Brooks Robinson got a phone call from his cousin Jennifer. She couldn’t stop screaming. “She’s gone. She’s gone,” she yelled into the phone.
Jennifer was calling to tell him their 34-year-old cousin Santayana Harris had just died of pneumonia, a symptom of COVID-19. He couldn’t believe it. Just a day earlier, he’d lost another cousin, Flora Robinson, to the same virus. It was a second blow, but not the last.
Brooks comes from a close-knit family, one that often hosts joyous get-togethers, including an annual Fourth of July celebration. They attend church together. “We are so close to the point that when one hurts, we all hurt,” he tells me. Flora’s death was particularly painful, since no one was allowed to visit and console her, forcing her to suffer alone. “That’s the most devastating thing about this,” he says.
To honor Flora, Brooks put together a video tribute and posted it to Facebook, sharing memories from church, those Independence Day gatherings and his parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. Then he did the same for Santayana, but he had to stop there. A few days later, a relative died of a heart attack, but “I just didn’t have the energy to go through another,” he says. By then two more family members had tested positive for the new coronavirus.
Flora died at Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital in Albany, Georgia, a coronavirus hot zone with one of the country’s worst outbreaks. The numbers are stark. Just 91,000 people live in Dougherty County, but as of Wednesday, more than 1,400 had tested positive and 107 had died. That’s more deaths than anywhere in the state — more than Atlanta’s Fulton County, with its population of 1 million. There’s another difference too: This rural spot is majority black, and that matters in the current pandemic.
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