COVID-19: The unfolding public health crisis in the South

By Chris Kromm / April 1, 2020

Articles in this series

A history of groundbreaking reporting on the South's poultry industry

By Olivia Paschal
June 1, 2021 - It was 32 years ago that Southern Exposure — the print forerunner to Facing South — set out to document conditions in the region's fast-growing poultry industry. Many of the problems it reported on continue today. And as our recent reporting has shown, the pandemic created new challenges for the industry's changing workforce while also presenting opportunities for organizing in an industry that's long resisted unionization.

For Magaly Licolli, organizing poultry workers starts with learning together

By Olivia Paschal
June 1, 2021 - Licolli co-founded the group Venceremos to organize poultry workers in Northwest Arkansas and now serves as its director, a position she previously held at the now-defunct Northwest Arkansas Workers' Justice Center. In this oral history interview, she talks to Facing South about her upbringing in Mexico, how her theater education plays into her organizing strategy, sexism's impact on worker organizing, and lessons she's learned through her work.

The rural South lost 13 hospitals in 2020

By Olivia Paschal
March 17, 2021 - The COVID-19 pandemic contributed to the ongoing loss of hospital beds in rural communities across the South. The greatest losses were in Tennessee — among the states that haven't expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. The rate of rural hospital closures in non-expansion states is six times greater than in states that expanded the program.

George's poultry workers walk out in Arkansas to protest COVID-19 conditions

By Olivia PaschalRachell Sanchez-Smith
December 8, 2020 - Employees of a Springdale, Arkansas, processing plant owned by George's, one of the top U.S. chicken producers, are pressing the company to re-implement staggered shifts and make social distancing possible. The walkout, which the workers plan to continue until their demands are met, was the first such action by poultry workers in the state, which leads the nation in poultry production.

VOICES: Deconstructing the systems crushing the South's young people in the pandemic

By Victoria Bowden
December 4, 2020 - Victoria Bowden, 25, of Stone Mountain, Georgia, shares her and other young people's difficult experiences trying to get by during the COVID-19 pandemic. Now a graduate student intern with the Southern Economic Advancement Project, she offers practical ideas for fixing the systems that put young Southerners at risk of heavy debt, poverty, homelessness, and mental illness.

THE STAKES 2020: Calandra Davis on how elections shape poor Mississippians' lives

By Olivia Paschal
October 26, 2020 - Mississippi is one of the poorest states in America, and one-third of Black Mississippians live under the federal poverty line. We spoke with Calandra Davis, a policy analyst at Hope Policy Institute and a community activist, about how federal elections affect the regulatory state and thus people's access to affordable housing, health care, and banking.

VOICES: Essential workers must help set NC health and safety standards

By Faith Alexander
July 1, 2020 - NC Raise Up/Fight for $15 recently brought together essential workers to testify to members of the General Assembly about why workers must be involved in creating and overseeing health and safety guidelines for their industries. This is the testimony of Faith Alexander, a certified nursing assistant at a Fayetteville hospital and a COVID-19 survivor.

After wrecking the Gulf, Big Oil is worsening the COVID-19 crisis

By Sue Sturgis
April 24, 2020 - A decade after the BP oil spill set off an environmental health disaster in communities across the Gulf Coast, the company and the rest of the U.S. oil and gas industry continue to inflict pain on vulnerable populations across the South — and they're now implicated in raising the death rate from the novel coronavirus in African-American communities across Louisiana.

INSTITUTE INDEX: Southern states refuse to release prisoners amid the pandemic

By Billy Corriher
April 20, 2020 - With the COVID-19 pandemic raging through correctional facilities, many states have ordered the release of nonviolent offenders in local jails or prison inmates at greater risk from the virus. But states in the Deep South have been slow to act. Meanwhile, Louisiana is moving its COVID-19-stricken prisoners to the notorious Angola penitentiary — an hour's drive from a hospital with a ventilator.

Who takes care of the farmworkers' children?

By Rolando Zenteno
April 20, 2020 - The migrant and seasonal farmworkers who help feed the U.S. are considered "essential" employees amid the coronavirus pandemic and must show up to work to earn enough money to survive. As schools move online and government child development programs close temporarily, they're left scrambling to figure out what to do with their children.

COVID-19 and the unfunded Black Belt commission

By Greg Kaufmann
April 10, 2020 - The Southeast Crescent Regional Commission was created in 2008 to provide economic development assistance to Black Belt states but has never received its full appropriation from Congress — even while its counterpart covering whiter, richer Northern states has. With Black Belt communities being ravaged by the pandemic, it's past time for action.

INSTITUTE INDEX: Taking the census in a pandemic

By Sue Sturgis
April 9, 2020 - The decennial U.S. population count is underway and will be used for everything from drawing new congressional districts to deciding where to allocate federal resources — including any potential coronavirus vaccine. But the pandemic is complicating the process and raising concerns about potential undercounts, which would inflict more pain on suffering communities.

The Tennessee company behind the Washington nursing home coronavirus crisis

By Sue Sturgis
March 13, 2020 - A skilled nursing facility that's part of the Tennessee-based Life Care Centers of America chain, which is owned by billionaire GOP donor Forrest Preston, is at the center of the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak in the Seattle area. Stories have emerged of gross mismanagement of the outbreak at the facility, whose corporate owner has also recently been in trouble for Medicare fraud and worker discrimination.