Facing South, the essential blog from the Institute for Southern Studies in Durham, N.C., has put together a study of the impact of the pandemic on that region. It is a comprehensive report that demonstrates first and foremost how many different aspects of American life are affected by the current public-health emergency, especially in the South, which is particularly vulnerable.

Moreover, a new analysis from the Southern Economic Advancement Project indicates that the Southern region is vulnerable to the pandemic in ways that other regions are not. Approximately 30 percent of all wages and salaries in the South — more than $577 billion — are earned in seven industries that rely on sustained levels of household spending and so are easily disrupted. The South also has a higher proportion of elderly residents and people with disabilities, lower rates of paid sick leave, weak levels of public benefits, fewer overall resources, and nine of the 14 states in the nation that have failed to expand Medicaid. Indeed, between 2005 and 2019, 162 rural hospitals were closed, and 60 percent of those were in Southern states that rejected Medicaid expansion.



Prominent in the report is the rising problem of the unequal impact of the pandemic that is landing on poor and minority citizens. This has become an important issue in a number of places beyond the South. Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, Democrat of Massachusetts, has been sounding the alarm for a while, and on Tuesday, she brought it into a discussion with Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker over the guidelines set up by the state’s Department of Public Health regarding the allocation of necessary medical supplies.

The virus is no great equalizer. JOHANNES EISELE Getty Images

The protocols in place are slanted toward patients without what have become known as “co-morbidities,” pre-existing health conditions that make patients more vulnerable to serious COVID-19 complications. Those conditions—heart disease, diabetes, asthma, etc.—are more prevalent in minority communities, which also happen to be the neighborhoods in which the pandemic is most widespread. Pressley argues that these guidelines direct resources away from those citizens who need the supplies the most. In a letter to Baker, Pressley wrote:



Unfortunately, many of us anticipated this outcome. That barring proper action, COVID-19 would be a death sentence for Black and Latinx communities — not because communities of color are predisposed to the negative consequences of this disease, but because racism and inequality have predisposed communities of color to underlying conditions like diabetes, asthma, and hypertension that heighten the risk of COVID-19 hospitalization and death.



The legacy of structural racism and inequality has resulted in unequal access to affordable health care, safe and stable housing, and quality schools and employment. Like the H1N1 pandemic before it, COVID-19 has already robbed us of thousands of lives, many of whom are people of color. In the midst of this crisis, social and economic inequality has simply worsened these disparities and exposed severe cracks in our nation’s safety net. These devastating outcomes are not unique to Massachusetts, but are happening nationwide in places like Chicago, New Orleans, and Queens.



As you can imagine, these problems are even more acute in the South, especially the pre-existing societal conditions whereby general economic inequality has bled into a form of medical discrimination. In addition, even economic development has proven discriminatory. From the Facing South report:



The Southeast Crescent Regional Commission (SCRC), created in 2008 to provide economic development assistance to seven Black Belt states, has been authorized to receive $30 million to $33 million annually but was never appropriated more than $250,000 in a year. In contrast, the same 2008 legislation also launched the Northern Border Regional Commission (NBRC) for similar rural development assistance in the primarily white states of Maine, New Hampshire, New York, and Vermont; it has received steady funding — growing to $25 million in 2019 — despite being a much smaller region than that covered by the SCRC.



The resources that the SCRC should have received for the past 12 years were sorely needed before, and there is palpable desperation now. The South contains approximately 84 percent of the nation's persistently poor counties — that is, counties that have had at least 20 percent of the population in poverty over 30 years. The region faces everything from raw sewage due to inadequate infrastructure, to health care deserts, to no broadband access, to a lack of living wage jobs. The SCRC was created to provide funding for job training, health care services, transportation, infrastructure, and more. SCRC investments in health care facilities and a more diversified economy — so fewer people would now be dependent on low-wage and currently high-risk work — could be making a difference right now as Southerners confront this public health crisis.



The pandemic is teaching important lessons every day, object lessons in all the problems this country has been ignoring, or dealing with fitfully, over the last 100 years. If we’re not smart enough as a self-governing republic to take this opportunity to learn from it, we’re not smart enough to be a self-governing republic, and maybe never have been.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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