In a story published in The Appeal, Roxanna Asgarian reported on a shadow foster care system in some states in which “no court case is initiated, and no lawyers are present to advise either parents or caregivers of their rights,” which has led to informal caregivers being left to support children on their own and parents seeking to regain custody denied the services that could help them. Proponents of the approach call it less traumatic for parents and children than opening a formal child protection case, but critics say it can leave both parents and children in legal limbo. Roxana illustrated the effects on a family by telling the story of a 1-year-old whom child protective services workers informally placed with the friend of her mother because of the mother’s drug abuse. The caregiver and her husband have spent tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees trying unsuccessfully to achieve stability for the child, now 4, through a formalized placement with them or another family.
Neil Bedi and a colleague at the Tampa Bay Times, 2016 National Fellow Kathleen McGrory, prompted an enormous public outcry, Florida legislation, and a request by a member of Congress for a federal investigation in response to “Targeted,” their multimedia investigation into the legality – and the tragic consequences – of a controversial “intelligence-led policing” effort of the Pasco County, Florida sheriff’s department. Ostensibly a crime prevention strategy, those in the program’s sights describe it as police harassment. Sheriff deputies make multiple unannounced visits – night and day -- at the homes of people considered likely to break the law, based on arrest histories, unspecified intelligence and an algorithm. The investigation found that 100 of the 1,000 people who were targeted in the last five years were juveniles. And of the 20 residential addresses visited most by dedicated enforcement teams, more than half were homes of middle or high schoolers. The reporting grant provided by the Center for Health Journalism helped the reporters to acquire body camera videos of sheriff’s deputies’ encounters with targets. In their second story, readers learned about how the Pasco County sheriff took their intrusive tactics into schools – with a hidden watch list designed to predict which child would become a criminal. Assessments were based on such private information as grades, a history of trauma or involvement with the child protective system. The sheriff’s department has access to all of these confidential records through a special agreement with the school district. But parents aren't informed that their child was being watched. Sensitive information about kids, said Guthrie Ferguson, a law professor at American University and national expert in predictive policing, should remain “in the hands of people who can offer help.”
In December, Neil and Kathleen published four follow-up stories. In the first follow-up, they reported that several civil rights groups were looking into challenging the Sheriff’s program and that a libertarian-led law firm was seeking plaintiffs to sue for damages. An attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union told them: “This program overall is morally indefensible, legally questionable and based on junk science.” An attorney for the Southern Poverty Law Center called it “an egregious violation of students’ rights,” and a policy analyst for the Electronic Frontier Foundation called it “the worst-case scenarios in our head, played out exactly.” Meanwhile, the Sheriff’s Office accused the paper of “classic yellow journalism.” In the second follow-up, the Tampa Bay Times reported that the Pasco County Council PTA had asked for a review of the program and the district’s previously unknown data-sharing agreements with the Sheriff’s Office. A group of teachers, meanwhile, was circulating a petition asking that the sheriff’s database of “at-risk” children be deleted, and that demographic information be shared so it could be determined if children of color were targeted. Danielle Biggs, a teacher at Veterans Elementary School in Wesley Chapel, told them that the program “goes against all good education practice.” In addition, two parents have filed public records requests relating to their children’s possible targeting. In their third follow-up, the Tampa Bay Times sought reactions from Pasco County school officials and found that few would comment and those that did mostly supported the Sheriff’s program. In December, Neil and Kat reported that the sheriff owed his career to powerful connections in the Republican Party, for which his wife is a fundraiser. Most recently, Neil and Kat and a colleague, Romy Ellenbogen, reported that U.S. Rep. Robert C. Scott, D-VA, chairman of the House Committee on Education and Labor, had called for an investigation by the U.S. Department of Education, saying "this use of student records goes against the letter and the spirit of (the federal student privacy law) and risks subjecting students, especially Black and Latino students, to excessive law enforcement interactions and stigmatization.” In a companion story,they reported that activists in Pasco County a want citizen board to review allegations of police misconduct. The activists want an inquiry into complaints against all law enforcement agencies in Pasco County, not just the Sheriff’s Office. Neil has accepted a job with ProPublica in Washington, D.C., and Kathleen is on leave, but their colleagues continue to follow the story.
