because they didn’t take care of themselves.
On my first visit to Albany, I met Pastor Daniel Simmons, the leader of Mt. Zion Baptist Church. He made clear he was skeptical of the prevailing narrative and encouraged me not to fall for it either.
“If Albany, Georgia, had done things differently over the years, our community wouldn’t have been as vulnerable as it was,” he said. “If the health care system was different, if it had a different relationship with poor people and people of color, the outcome would have been different.”
The main lesson that he hoped I and other people would take from Albany’s COVID-19 crisis was: “It didn’t have to be this way.”
What he and others told me had been left out of that narrative was how hard it had been for African Americans in Albany, particularly those who are poor and uninsured, to get safe and affordable health care in a city whose dominant institution is a hospital. Phoebe Putney Health System is not only the largest provider of health care in southwest Georgia, it is also Albany’s largest employer and property owner. The health system’s CEO, Scott Steiner, said the hospital’s mission is to provide care regardless of race, religion and ability to pay, “but we’re always trying to balance that out with paying the bills.”
Doris and I spent the following four years exploring that part of Albany’s story, interviewing more than 150 sources and poring over thousands of pages of records. We learned that Phoebe was the only hospital in town because it had worked hard — even stealthily — and spent millions of dollars to drive out its old competitor, before finally managing to acquire it. The cost of care went up and quality went down. Meanwhile the more Phoebe grew, the more economically dependent Albany became, and the harder it was for patients to hold the hospital to account.
The CEO that oversaw Phoebe during the period of its most significant growth and the health system’s former attorney did not respond to detailed lists of questions. When we asked Phoebe’s current leaders for responses to our findings, a hospital spokesperson accused us of intentionally excluding positive patient stories. “Most patients have positive experiences at Phoebe,” he said. “Ignoring that fact is wrong.”
As for Doris and me, we were determined to focus on the people who tend to get left out of Albany’s, and the nation’s, stories because we believed they would resonate with anyone who has struggled to get the health care they need. We hope you’ll spend time with the whole series. You can read it here. Or you can listen here to an audio version, produced in collaboration with actors from Theater of War.
