National media covers healthcare crisis in South LA

media wrap
Credit: Francine Orr for the Los Angeles Times | Copyright: Los Angeles Times | Run date: 2/19/21 | Story: For two COVID-19 patients, life and death rests on ‘el tubo’

News media outlets from around the country, including CNN, The New York Times, and NPR, came to South LA to report on the epicenter of the COVID-19 crisis in United States this winter.

But the story they discovered was much broader—COVID-19 didn’t cause the health crisis happening in South LA. Decades of racial injustice and underinvestment have combined to create disparities that make our community exceptionally vulnerable to the virus. Our community was already in crisis, COVID-19 has only increased the scale and urgency.

Below, read, watch, and listen to take a closer look at reporting on our efforts to improve the health of our community and build pathways to health equity.

Read

Gift shops, meditation rooms, field tents—these are the spaces where patients are being treated. The Los Angeles Times profiles how, in the face of a “crisis on top of a crisis,” our hospital managed “one hour at a time, one day at a time.”

Watch

CNN calls MLKCH an “oasis-of-care in the healthcare desert of South LA.” This piece underscores how “the inequities in healthcare invite death” in our community. But in the darkness, we find light, as a once critically-ill COVID patient is reunited with the ICU team that saved her life.

Listen

National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered” reports on how our “separate and unequal health system” has made the pandemic a deadly but predictable disaster in our community—one that is taking more and more lives each day.

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