In March 2021, a national public interest law firm filed suit on behalf of four Pasco County residents, three of whom had been featured in the project, claiming they had been harassed, fined or arrested by overzealous deputies who overstepped their bounds. “The goal here is to shut this program down and to make sure it stops, both for these clients and everybody in Pasco County,” Robert Johnson, an attorney with the Institute for Justice, which filed the suit, told the Tampa Ba Times. Also that month, a Florida Senate committee approved a proposal that would prohibit school districts from sharing student grades with law enforcement agencies without parents’ written permission. In addition, the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund last month filed a public records request, seeking to learn more about a separate, but related, initiative described in Neil’s and Kathleen’s second story that uses confidential data from the Pasco school district and the state Department of Children and Families to identify kids who could fall into a life of crime. Neil and Kathleen received the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Local Reporting, the Scripps Howard Award for Local or Regional Investigative Reporting, the Al Neuharth Innovation In Investigative Journalism Awardanwere finalists for four national journalism awards for “Targeted:” Harvard University’s Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting; the Scripps Howard Award for Local or Regional Investigative Reporting; the IRE Tom Renner Award; the American Bar Association's 2021 Silver Gavel Award and the National Headliner Award for Local Accountability Reporting and were finalists for numerous other awards. The Journalist’s Resource at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center recently published a “how they did it” piece about Neil’s and Kathleen’s investigation in which Neil emphasized the importance of consulting with academic researchers.
Valeria Fernandez reported in Spanish for Radio Bilingüe's Edicion Semanaria (Weekly Show) and in English for PRI's The World on how indigenous, immigrant communities and people of color were organizing communities of care to find support and healing during the pandemic. In her first piece, she reported on the launch of a groundbreaking national survey by a network of therapists to document how uninsured Latinos are dealing with depression and anxiety by combining traditional therapies with mutual support programs. In her second story for Edicion Semanaria, she reported that many undocumented Latino families with mixed immigration status in Arizona were avoiding state- or federally-funded clinics and hospitals for fear of being considered “public charges” and suffering retaliation from federal authorities if they apply for citizenship. In another story, in Spanish for Radio Bilingüe and in English for PRI's The World, she reported on a network of mental health professionals who had joined forces to provide counseling to activists and the immigrants they support during these challenging times. Few Latinos, and even fewer of those who are undocumented, get their mental health problems addressed due to stigma and a lack of access to care, Valeria reported. In another story, in Spanish for Radio Bilingue and in English for PRI's The World, she focused on the disproportionate number of pregnant Latinas who have become infected with COVID-19. These women are more likely to suffer birth complications during the pandemic and have few services to help them, she reported. Experts are especially worried about the impact of these circumstances on their mental health, with possible long-term consequences for both mothers and their babies. Valeria put a human face on the problem by telling the story of one Guatemalan family. In late December, in Spanish for Edicion Seminaria and in English for PRI's The World that a group of activists in Phoenix was giving immigrants and low-income people food bags with indigenous and organic products so that they can reconnect with the smells and flavors of their ancestors.
Sarah Karp, a reporter for WBEZ, Chicago's NPR affiliate, spent five months following the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the teacher and her children in a second grade classroom at Saucedo Scholastic Academy, a public elementary school in Chicago’s largely Latino Little Village neighborhood. In her first half-hour documentary, As Covid-19 Devastates Their Community, Can 17 Second Graders and Their Teacher Make Up for What the Pandemic Took Away?, Sarah focused on the teacher, Olga Contreras, and her efforts to make sure that her students learn as much as possible through remote learning, which was implemented when in-person education shut down in March 2019. Not a single student in her class was reading at or above grade level, she told Sarah, so she was fearful that most would lose ground. In her second half-hour radio documentary, Death, Job Loss and Remote Learning, which aired in January 2020, Sarah reported on how the pandemic was affecting a typical multigenerational Latino family in Chicao’s Little Village neighborhood, which has had one of the highest COVID case rates in the city. Sarah spent many hours over five months talking with the Camarillo family, which was coping with the death, from COVID-19, of a beloved grandfather. Three other family members also got COVID, but recovered. Money was tight since one adult family member had to quit her job to supervise remote schooling of the three children in the household (her two sons, 4 and 6, plus her 13-year-old sister). Food was in short supply and the three children in the extended family were struggling with remote learning. (The 13-year-old, who is developmentally disabled, talked about killing herself, but the family couldn't afford therapy.) WBEZ also ran a 22-minute show featuring Sarah and Adriana Cardona-Maguigad, a colleague who also reports on education, discussing what they learned through their reporting on education during the pandemic. La Raza published a Spanish-language version of Sarah’s project, and WBEZ made a Spanish-language version of her first piece available on its website. With Center engagement grants and specialized mentoring, Sarah convened three separate councils of community advisers and also held a briefing for the public on learning loss via YouTube. School district officials cited Sarah’s project as evidence of why in-person learning needed to resume, and listeners donated $5,000 to help students at the school on which she focused.
