The stories of Ashevillians are being ignored. In working to survive, trying to get a COVID-19 test and seeing their communities in danger they all show a very different reality of the pandemic from the breathless coverage of tourism barons and economic forecasts
Above: Asheville by night. Photo by Bill Rhodes
True to form, far too much media in Asheville during the pandemic has focused on the wealthy and white. Business owners and tourism magnates mourn the loss of their profits, complain about being crushed or strangled as they sit in their mansions and mourn that the airbnbs aren’t raking it in like they used to.
As I write this, local governments have moved to re-open despite every indication that doing so will cost more locals their lives and health. They’ve bragged about “success” and “flattening the curve” even as case numbers spike, deaths increase, new outbreaks take hold and the Asheville area makes national lists for the rapid rise in infections.
Re-opening is incredibly unpopular, of course, as it’s clear COVID-19 has not been contained and that the further relaxing of restrictions until it actually is just makes everything worse. Most people want to stay home, cook and care for each other and keep themselves and their communities safe. For weeks I’ve talked to friends and neighbors terrified of returning to workplaces they know are dangerous, often for less pay and benefits than before. But every time county and city officials follow the state government and sign off on another re-opening it allows more businesses to force locals off of unemployment and back to work.
Only after a major public outcry and outbreaks disproportionately hitting Latinx and Asian communities did the county bring back walk-in testing sites. It took similar pressure for the Buncombe County commissioners to narrowly vote yesterday to require masks in most businesses, though they didn’t halt the drive to re-open.
It’s not news that the elites of this town don’t care if we live or die but the pandemic has made that reality clearer than ever. The gentry are helped by a local narrative that prioritizes the tourism economy and the small sliver raking in profits while erasing the rest of us. The demands from locals, of course, look very different.
So do the stories.
Here are three of them. These are the voices of essential workers, of locals trying to get tested as they fall ill, working to keep their communities safe, struggling to deal with incoming tourists, seeing institutions and businesses dedicated to making cash even at the risk of their lives. All are anonymous due to concerns about retaliation, a fact that by itself speaks volumes.
Forget the marketing. This is Asheville.
‘Asheville does not give a shit about its poor’
Around late April the symptoms started. The essential worker had stayed at their job at a major grocery store throughout the pandemic. They’d had colds before, but “this was completely different.” The symptoms tracked closely with the COVID-19 checklists, and they later learned they’d been in contact with a co-worker who’d been exposed to the virus.
The store they work at is also a hub “for all the touristy people, all the people that travel.” That hadn’t stopped, they recall, despite the supposed restrictions.
So, as their health worsened, they tried to get a test. Like many Ashevillians, they don’t have a primary physician, so they went to a local urgent care.
“They were like ‘yeah, you have this,'” they tell the Blade. “But because you don’t need to be hospitalized, yet, we’re not going to test you.”
From March 27 to April 20 the county stopped reporting testing numbers entirely. After repeated pressure from locals and the press, they finally revealed that testing had basically disappeared during that time and that multiple health institutions made it nearly impossible to get.
Public health organizations like the Steady Collective even warned that the lack of testing was giving locals a false impression that COVID-19 had spared Asheville, a narrative officials helped promote by repeatedly downplaying the severity of the local situation.
But despite the refusal at the urgent care, the worker kept trying to get a test. “I was frustrated. I’m an essential worker, I need to at least be able to tell my co-workers ‘hey, you were exposed to this.'”
“Then I heard about the difficulty other people in similar situations were having, when they clearly also had symptoms,” they recall. “It was even more frustrating because I know of people who were completely asymptomatic, who didn’t even have it, who were like the rich, white people of Asheville who were getting tested with no problem at all. They could walk in, get tested for COVID.”
“But me, an essential worker, a Black person, one of the main groups disproportionately impacted by this, I was being denied,” they emphasize. “I decided to keep fighting.”
They called the Buncombe County health department and were told to go to Mission Hospitals for a test.
“But I called Mission and they told me they weren’t going to test me until I got a recommendation from my physician,” they recall.
So they went to a family health doctor and emphasized that they’d already visited one physician “who described me as a presumed positive case. I clearly have symptoms of this. I am an essential worker. I know I was exposed to this. I just would really like to get tested so I can get answers.”
But instead of answers, they got more refusals. “They just said they wouldn’t test me, that they didn’t have a test available for me. They just gave me medicine for tonsillitis and said ‘hopefully this will help you.’ It really didn’t, honestly.”
