Covid-19 is ravaging one of the country’s wealthiest black counties
Medical staff and workers walk through the halls of the University of Maryland Laurel Medical Center, which was expanded into a hospital to treat covid-19 patients in Prince George’s, the county with the most coronavirus cases in the state. (Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post)
By
Rachel Chason,
Ovetta Wiggins and
John D. Harden
April 26, 2020 at 7:40 p.m. EDT
The intensive care unit at Inova Alexandria Hospital has empty beds, and doctors are prepared for a rush of coronavirus patients that has yet to hit the largely white suburb.
A dozen miles away at Adventist HealthCare Fort Washington Hospital Center, the ICU is full, and employees treat coronavirus patients in medical tents in the parking lot. Paramedics across Prince George’s County are summoned daily to help people struggling to breathe, and funeral home directors are searching for more places to store bodies.
Prince George’s, one of the nation’s wealthiest majority-black counties, has reported the most coronavirus infections and some of the highest death tolls in the Washington region. In the hardest-hit neighborhoods, African American and Latino residents make up more than 70 percent of households. The grim statistics mirror data showing black Americans are more likely than white Americans to be infected with coronavirus, and more likely to die from it.
Officials say the pandemic has hit the county of 900,000 especially hard because many residents are front-line workers exposed daily to the virus, and Prince Georgians disproportionately suffer from underlying health conditions that make the virus more deadly.
Sean Boynes (Family photo)
“His comment to me was, ‘I am the only pharmacist,’” said Bowie resident Nicole Boynes, whose husband, Sean, had asthma but kept working at a pharmacy he helped found in Greenbelt. Sean Boynes, a former Air Force captain, died of covid-19 on April 2, at age 46.
Nearly 14 percent of adults in Prince George’s have diabetes, according to county health statistics, 36 percent are obese and 64 percentof the Medicare population suffers from hypertension — rates above national and statewide averages. There are fewer hospital beds and primary care doctors than in neighboring jurisdictions, which means residents are less likely to treat medical issues early. The county also spends less on public health efforts than its wealthier neighbors.
Sign up for our Coronavirus Updates newsletter to track the outbreak. All stories linked in the newsletter are free to access.
The 174 county residents who had died of covid-19 as of Sunday, according to The Washington Post’s tracker, include educators, a maintenance worker, a prominent artist and a pastor. One of the youngest victims was Leilani Jordan, 27, who had cognitive disabilities and worked at the Giant supermarket in Largo.
As the number of cases continues to rise, officials are vowing to put more money toward public health, even as the prolonged economic shutdown decimates government budgets. They are determined to improve wellness and find ways to bring doctors and nurses to the communities they say have too long been ignored.
It’s served as a magnifying glass for challenges we knew we had,” said County Executive Angela D. Alsobrooks (D). “We know that when this is over, we can’t return to business as usual.”
Learn more about covid-19 cases and deaths in D.C., Maryland and Virginia
Death transcends class, geography
Maryland’s first coronavirus death, announced March 18, was a Prince George’s man in his 60s with underlying health conditions. The deaths that followed have been people from poor neighborhoods inside the Capital Beltway and wealthy subdivisions outside of it. Of the cases where the victim’s race or ethnicity was reported, 130 were African American, 15 were Latino and 19 were white, according to county data.
A Washington Post analysis found that among the Zip codes with the highest per capita infection rate is 20769, which includes Glenn Dale, and has a median household income of $148,800. But there is also 20712, which includes Mt. Rainier, on the border with the District, and has a median household income of $54,800.
Jordan, the supermarket worker, lived in Upper Marlboro. Her mother, Zenobia Shepherd, warned her about the risks of the pandemic, but said Jordan likely did not fully understand.
“She said, ‘Mommy, I’m going to work because no one else is going to help the senior citizens get their groceries,’ ” Shepherd said. “She only stopped going to work when she could no longer breathe.”
Shepherd said her daughter’s death made her more aware of the disparities between white and black communities. Recently, she tried to buy respiratory masks in her local pharmacy; there weren’t any. When she drove across the river to Alexandria, she had no trouble finding them.
