Federal agencies have hired contractors with no experience to find respirators and masks, fueling a black market filled with price gouging and multiple layers of profiteering brokers. One contractor called them “buccaneers and pirates.”
Of Georgia’s more than 1,100 virus deaths, 12% are from long-term care facilities in a region that holds just 3% of the population. As the state reopens, staff know that risks of exposure will only increase.
The communities hardest hit by the coronavirus in Chicago are low-density black and Hispanic neighborhoods, including ones where economic decline and population loss have caused more people to live in the same household.
Citing a state medical privacy law, Texas is refusing to release the names of long-term care facilities where residents have died from COVID-19, even as those case numbers soar and families plead for information.
by Lomi Kriel , Vianna Davila, ProPublica , and Edgar Walters, The Texas Tribune
Correctional officers, health care staff and detainees describe how COVID-19 spread through Cook County Jail in Chicago as the sheriff came under fire for his handling of the crisis. “You’re working in a petri dish,” one staffer said.
FEMA has helped pay for the burials of victims of past disasters. But months into the coronavirus pandemic, the Trump administration has sat on similar requests. Families of COVID-19 victims have been forced to turn to religious centers and GoFundMe.
After a worker at a beauty supply factory near Chicago died of COVID-19, her former co-workers staged a protest. But they didn’t seek help from OSHA. They sought help from a new advocate: the state attorney general’s office.
Coronavirus antibody studies and what they allegedly show have triggered fierce debates, further confusing public understanding. ProPublica’s health reporter Caroline Chen is here to offer some clarity around these crucial surveys.
U.S. hospitals are in the spotlight for being on the frontline of fighting the pandemic. But in the shadows, debt collection operations continue, often by the same institutions treating coronavirus patients, all while unemployment and uncertainty soar.