Spencer Kent, a reporter for the Newark Star-Ledger and NJ Advance Media, reported a magazine-length piece about how COVID-19 devastated majority black communities in Newark, NJ, a city shaped by decades of systemic racism and once known nationally as a symbol of urban unrest because of race riots in 1967. Spencer wove profiles of victims and survivors into a narrative that looked at some of the historic reasons for the pandemic's disproportionally high toll on Blacks. As of December 3, there were 30.49 Black deaths per 10,000 Newark residents versus 17.29 White deaths per 10,000 residents. Among the factors Spencer identified were segregationist housing policies, which forced many multigenerational Black families into overcrowded and neglected neighborhoods with poor schools; the concentration of Blacks in essential jobs, which means that few could work from home; reliance on public transportation, where social distancingis difficult; and the legacy of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, which has left many Black people leery of doctors and hospitals. Spencer traced the path of the virus from its arrival in Newark on March 14 to an April peak of almost 300 new cases and 40 deaths a day-- often several members of one family--to a recent mid-November peak of 531 new cases in a weekend. Spencer also looked at how the pandemic had affected some key institutions in Newark's Black neighborhoods, including St. Luke AME Church, which lost 15 members to COVID-19; University Hospital, a safety net public hospital where medical workers choke back emotions as they hook people up to ventilators, knowing they may never breathe on their own again; and a funeral home in a Black neighborhood whose owner, Samuel C. Arnold, told him, "It’s the first time in my 49 years of being here that I felt like I may lose control.”
Dan Levin of the New York Times reported from Washington, D.C., on how COVID-19 has impacted children whose lives were already marked by trauma, including community violence, domestic violence, abuse or neglect and poverty. Data show a 24 percent spike nationwide in mental health-related emergency room visits among children between the ages of 5 and 11, and a 31 percent rise among those between 12 and 17, compared with the same period last year, he reported. Child development experts and therapist around the country told him that they’re seeing “huge increases” in sleeping problems, nightmares and aggression among children and that these are symptoms of trauma, with the virus “becomes one more source of uncontrollable danger.” Dan put human faces on the challenges through the stories of two families in Southeast Washington, D.C., both of which lost their fathers in shootings. They can’t play in their backyards or nearby parks because of frequent gunfire, and their single mothers, both of whom are disabled, struggle to oversee virtual schooling. Just a few miles from Capitaol Hill, the neighborhood is about 90 percent Black and has the city’s highest homicide rates and among the most coronavirus deaths.
Rachel Monahan of Willamette Week reported on vaccination trends in Oregon. In her first story, Rachel explored Oregon immunization officials’ concerns about the state’s low flu vaccination rate for adults – 45 percent – and how the coming flu season could combine with COVID-19 to put pressure on the state’s hospitals and lead to a high number of preventable deaths. Later, she reported that with hopes of ending the COVID-19 pandemic dependent on the development of a vaccine, the state’s vaccination laws had become an issue in the November elections. At least four vaccine skeptics, all Republicans, ran for state and local offices in November with hopes of weakening the state’s vaccine laws, and the Democratic Party used the vaccination issue to try to damage Republicans. In early December, she reported that the state's medical board had stripped one of the anti-vaccine movement’s leaders, Dr. Paul Thomas, a pediatrician, of his medical license after finding evidence he had violated standard medical practices related to vaccines and that allowing him to continue to practice would pose “serious risk of harm” to his patients. Also in early December, she published a Q&A with Dr. Louis Picker, an Oregon Health & Science University professor who is one of the experts reviewing the data on the vaccines’ effectiveness and safety for the state. In her final Fellowship story, she took an in-depth look at how many Oregonian's historic skepticism about vaccine effectiveness and safety might affect the goal of achieving herd immunity in the state, which requires about 85 percent of the population to be vaccinated. University of Oregon researchers told her that about 25% of Oregon women and 21% of men say they won't get the shot, another one-third of state residents aren't sure. "We've not done a great job in the U.S. at large at getting people to take vaccines," Dr. David Bangsberg, founding dean of the joint Oregon Health & Science University-Portland State University School of Public Health, told her. "The historical precedent suggests [acceptance of the COVID-19 vaccine] will be a challenge."