She knows that people in her county have more diabetes and heart disease than others in the region. But she also has grown angry about black people dying across the country after not receiving proper care, including a man in Detroit who died in his home after being turned away from three emergency rooms.
“It’s not right, it’s not right,” Shepherd said. “I’m not going to allow underlying conditions be an excuse for how the black community is being treated in certain communities.”
Supermarket employees across Prince George’s mourned Jordan’s death, said Bernadette Christian, a cashier at the Giant in Camp Springs, Md. Then they kept working, and worrying. She said employees have been dealt blow after blow: Angry shoppers snapping at them, fear about exposing their families, then the death of their colleague.
But Christian, 55, has not missed a day of work, and does not plan to.
“People have got to eat,” she said. “You’ve got to eat. You cannot not go to work.”
Bernadette Christian, a cashier at the Giant supermarket in Camp Springs, Md. The Giant is in Prince George's County, the hardest hit part of Maryland in both number of positive cases and deaths. (Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post)
A strained system
The influx of coronavirus patients has inundated Prince George’s hospitals at times, forcing some patients to be transferred to facilities outside the county.
To add more beds, the state reopened the shuttered Laurel Regional Hospital, which had been downsized to a walk-in medical center in late 2018, and is adding beds at University of Maryland Prince George’s Hospital Center in Cheverly and Fort Washington Medical Center. A testing site was launched at FedEx Field.
Hospitals in Prince George’s seeing an influx of critically ill patients
Because of underlying health problems, many coronavirus patients in Prince George’s arrive at the emergency room very, very sick, said Joseph Wright, interim chief executive at Capital Region Health, which oversees the Prince George’s Hospital Center in Cheverly.
The hospital’s case fatality rate is about 7.2 percent, Wright said, and the rate of patients who test positive is about 34 percent — double the rate at the 12 other hospitals in the University of Maryland Medical System.
Commuters, the majority of them people of color, exit a Metro station in New Carrollton. Many Prince George’s County residents have essential jobs that they cannot do from home, officials say, increasingly their exposure to coronavirus. (Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post)
Medical staff and workers walk through the halls of the University of Maryland Laurel Medical Center, which was expanded into a hospital to treat covid-19 patients in Prince George’s, the county with the most coronavirus cases in the state. (Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post)
By
Rachel Chason,
Ovetta Wiggins and
John D. Harden
April 26, 2020 at 7:40 p.m. EDT
The intensive care unit at Inova Alexandria Hospital has empty beds, and doctors are prepared for a rush of coronavirus patients that has yet to hit the largely white suburb.
A dozen miles away at Adventist HealthCare Fort Washington Hospital Center, the ICU is full, and employees treat coronavirus patients in medical tents in the parking lot. Paramedics across Prince George’s County are summoned daily to help people struggling to breathe, and funeral home directors are searching for more places to store bodies.
Prince George’s, one of the nation’s wealthiest majority-black counties, has reported the most coronavirus infections and some of the highest death tolls in the Washington region. In the hardest-hit neighborhoods, African American and Latino residents make up more than 70 percent of households. The grim statistics mirror data showing black Americans are more likely than white Americans to be infected with coronavirus, and more likely to die from it.
Officials say the pandemic has hit the county of 900,000 especially hard because many residents are front-line workers exposed daily to the virus, and Prince Georgians disproportionately suffer from underlying health conditions that make the virus more deadly.
Sean Boynes (Family photo)
“His comment to me was, ‘I am the only pharmacist,’” said Bowie resident Nicole Boynes, whose husband, Sean, had asthma but kept working at a pharmacy he helped found in Greenbelt. Sean Boynes, a former Air Force captain, died of covid-19 on April 2, at age 46.
Nearly 14 percent of adults in Prince George’s have diabetes, according to county health statistics, 36 percent are obese and 64 percentof the Medicare population suffers from hypertension — rates above national and statewide averages. There are fewer hospital beds and primary care doctors than in neighboring jurisdictions, which means residents are less likely to treat medical issues early. The county also spends less on public health efforts than its wealthier neighbors.
Sign up for our Coronavirus Updates newsletter to track the outbreak. All stories linked in the newsletter are free to access.