By this point even basic activity made them extremely fatigued. They had a persistent cough, a sore throat and gastrointestinal issues. Even a mild fever. All well-known COVID-19 symptoms.
Isolation was hard, as the worker doesn’t have a car. Their whole household, including their spouse and a housemate, had to stay quarantined. They don’t have a large support network here, so they had to rely on delivery services for food and groceries.
“It was a very difficult experience,” they said. “I was so afraid I had given it to them, that they might have gone to work and passed it to other people. I was genuinely afraid I had hurt other people.”
Fortunately, they recovered. “I’m grateful that it was a fairly mild case. If it hadn’t been, things could have gone far differently.”
Because they were never tested, their case never went in the official case counts. While COVID-19 may be new, the longtime barriers to Asheville’s Black residents getting necessary healthcare is not.
Officials would later cite those artificially low case numbers from April as a reason to begin re-opening in early May, even as a modest uptick in testing was already making it clear that the situation was rapidly growing worse.
The worker returned to their job when their quarantine ended. Now, they see the county claiming all essential workers and “members of historically marginalized populations” should get tested, something that feels too little too late.
“They never approved me for a test,” they note. “It’s kind of a slap in the face. You denied me testing three times and re-opened everything up.”
They see moves to re-open the area as “extremely concerning” and already have to navigate crowds, many of them tourists without masks, returning to their neighborhood near the core of the city. “There are not a lot of people who are social distancing.”
“May and June are the peak tourist season, we already have tourists coming into Asheville,” they tell the Blade. “I’m concerned for the retail workers first and foremost. because they have to interact with many people during the day. I worry that some of them will get infected, some will die from this.”
Re-opening, they point out, also sends a signal to the public, bolstering those who believe “that this virus is not real or that it’s over.” That makes things even harder for populations — like the immunocompromised and houseless — already facing stark odds, as many who have the resources to wear masks and social distance are belligerently refusing to and putting everyone else in danger.
“I get so angry: what goes on in your head that you don’t care about other people?”
Their store even got signs from their corporate offices mandating social distancing, but the local managers refused to put them up “because they felt they ‘sounded too harsh.’ It’s not a matter of harsh, it’s a matter of saving lives.”
As re-opening has continued, they and their co-workers have found it increasingly difficult to enforce basic safety precautions.
“In our store we have a sign telling people not to enter without face coverings and people are blatantly ignoring it,” they say. But when another grocery worker tried to enforce that, “it ended badly,” with them being shouted at and threatened by customers.
“We don’t get paid enough to deal with that.” Workers at the grocery store make well under living wage and only got a minimal hazard pay boost for putting their lives in danger during the pandemic.
“It’s disturbing how many people aren’t taking this seriously,” they said. “Asheville doesn’t give a shit about its poor citizens, it just does not.”
“Low wages will break Asheville” Art by Nathanael Roney
‘They just want to put a lid on everything’
In March, as the pandemic started to hit our city, a Mission Hospitals worker volunteered to help screen people coming into the emergency room. They stopped patients coming in the door, asked them a series of questions and then — if they had COVID-19 symptoms or exposure — isolated them from the others waiting for treatment.
“I helped out when they were really needing people to try and get ahead of this,” they tell the Blade. One patient who’d been exposed suddenly came in when they didn’t have a mask on. While they remember the staff and nurses reacting quickly and handling the case well, it was clear the worker had been exposed.
The next day a hospital administrator “came down from the main offices, some higher-up who’s tracking all these things” and asked them questions about their contact with the patients.
The worker started to have symptoms over the coming week.
“It became clear that what I was dealing with was not regular bronchitis, because I’ve had that before,” they remember.
They asked their work if they needed to get tested, especially as they’d been exposed. They were told to come back if they developed a fever (which not all COVID-19 cases have).
“Another week and a half after that I still felt sick.”
They called the urgent care the hospital referred them to and asked for a test. “I have immunocompromised people in my household, I need to know.”
But even as a hospital employee they found the system hard to navigate. The urgent care transferred them to another office, who told them that since it had been more than two weeks since contact they weren’t able to do a test. Many COVID-19 cases take two weeks to begin displaying symptoms, longer for them to get severe enough to require medical attention.
“I asked ‘what do you mean? I’ve been sick for over two weeks now,’ but they said ‘no,'” the hospital worker recalls. They were told the only way they might get tested was to go to the ER. They kept pressing for a test but were told “it’s just not something we’re going to do.”
They called the urgent care nurses again, who even recommended they definitely needed a test but said the urgent care couldn’t administer it. Facing the ER had its own problems, mainly that they didn’t make enough money to afford care at the very hospital they worked at.