Nathan O’Neal and Colton Shone, colleagues at KOB-TV 4 in Albuquerque, produced five episodes their National Fellowship project, “The People vs. the Pandemic,” as well as a capstone half-hour documentary. The first episode, “Overlooked,” which aired in July, looked into how the COVID-19 pandemic got out of control on the Navajo Nation and pegged institutional problems, such as lack of access to running water, the prevalence of chronic health conditions, crowded multi-generational households and poor access to healthy food and health care. By the time they reported the second episode, “Infected and Isolated,” in mid-August, the Navajo Nation had “flattened the curve,” in part by isolating reservation residents once they contracted the virus. In their third episode, ”Addiction,” they reported on how a high incidence of drug addiction on the reservation was complicating efforts to control the disease. In their fourth episode, “Culture and Covid,” they reported on how integrating a cultural perspective into strict public health orders had helped reduce the case rate. In their most recent episode, “Water Is Life,” they looked into how a lack of running water in 30% of Navajo Nation homes contributed to the high COVID-19 rate and the decision by Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez to earmark $130 million of federal CARES Act assistance for water projects. The capstone element of the project, a 23–minute special exploring health disparities on the Navajo Nation amid the COVID-19 pandemic, ran on KOB-TV 4 in Albuquerque on November 16. The special brought together the five earlier reports and provided insights into the reasons for the disproportionately high toll of COVID-19 on the Navajo people, including poor infrastructure, food insecurity and barriers to routine health care. Viewers who watched it on the station’s Facebook page shared condemnation of state, federal and tribal officials and concern for residents. “This will shine on the fact of no running water, electricity and the politics that have kept the money to help,” wrote Loretta J. Cruz Salazar of Santa Fe. All of Colton’s and Nathan’s Fellowship project reports can be found at NavajoCovid19.com. Nathan and Colton received five regional Murrow Awards from the National Academy of Television, Arts and Sciences, Rocky Mountain Chapter, and a regional Emmy from the RTNDA for their project.
Tim O'Shei of the Buffalo News explored the many challenges that refugees in the United States face today, given the previous administration's hostility, restrictions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and the anxieties that wrack anyone trying to find a place in a new world. For his first Fellowship project piece, he visited the United States/ Canada border at Champlain, a village in upstate New York, where he found a family of Haitian refugees trying desperately to get into Canada, only to be turned back because of the pandemic. The number of refugees trying to cross into Canada may increase, he wrote, because of a Canadian judge's ruling that United States is no longer a safe place for refugees and Canada has a legal responsibility to accept those who try to enter Canada from the United States. Tim reported four new pieces in December. In the first piece, he focused on the untreated trauma that many refugees bring with them from their home and the importance of getting help to overcome the trauma so they can adjust to life in the United States. The piece focused on Kuresha Noor, a Somalian refugee, who had been forced to marry a man more than 20 years her senior when she was 13, and then, after she divorced him, been forced to marry another older man when she was 17. She and her second husband, who was very controlling, received asylum in the United States after years in a refugee camp in Uganda. Through counseling, she was able to deal with her past traumas. She divorced her second husband and now has a happy life and a job helping other refugees access services. In his second piece, he reported that a change in presidents would likely mean an increase in refugees settling in the Buffalo area, which would tax existing services, particularly mental health support, at a time when more Americans are reporting high levels of stress because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Refugees’ mental health needs are different and more difficult to meet than those of people born in the United States, experts told him. “They went through war,” a nonprofit leader told him. “They went through – literally – hell. It’s hard: You come here and not only are you learning a new language and a new culture – a very different culture than what they’re coming from – but you’re then bringing that together with PTSD.” For his final pieces, he talked to health-care practitioners and executives from refugee resettlement agencies about what new policies and systemic changes they would like to see and shared his own views about what needs to happen.