The 174 county residents who had died of covid-19 as of Sunday, according to The Washington Post’s tracker, include educators, a maintenance worker, a prominent artist and a pastor. One of the youngest victims was Leilani Jordan, 27, who had cognitive disabilities and worked at the Giant supermarket in Largo.
As the number of cases continues to rise, officials are vowing to put more money toward public health, even as the prolonged economic shutdown decimates government budgets. They are determined to improve wellness and find ways to bring doctors and nurses to the communities they say have too long been ignored.
It’s served as a magnifying glass for challenges we knew we had,” said County Executive Angela D. Alsobrooks (D). “We know that when this is over, we can’t return to business as usual.”
Learn more about covid-19 cases and deaths in D.C., Maryland and Virginia
Death transcends class, geography
Maryland’s first coronavirus death, announced March 18, was a Prince George’s man in his 60s with underlying health conditions. The deaths that followed have been people from poor neighborhoods inside the Capital Beltway and wealthy subdivisions outside of it. Of the cases where the victim’s race or ethnicity was reported, 130 were African American, 15 were Latino and 19 were white, according to county data.
A Washington Post analysis found that among the Zip codes with the highest per capita infection rate is 20769, which includes Glenn Dale, and has a median household income of $148,800. But there is also 20712, which includes Mt. Rainier, on the border with the District, and has a median household income of $54,800.
Jordan, the supermarket worker, lived in Upper Marlboro. Her mother, Zenobia Shepherd, warned her about the risks of the pandemic, but said Jordan likely did not fully understand.
“She said, ‘Mommy, I’m going to work because no one else is going to help the senior citizens get their groceries,’ ” Shepherd said. “She only stopped going to work when she could no longer breathe.”
Shepherd said her daughter’s death made her more aware of the disparities between white and black communities. Recently, she tried to buy respiratory masks in her local pharmacy; there weren’t any. When she drove across the river to Alexandria, she had no trouble finding them.
She knows that people in her county have more diabetes and heart disease than others in the region. But she also has grown angry about black people dying across the country after not receiving proper care, including a man in Detroit who died in his home after being turned away from three emergency rooms.
“It’s not right, it’s not right,” Shepherd said. “I’m not going to allow underlying conditions be an excuse for how the black community is being treated in certain communities.”
Supermarket employees across Prince George’s mourned Jordan’s death, said Bernadette Christian, a cashier at the Giant in Camp Springs, Md. Then they kept working, and worrying. She said employees have been dealt blow after blow: Angry shoppers snapping at them, fear about exposing their families, then the death of their colleague.
But Christian, 55, has not missed a day of work, and does not plan to.
“People have got to eat,” she said. “You’ve got to eat. You cannot not go to work.”
Bernadette Christian, a cashier at the Giant supermarket in Camp Springs, Md. The Giant is in Prince George's County, the hardest hit part of Maryland in both number of positive cases and deaths. (Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post)
A strained system
The influx of coronavirus patients has inundated Prince George’s hospitals at times, forcing some patients to be transferred to facilities outside the county.
To add more beds, the state reopened the shuttered Laurel Regional Hospital, which had been downsized to a walk-in medical center in late 2018, and is adding beds at University of Maryland Prince George’s Hospital Center in Cheverly and Fort Washington Medical Center. A testing site was launched at FedEx Field.
Hospitals in Prince George’s seeing an influx of critically ill patients
Because of underlying health problems, many coronavirus patients in Prince George’s arrive at the emergency room very, very sick, said Joseph Wright, interim chief executive at Capital Region Health, which oversees the Prince George’s Hospital Center in Cheverly.
The hospital’s case fatality rate is about 7.2 percent, Wright said, and the rate of patients who test positive is about 34 percent — double the rate at the 12 other hospitals in the University of Maryland Medical System.
Commuters, the majority of them people of color, exit a Metro station in New Carrollton. Many Prince George’s County residents have essential jobs that they cannot do from home, officials say, increasingly their exposure to coronavirus. (Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post)
Them bougie PG county negros don't give two shyts about the poor black folks, and that ain't gonna change.
