How our region survives the coronavirus may have a direct relation to how our governors and mayors treated it in the early days of the outbreak in the United States.
And for the South – especially our part of it in Tennessee, Georgia and Alabama – that’s a particularly bad sign.
A perfect storm is nearly upon us, according to Nashville writer Margaret Renkl who is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times.
“What does it mean to live though a pandemic in a place with a high number of uninsured citizens, where many counties don’t have a single hospital, and where the governor delayed requiring folks to stay home? Across the South, we are about to find out,” she wrote Friday.
Coupled with these three state’s high rate of uninsured residents thanks to a partisan decision not to expand Medicaid, we also have Republican governors who throughout the epic coronavirus roll-out took their signals about preemptive pandemic measures from their GOP president and idol Donald Trump.