Shiqiao Peng, a reporter for Sing Tao Daily, reported on how Chinese immigrants living in cramped single rooms in San Francisco’s Chinatown were faring during the pandemic. Shiquiao told the story through the eyes of Situ Yongyu and her family -- four people from three generations sharing a 10 square meter room during the pandemic, unable to go to work or school. Her reporting chronicled an uneven public health response in San Francisco’s historic Chinatown district, but also captured how residents themselves and local Chinese institutions such as the Chinese Hospital stepped in to keep transmission rates low. Here’s one description that evokes the circumstances residents encountered: "Zhen mentioned that during the 14 days of quarantine, a staff member of the Health Department called to ask if the food was needed. After answering "needed" for more than 20 days, Zhen did not get any replies, "If we really need that food, our family would have starved to death at home...I think the Health Department has done very, very badly.” What’s remarkable in reading this story is how different it is from the mainstream media accounts of the low COVID-19 rates in Chinatown. It is a testament to the value of reporting by a journalist who speaks the same language as her subjects, who nonetheless had to work hard to win the trust of residents of the low-income single room occupancy (SRO) buildings that dot hyper-expensive San Francisco. Community responses pouried in within days of publication. A week after Shiqiao detailed the difficulty families in SROs had obtaining food, restaurants and civic leaders decided to relaunch Feed + Fuel Chinatown, a food program that had been shut down several months before. The program will both help sustain 80 restaurants and feed hundreds of SRO families who lack private cooking facilities.
Adreanna Rodriguez, an associate producer for Vice Audio, journeyed to the Standing Rock reservation in South Dakota to report a deeply personal 40-minute podast about her personal history in foster care as a Native American youth, chronicling the wrenching choice she had to make between her tribe and her family. The podcast chronicles what she learned during her reporting trip to Standing Rock and from her family about the larger forces that shaped her life course including policies of exclusion and family separation that are part of her family's history and that of so many other Native Americans. It was distributed as part of Vice's Strongman podcast series and aired on the nationwide public radio show Snap Judgment, which also distributed it as part of its Bloodlines podcast series. Adreanna also produced a shorter podcast for Vice reporting on a new foster care model for Native American children that is based on community living and known as a "children's village." It's a collaboration between the tribe and an organization called Simply Smiles -- with members of the tribe leading the way by sharing traditional knowledge at a critical time.
Pedro Rojas, a national correspondent for Univision based in south Texas, traveled to several colonias along the border – settlements in unincorporated areas, which often lack infrastructure like running water and septic systems. The epidemic has called attention to the impoverished conditions that people in the colonias have endured for decades, he explained in a segment headlined “Vivir Y Morir en las Colonias,” or “Life and Death in the Colonias, for the national program, “Aqui Y Ahora” (Here and Now). Hidalgo County, site of many colonias, has the second highest death rate from COVID-19 in Texas and also suffers from high unemployment and few resources. “None of the bills stop coming,” related one woman, whose husband saw his hours reduced and who had to leave her job to care for her children. “We are barely subsisting,” said another resident. One study shows that more than 40% of residents have lost work and more than 40% do not have access to the internet for themselves or their children, which limits remote learning. For members of this community, primarily made up of undocumented immigrants, health insurance is a luxury, Pedro reported. As a result, people who get sick often wait too long to get care, missing a critical window to make a recovery. After Pedro's report aired, Justice for Migrant Women gave $20,000 to LUPE, a community union founded by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, to help the families that Pedro reported on with internet payments and/or purchase of a laptop. And a few weeks after his story aired, Hidalgo County began installing a wifi tower in one of the “colonias” where he conducted his survey and interviews. LUPE staff members and volunteers aided Pedro in reporting his story. Pedro is continuing to track whether the Hidalgo County government makes good on its planned investment of $20 million to improve internet access, which was allocated in the pandemic-related CARES Act.
