Last week, ProPublica published a five-part series that senior investigative reporter Doris Burke and I wrote about Albany, Georgia, and its only hospital, the Phoebe Putney Memorial. We started working on this story five years ago, when COVID-19 was raging across the world and Albany, a small, remote city with little time to pass, had the fourth-highest infection rate in the world.
We originally thought we’d write a David vs. Goliath story about a town’s response to a crisis. But as I’ve written in this series, there came a turning point when I realized that there are questions and challenges facing Albany that are far more enduring than COVID-19. They were about race and power.
In the weeks immediately after the pandemic made travel unsafe, I observed the city’s daily press conferences and the social media posts on Facebook that flooded the hospital. It’s where the first drafts of Albany’s COVID-19 story are being written, and I thought the story pushed there felt eerily nostalgic.
Albany is a majority black city of approximately 67,000 people. But while black residents died in disproportionate numbers, the officials leading the response were white, including the mayor, county commissioners, and city leaders. At each press conference, authorities announced the number of people infected with the new coronavirus and the number of deaths.
In early April 2020, he announced his name instead of his number for the first time. Individuals deserving of recognition were Judge Nancy Stevenson. she was white.
The hospital’s chief medical officer, Dr. Stephen Kitchen, choked up when he announced her death. Mayor Kermit “Bo” Dorrow took to the stage and asked for a moment of silence in commemoration, saying, “This marks the next step in this fight for many people in our region as we recognize the victims of COVID-19.”
“We have lost a tremendous gem of this community, a gem of a people,” declared then-County Chairman Christopher Kohilas. He added: “I think her death highlights exactly how deadly this disease is.”
I’m not going to lie. I cringed when I heard that. By then, about 38 people had died. The overwhelming majority were black. There was no mention of them by name or moment of silence at the press conference. I wondered to myself how the city’s leaders didn’t realize how deadly this disease was until after Stevenson’s death.
The comments that flooded the video briefing’s live chat made it clear that I wasn’t the only one asking that question.
It read, “Let us not forget others who have died and are known to others in our community.”
Another article said, “So you’re saying you’re going to express your condolences to the judge, but not the residents.”
And then there were these words: “Now, back to the topic.”
That moment resonated with me because 20 years earlier, as part of a Pulitzer Prize-winning series for The New York Times, I had written an article about how history written by those in power, most of them white, tends to erase, trivialize, and misrepresent the experiences and contributions of those who are not.
That story was also set in the South. Titled “How Race Lives in America,” the series aimed to show how the systemic divisions that shape our society and each individual’s place within them are driven by everyday interactions at work, school, and hospitals.
What I was watching unfold in Albany and Phoebe felt like a new work. Not only did city leaders not seem to realize the magnitude of the crisis until one of their own died, they seemed to be making those bearing the brunt of the pandemic feel responsible for their own demise. The official story is that the outbreak began at a black funeral, and that the reason black people were so vulnerable to the virus was because they didn’t take care of themselves.
When I first visited Albany, I met Pastor Daniel Simmons, the leader of Mount Zion Baptist Church. He made it clear that he was skeptical of popular theories and encouraged me not to be fooled by them either.
“If Albany, Georgia had done things differently over the years, our community would not be as vulnerable,” he says. “If the health care system had been different, if the relationship had been different with poor people and people of color, the outcome would have been different.”
The main lesson he hoped I and others would take away from Albany’s COVID-19 crisis was that it didn’t have to happen this way.
What he and others told me was missing from that story was how difficult it was for African Americans in Albany, especially those who were poor and uninsured, to receive safe and affordable health care in a city whose primary institution was the hospital. Phoebe Putney Health System is not only Southwest Georgia’s largest health care provider, but also Albany’s largest employer and real estate owner. Scott Steiner, the health system’s CEO, said the hospital’s mission is to provide care without regard to race, religion or ability to pay, “but we always try to balance that with paying our bills.”
Doris and I spent the next four years exploring that part of Albany’s story, interviewing more than 150 sources and sifting through thousands of pages of records. He learns that Phoebe Hospital is the only hospital in town that has secretly worked hard and spent millions of dollars to oust an old competitor and eventually succeed in buying the hospital. The cost of treatment has increased and quality has declined. Meanwhile, the more Phoebe grew, the more Albany became financially dependent on her, and the harder it became for patients to hold the hospital accountable.
The CEO and former attorney for the health system who oversaw Phoebe during its greatest growth years did not respond to a detailed list of questions. When we asked Phoebe’s current leadership for a response to our findings, a hospital spokesperson accused us of deliberately excluding positive patient stories. “Most patients have a good experience with Phoebe,” he said. “It would be wrong to ignore that fact.”
As for Doris and I, we decided to focus on people who are often left out of the story of Albany and this country. Because I believed it would resonate with anyone who is struggling to get the medical care they need. Please enjoy the entire series. You can read it here. Alternatively, you can listen to the audio version created in collaboration with Theater of War actors here.
