Some southern states, including Georgia and South Carolina, are among the first in the country to ease restrictions to try get back to business despite factors that make the South particularly vulnerable to the coronaviruspandemic.

And pressure is mounting on other southern governors to get their economies back up and running. Outside the Alabama Capitol this week, a few dozen protesters drove by honking their horns, chanting freedom and demanding to get back towork

Republican Gov. Kay Ivey has issued a stay-at-home order through April 30. Paralegal Melissa Kirby from Athens, Ala., says shes hadenough.

If she was worried about safety she could let the people who are actually in danger self-quarantine, wash their hands more, Kirby says. But to force businesses to shut down, thats not hercall.

From inside the capitol, Ivey says no one wants to open the economy more than she does, but the state must first increase its testingcapacity.

Remember all of our decisions that Im going to make are based on data, not desired date, Iveysays.

She is taking a more cautious approach than neighboring states Georgia, Tennessee, Florida and Mississippi, where Republican governors have all moved to reopen at least parts of theireconomies.

I think that we could be heading for a macabre game of whack-a-mole, says Thomas LaVeist, dean of the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine at Tulane University in New Orleans. He worries that Louisiana an early hot spot for COVID-19 could see a resurgence in cases as surrounding states eastrestrictions.

Unless the states in the South can coordinate the way the states in the North, East, the West, and the upper Midwest are striving to do, were going to have problems, hesays.

LaVeist says longstanding policy decisions, and population characteristics in the South already put the region at risk in a health pandemic. He points to high poverty rates, large numbers of uninsured residents, lower minimum wages, and general health and well-beingmeasures.

The south is the epicenter for health inequities in this country, LaVeist says. We call the South the stroke belt higher rates of all kind of chronicconditions.

Conditions such as high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity, and kidney disease have all been identified as factors in COVID-19deaths.

LaVeist says rural communities in the South are not really resourced to manage an outbreak given the number of rural hospitals that have closed or downsized in recentyears.

You add all of that together and youve got sort of this toxic mix of political decisions, policy decisions, resource limitations that just create an opportunity for a pandemic to really just rage in the south, LaVeistsays.

Another disturbing trend is the high proportion of coronavirus cases and deaths amongAfrican-Americans.

The early evidence of that is from Louisiana, where the death toll has now surpassed that of Hurricane Katrina. African-Americans are 56% of reported COVID deaths, but just about one-third of the states population. Other southern states show similar disproportionate impacts on African-Americanresidents.

In New Orleans, there are clusters of cases in predominantly black neighborhoods where people mostly work in the tourismindustry.

This virus has exposed the social and economic fragility of working families, says New Orleans Mayor LaToyaCantrell.

She points to a tyranny of policies that leaves families without a living wage or access to healthcare.

All of this is embedded in really what were seeing across the board in the city of New Orleans, Cantrell says. And really the state of Louisiana is on the front line as it relates to thesematters

Southern states are also subject to natural disasters. This month, there have been deadly tornadoes and flash floods; hurricane season starts June first; and theres spring flooding on the MississippiRiver.

In the river town of Greenville, Miss., Mayor Erick Simmons says theyre still reeling from record floods last year with some residents still displaced, and nowthis.

In a city that has a 38.6% poverty rate, this COVID-19 is exacerbating all of the issues that were having, Simmons says. The acute nature of the pandemics economic downturn is felt more here than many otherplaces.

Simmons says demand at food pantries and soup kitchens has nearly tripled in the MississippiDelta.

Regionwide, eight of the 10 states with the biggest jumps in unemployment claims are in theSouth.

The pandemic is also renewing calls for expanding Medicaid coverage. Nine of the 14 states that did not expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act are in the South. Of them, Texas has the highest number of uninsuredresidents.

Rep. Colin Allred, D-Texas, fears those numbers are on the rise based on calls to his office from constituents who have lost their jobs and their healthinsurance.

So now, more than ever, we need to push to expand Medicaid, he says. To provide a backstop to our health care coverage for many working people who desperately needit.

Allred, whose congressional district includes Dallas, is pushing legislation that would offer more federal money to states that expand Medicaid, in an effort to sway mostly Republican legislatures and governors to reconsider their repeated rejection of a key part ofObamacare.

Sen. Doug Jones, D-Ala., is behind the bill. He says expanding Medicaid would help protect everyone in these uncertaintimes.

The thing that this pandemic has really brought home to people is that our health is dependent on our neighbors health more than we like to have thought about in the past, Jonessays.

A test of that dependency is coming with some southern states now on the brink of reopening.

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The South's Handling Of Coronavirus Could Be 'A Macabre Game Of Whack-A-Mole' - OPB News