Claire Stremple, a reporter for KHNS Public Radio in Haines, Alaska, produced a three-part radio series about the challenges of being pregnant -- and giving birth -- in Alaska's remote communities, most of which are accessible only by ferry and small plane. Women must fly to Anchorage or Juneau or even Seattle for key prenatal appointments, and then relocate there for about a month before their due dates. Her first story explained that the practice of requiring pregnant women in Alaska to go to Anchorage or Juneau arose as a result of the high infant mortality rate through the '80s, when most women gave birth at home or in community clinics. The story also described how the COVID-19 pandemic has made the pregnancy and birth experience for women in remote communities far more stressful than usual, with travel bans sometimes interfering with their need to get to Anchorage or Juneau for prenatal appointments or deliveries -- or leaving them stranded there when they couldn't get home. Her second story focused on the extra challenge in Unalaska, a remote community that lost its regularly scheduled air service because of the pandemic, forcing some women to charter flights for the three-hour trip to Anchorage at a cost of $1,300 miles roundtrip (Medicaid eventually agreed to pay). The third story related the experience of Cara Lestenkof-Mandregan, an Inuit woman who lives in an Unangan community in the Pribilof Islands in the middle of the Bering Sea. Pregnant with twins during the COVID-19 pandemic, which made both pregnancy and delivery high risk, Cara and her boyfriend had to spend four months quarantined in hospital housing in Anchorage in order to avoid putting the whole island community at risk by traveling to and from Anchorage every two weeks. Good Morning America picked up Claire's third story, and National Public Radio’s Morning Edition show broadcast it nationwide. In addition, a professor at the University of Alaska told Claire that her project had inspired her to design a class about barriers to health care for rural women. The project helped Claire land a new job as health and science reporter for the statewide public radio network.
Herbert White, editor of The Charlotte Post, reported a three-part series about why there's virtually no upward mobility for Black residents of Charlotte and why they suffer disproportionately from poor health outcomes. The first story looked at the structural and institutional reasons for chronic health disparities in Charlotte. The piece examined the history of segregation in Mecklenburg County, where Charlotte is situation, as well as the role that local customs and legislation played in creating barriers to opportunity for Black residents. The North Carolina Legislature’s refusal to expand Medicaid to cover low-income childless adults has contributed to a high rate of uninsured; an estimated 500,000 state residents lack insurance and hence postpone needed medical care or rely on emergency rooms. In his second article, he reported on how the Affordable Care Act has benefitted many North Carolina residents who lack employer-sponsored health insurance, including DonnaMarie Woodson, who credits coverage provided under the ACA with enabling her to survive colon and breast cancer. However, more than 1 million state residents – almost 11 percent of the population -- lack insurance, and a disproportionate number are Black or Latino. One reason for the high uninsurance rate is the state's refusal to expand Medicaid to cover low-income single adults. In addition, the number of children who are uninsured has grown during the Trump administration as a result of cutbacks to the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), he reported. In his third and final story, he examined some of the reasons why Black people have poorer health outcomes than White people, including greater likelihood of being exposed to air pollution; lack of culturally competent health care; a higher uninsurance rate; a higher poverty rate; and, during the COVID-19 pandemic, a greater likelihood of being essential workers, which puts them at higher risk of being exposed to the virus. Among the measures that would help improve health outcomes for Blacks are expanding Medicaid access to low-income single adults, which North Carolina legislators have refused to do, and enactment by Congress of the Black Maternal Health Momnibus Bill (H.R. 6144), which would increase federal funding for programs to improve childbirth survivor rates, Herbert wrote.
Alissa Zhu reported a three-part series for the Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Mississippi on the disproportionate toll that COVID-19 has taken on chicken plant workers in rural Mississippi, who are mostly Black or Latino. In their first story, she and a collaborator, Maria Clark, laid out the reasons: their role as essential workers, required to work even when the virus was rampant in their plants; inability to socially distance at work; inadequate personal protective equipment; lack of sick leave; high rates of chronic illnesses related to poor diets and poverty; crowded housing; and barriers to access to health care because of distance. “These inequalities were ingrained in our society before COVID-19,” Jamila Taylor, director of health care reform and senior fellow at the Century Foundation, told them. “What COVID-19 has done is blown it up in a way; it’s magnified them.” In their second story, they quantified the toll on chicken plant workers: in Scott County, which has four chicken plants, 438 workers were infected through mid-November, and three died. Across the state, more than 1,200 employees were infected, and eight died. (The actual numbers of cases and deaths are believed to be higher.) In their final story, Alissa and Maria reported on the impact of COVID-19 on the chicken industry’s many undocumented immigrant workers and the important role that promotoras –volunteer community health workers – played in spreading public health officials’ advice to Spanish-speaking immigrants and providing herbal remedies to people who were sick. The articles were co-published in Spanish.