The COVID-19 pandemic

Like everyone in the news industry, my work in the early days of the global COVID-19 pandemic centered on adaptation strategies. How could people make adjustments in their daily lives to accommodate this unprecedented challenge?

As an editor at Edutopia, I focused on the ways students and teachers might “reset” their systems from the seemingly endless stress. I produced a feature article and a series of animated videos providing simple techniques for daily use.

Here’s one example:

As an editor at Carolina Public Press, I moved to coronavirus coverage focused on accountability for government officials.

We tracked vaccine distribution. As in most states across the country, during the COVID-19 vaccine rollout in early 2021, demand for the shots far exceeded supply in North Carolina. The state Department of Health and Human Services devised and revised a prioritization plan to put health care workers at the front of the line. In the early weeks, I reported evidence of line-skipping, citing specific incidents where individuals who did not qualify under the state’s protocol received shots. 

I wanted to know if these were isolated cases or if there was widespread abuse of the system affecting distribution of the vital vaccine statewide. In early March, after more than a month of repeated public records requests, the department gave me the data. In it, we discovered that nearly 1 million people received a shot as part of the first priority group — a number that far exceeded the state’s estimate of approximately 330,000 health care workers who qualified to receive vaccines. An interview with lead department officials offered no plausible explanation for the discrepancy with one spokesperson dismissing the data as “messy.”