“If I go to the ER, it’s going to be $800 just to walk in the door, I know this for a fact. I don’t have $800,” they tell the Blade. “Even though I have insurance it’s not enough for my deductible.”
“It was so frustrating,” they said. They also found out they weren’t alone: nurses and staff they knew who’d risked exposure during the screenings “couldn’t even find tests. They’re feeling like they need one, but they can’t get one.”
While their co-workers and direct managers were supportive, the higher-ups were another matter.
“No one’s talking about it: they just want to put a lid on everything,” they said of the official reaction.
As they were repeatedly refused a test, their symptoms worsened. They got winded “walking from my bathroom and back. Just not really feeling like I’m moving enough oxygen. My voice was gone I had so much congestion.” They had headaches and body aches, as well as gastrointestinal issues.
“It got to the point where I couldn’t even walk up the stairs to go to the bedroom,” they recall. Their symptoms continued for nearly a month. They’re still recovering. They now work from home.
“My significant other also felt really sick for about a week and a half, same symptoms,” but also couldn’t get a test “because I technically never tested positive, so [the hospital] wouldn’t even consider it.”
Because neither was ever tested, they weren’t part of the county’s official tallies even though they had known COVID-19 exposure and many of the symptoms.
Given the hospital worker’s experience on the front lines of the pandemic, they find the move to re-open dangerous as “we have so many asymptomatic people that are just spreading this virus everywhere because they have absolutely no idea that they’re sick.”
“We’re a tourist town, the second they re-open to visitors it’s just going to go haywire,” they said. “Right now the hospital’s dealing with it ok, fair-to-middling. But if we re-open so fast I don’t know what’s going to happen. They’re not testing anywhere near enough people. They’re just not.”
“It’s way too fast, way too early for anybody to be opening up again,” they emphasize. “It’s ridiculous.”
‘A pile on a desk in the back’
Early in the pandemic, leisure travel was officially banned. But as part of the county’s supposedly measured re-opening earlier this month, tourism was again allowed, though supposedly limited just to residents from other parts of Western North Carolina.
But a hotel worker says that those rules are being widely ignored as managers and hoteliers downplay the danger and focus on making a profit.
“The hotel I’m working at, and I would assume many others, are not at all holding to the rental restriction guidelines set forth by the CDC or the city,” they tell the Blade. “They did not tell us who we can or can’t rent to and are just letting everyone come in.”
Some of the travelers do have good reason to be there, they note, “we have had many essential workers come in to help out at clinics and hospitals so that’s been great.”
But they also have tourists coming in from other parts of the South, even from the Midwest. This is technically illegal, but local government’s not enforcing it and the hotel has no reason to.
“The guidelines have been printed out and were in a pile on a desk in the back but no attention was drawn to them and no discussion had about them,” the worker says.
In fact, belligerent (and possibly contagious) tourists are a growing problem for the workers at the hotel.
“Many of the guests are angry that we haven’t opened completely as a state when theirs has. Dealing with rude guests is a daily challenge in hotels but things have begun to go off the rails,” they emphasize. “Just this week I was called a ‘libtard’ for wearing a mask. And I was ‘making a fool of myself for believing these liberal lies’ about the coronavirus.”
The top manager at the hotel “himself thinks the whole thing is way overblown and not at all as big a deal as it really is.” He’s also ignored workers who have pushed back.
“We have had many discussions about it and it never goes anywhere constructive. Either I’m angry because he refuses to see the reality of the situation or he’s mad at me for being willing to ‘sacrifice our freedoms.'”
It’s only due to more rank-and-file employees that the hotel has taken precautions.
“We have masks and gloves as well as hand sanitizer stations on every floor of the building. There are social distancing guidelines and we employees adhere to them however many guests do not,” they note. “They have gatherings of 10-plus people in the lobby and won’t distance from each other.”
Naturally, there’s been no increase in pay or benefits, despite the high risk hotel workers are facing on a daily basis. Facing even more re-opening, they worry that things are about to go from bad to worse.
“I think re-opening now is a terrible decision. I fully expect a more severe second wave to hit Buncombe fairly hard. Which will put over half of our workforce out of a job and make Asheville, I think, one of the most economically depressed places in the state.”
“I get it. Money buys food. Social interaction is necessary for mental stability,” they continue. “Change sucks. But by not dealing with the change as it comes responsibly we are putting lives at risk.”
“This whole thing has taken a toll on me as well as many others,” they say. “But to outright disregard the deadly reality is dangerous and delusional.”
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