What the Coronavirus Is Doing to Rural Georgia

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What the Coronavirus Is Doing to Rural Georgia
The pandemic hits a region that was already struggling to address its medical needs.
By Charles Bethea
April 4, 2020


Vanessa Williams’s uncle Johnny Carter died in late February, at the age of seventy. On the first Saturday in March, the family held a funeral at the Gethsemane Worship Center, a large, modern building on the north side of Albany, Georgia, a city of about seventy-five thousand people in Dougherty County, in the southwestern part of the state. It was packed. “Maybe four hundred of us filling up three sections of nine rows,” Williams, who is thirty-three and works as an office administrator, said. “We were in there together, close contact, for at least an hour and a half, remembering my uncle.” She exchanged hugs with family and friends and watched everyone wipe the tears from their faces.

The previous Saturday, worshippers from the same congregations had hosted another large funeral, for Andrew Jerome Mitchell, a local custodian who had died from apparent heart failure on February 24th. Mitchell had ten siblings, and his extended family and friends came from Louisiana; Washington, D.C.; Hawaii; and elsewhere to remember him. “The minister, he was shaking pretty much everybody’s hand, just giving the family comfort and condolences,” Mitchell’s niece later told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “The funeral home officiants, they were kind of doing the same thing. That’s kind of their job, to give comfort.” Gatherings followed at the homes of family members.

“And that’s exactly where it started,” Winfred Dukes, Williams’s boss, told me. Dukes is a state legislator and also the owner of a construction company where Williams works. “We’re tracing it back to an individual from Cobb County,” north of Atlanta, Dukes said. “He came down to the Mitchell funeral.” (It remains unclear whether this man from Cobb County was Albany’s initial carrier.) That night, the traveller, who was sixty-seven, was admitted to Phoebe Putney Memorial—a six hundred and ninety-one bed hospital in southwest Georgia—with shortness of breath. He had chronic lung disease, which seemed to offer an explanation. But his condition deteriorated, and he was attended by dozens of hospital staff before being transferred to Atlanta, on March 7th, the day of Johnny Carter’s funeral. On March 10th, tests revealed that he had the coronavirus. He died two days later.

Back home in Albany, Williams had begun to feel unusually tired. Then: chest pain, fever, chills, and a visit to the doctor, who diagnosed her with strep throat, which didn’t improve with antibiotics. Williams was tested for COVID-19 on March 16th. Dukes sent the rest of his construction-company employees home. He was already under quarantine himself, because a fellow-legislator, the Republican congressman Brandon Beach, had continued to work at the state capitol despite having COVID-19 symptoms, in early March, and had subsequently tested positive. (“I’m not a bad person,” Beach told the Journal-Constitution, adding, “I thought it was my regular sinus bronchitis stuff I get every year.”) By this time, Dukes said, “it became abundantly clear that all of these people from this church were coming down sick with the same thing.” Dozens of Mitchell’s family members were ill; the pastor who delivered Mitchell’s eulogy later died from the coronavirus.

Williams didn’t get her test results for eight days, during which she felt the worst of the illness. Williams lives in a second-floor apartment with her husband, her six-year-old son, and her mother, who’s retired. It was hard to keep her family at a distance. “My husband, he’s hard-headed,” she said. “He’s, like, ‘We’ve been married five years and I ain’t never not slept in the bed with you. Let’s put up a wall of pillows.’ ” That’s what they did. “But when we watched TV, he sat on one end of our large sectional, I sat on the other.” Her son was not allowed outside, but he insisted on playing football and basketball indoors and ran around constantly. “I did everything I could to let him know ‘Mommy can’t play,’ ” Williams said. “He wants a hug and to do all these things. He doesn’t understand what’s going on.” She sighed. “I tried to make sure my closest family didn’t contract it. I can’t promise they didn’t, though.”

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