Several writers from Central Appalachia are featured in the Jan 2023 non-fiction release Masks, Misinformation, and Making Do: Appalachian Healthcare Workers and the COVID Pandemic. The anthology is edited by Wendy Welch, PhD, MPH, director of the noprofit Graduate Medical Education Consortium.
Welch is the author or editor of six non-fiction books about Appalachia.
Welch said of Masks, “So many people were talking about healthcare workers, but not listening to them. It was important to give them a chance to tell their first-person stories. These make up the bulk of the book, with some deep background information to help people understand how the Appalachian pandemic experience in rural areas differed fairly sharply from nationwide coverage of coastal cities.”
Masks, Misinformation, and Making Do was chosen through a competitive selection process for inclusion in the 2023 collection of Knowledge Unlatched, an open-access platform for scholarly works. Through this platform, it will be available in libraries around the world.
The anthology was featured by the National Rural Health Association and authors have guested on several podcasts focused on rural health, misinformation, and/or Appalachia. Among the SWVA writers are: Lynn Elliott of Bristol, who writes a first-person account of being in charge of medical residents inside a large and economically fragile healthcare system, fearing for both her livelihood and her students.
Beth O’Connor of Blacksburg, opening the book with a chapter on the economic frailty of rural hospitals before the pandemic hit. O’Connor is director of the Virginia Rural Health Association and immediate past president of the National Rural Health Association.
Laura Hungerford of Blacksburg, PhD, DVM, MPH, CPH, describing the future landscape of variants and viruses in simple terms for the casual reader and the student of virology. Hungerford is Department Head of Population Health Sciences and Professor of Veterinary Public Health and Epidemiology at Virginia Tech.
Brittany Landore, DO, now practicing as a family physician in Gate City, examined the unexpected hardships diabetic patients in SWVA faced when contracting COVID.
Rakesh Patel, MD, completed his residency in Abingdon and writes with sensitivity about vaccine hesitancy among patients absorbing misinformation and expressing fear. Kathy Still is a retired journalist now living in Norton. She writes about the unique challenges to the local healthcare system on the timing of infection waves hitting SWVA, and on the difficulties of nurses working COVID wards. Sojourner Nightingale is the pseudonym of a SWVA nurse in Lee County who writes movingly about experiences as a black woman and nurse during pre-vaccine COVID.
