On March 15, churchgoers from several congregations gathered at the Friendship Baptist Church in Everettville to celebrate the anniversary of Pastor Laverna Horton.
A COVID-19 outbreak that followed led to a struggle for recognition of the African-American community’s needs — and ultimately, through sickness and death, the creation of the state’s African-American and minority task force to help guide the coronavirus response for those vulnerable communities.
It also resulted in the posting of minority data on the Department of Health and Human Resources’ coronavirus dashboard, and the free community testing now underway.
The church service
Romelia Hodges, of Fairmont, a leader in the African-American community in the Mon-Marion-Harrison area, described what happened that day and how the outbreak and response unfolded.
The 3 p.m. service drew members of seven other African-American Baptist churches in the tri-county area, including Morning Star in Fairmont and Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church in Clarksburg, Hodges’ home church. The pastor and first lady of one of the churches live in Canonsburg, Pa.
The service was preceded by a 1 p.m. family-style lunch. About 120 people then filled the small church sanctuary — Hodges estimates it at 2,500 square feet — for the service.
This Sunday fell after Gov. Jim Justice had taken some preliminary steps to deal with the virus: Issuing a state of preparedeness on March 4, restricting nursing home visitation and banning state employee travel on March 12, and closing schools on March 13. But it came a day before Justice issued his state of emergency and two days before the announcement of the first positive case in the Eastern Panhandle.
“We had a beautiful ceremony,” Hodges said. Her daughter performed with one of two liturgical dance troupes from the visiting churches. They thought this might be their last get-together for the period of the pandemic.
“We had a false sense of reality because there were no cases in West Virginia,” she said. “In hindsight, it was already here and looming at this church, or one of these churches.”
The outbreak
Shortly after, four members of the Morning Star choir, most who rode the church bus to Friendship, came down ill. One of them was Viola York Horton, Laverna Horton’s sister-in-law. She and Minister Rick Hood, of Friendship church, were both hospitalized on March 19. Viola died March 29. Hood died April 10.
It was evident, Hodges said, that there was an outbreak stemming, apparently from Morning Star’s morning service or Friendship’s afternoon service. But word was not getting out through the expected channels.
So on March 20, Laverna Horton called her and asked her to use her network to alert people to a probable community spread and urge them to get tested.
The same day, Horton called Lloyd White, director of the Marion County Health Department, and informed him of what occurred, and said there was no social distancing, and lots of kissing and hugging.
White did not respond to two invitations to be interviewed for this report — one left on his voicemail, one left with a member of his office.
In a recording of the call provided by Hodges, White said there were three positive cases in Marion County and told her that they have protocols in place and they do contact tracing. He said his staff was working on that. He recommended that everyone self-quarantine and monitor symptoms.
“That’s the best we can do,” he said in that recording.
She pointed out that the African-American community tends to not trust the medical community, which poses a challenge for dealing with the situation proactively.
Hodges said she started getting calls from people who were sick and were turned away from testing.
“We had no leadership or guidance from our public health officials on where to go from that point. It seemed unthinkable they would let all these people go untested.”
In a segment of a March 27 call with White, which Hodges provided, they discussed contact tracing for those who attended. White talked about some futility in making the attempt. “If I call you and you never return my call, then I can never get information from you and it just kind of hampers things,” he said.
He asked her to provide him names, addresses and phone numbers so his office could send them sheets to monitor their symptoms.
Hodges said she viewed White’s reluctance to undertake the contact tracing as biased stereotyping of the community, by presuming they won’t answer.
Efforts to get in contact with local delegates failed, she said, but she was able to reach Delegate Danielle Walker, D-Monongalia. After several conversations, Walker contacted Sen. Joe Manchin’s office.
Manchin’s office was able to set up contact tracing for the 120 people and — because few in the community had primary care and couldn’t get doctors’ recommendations — restriction-free testing at United Health Center in Bridgeport on April 2-4. Manchin’s office also placed a call to COVID-19 Czar Clay Marsh who provided some assistance.
“That became a relief for the community,” Hodges said.
Before that April 2-4 testing, Hodges said, the Marion County Health Department had discouraged her from getting herself and her family tested because they’d passed the 14-day quarantine period without symptoms. But her husband and her two sons have a rare autoimmune blood disorder — only 12 people in the nation have it, three in her home.
“My husband was deathly ill. I was literally battling the devil himself in this house trying to keep him alive,” she said. But they were hesitant to hospitalize him and treated him at home.
They got tested
April 4 and the next afternoon she learned she was positive but asymptomatic. A half hour later, her husband learned he was positive.
“Never in a million years did I think I was going to test positive 20 days out,” she said, adding she feared she had spread it to others during those 20 days.
In a phone interview, Manchin credited his case management staff for jumping in and getting the service attendees the help they needed — contact tracing and testing.
“Danielle made us aware of it, and we all worked together on that,” he said.
Walker, also in a phone interview, talked about Hodges reaching out to her, about failed efforts to communicate with various officials that failed and led to her call to Manchin.
“Not everyone was being transparent,” she said. “If the contact tracing was done properly, it wouldn’t have even been an issue.” The guidelines to get testing also became a barrier. “I think we all failed.”
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