In nature, a lot can change on a largely uninhabited Great Lakes island over the course of a century. And a lot can stay the same.

The ‘big, beautiful bill’ is heading to President Donald Trump’s desk for signature thanks to support from Michigan Republicans in the US House. Here’s what it could mean for the state.

Durable medical equipment has long been exempt from trade tariffs, but President Trump’s decision to include medical devices in new tariff policies is sparking concern among healthcare experts, who warn that rural hospitals, clinics, and medical equipment suppliers could face sharp cost increases as a result.

“The overarching concern from all kinds of hospitals, but in particular rural hospitals, is that the tariffs, if implemented fully, could potentially impact both the costs of delivering care and the availability of certain supplies to meet the needs of patients,” said Akin Demehin, vice president of quality and safety policy at the American Hospital Association (AHA). 

Demehin said that tariffs could touch a large spectrum of medical equipment. 

“We’re talking about things as complex as MRI machines or as simple as masks,” Demehin said. 

Rapidly shifting tariff policies have made it difficult to track their full impact, but experts warn that the tariffs could disrupt supply chains, drive up costs, and place added financial strain on hospitals—especially in rural and underserved areas. Increased expenses may also hinder innovation, limit access to care, and worsen treatment delays.

Anticipating Strains in Rural Medical Supply Chains

“Given the important role of our work in making America healthy, we are concerned that tariffs placed on medical and dental equipment threaten to disrupt the supply chain and raise costs for these critical items,” ten healthcare organizations said in an April letter to US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer. “This ultimately places further financial pressure on providers, hospitals, and health systems, particularly those located in rural and medically underserved areas.” 

A February 2025 survey of 200 healthcare professionals by Black Book Market Research, a healthcare market research company, found that 82% expected hospital and health system costs to rise by at least 15% within six months due to increased import expenses. Additionally, 90% of supply chain professionals anticipated significant disruptions in procurement and contract negotiations. Among the 21 hospital finance executives surveyed, 90% planned to shift rising costs to insurers and patients through higher service charges. Meanwhile, 84% of payers anticipate increased claims costs driven by higher prices for medical treatments and drugs.

Demehin said independent rural hospitals and clinics face unique challenges due to limited storage space and the short shelf life of critical supplies like IV solutions and medications. While they can collaborate closely with purchasing groups to source efficiently, stockpiling is often constrained, making it harder for smaller centers to navigate price hikes and strained supply chains compared to larger providers.

“Independent rural facilities are continuously working to make their supply chains more resilient,” Demehin said. “Working through both price increases and supply disruptions for smaller facilities can look a bit more complex and in some ways, a little bit more challenging than for other kinds of facilities.” 

The AHA said the consequences of these disruptions could be severe. 

“Disruption in the availability of these instruments would curtail hospitals’ ability to perform life-saving surgeries and keep patients safe from contagion and greatly reduce our ability to effectively diagnose and monitor patient conditions,” said Richard Pollack, president and chief executive officer of the AHA, in a February letter to President Trump. 

Allen Hunt, president of Hart Medical Equipment, a medical supplies company serving Michigan and Ohio, expressed concern about the growing challenges suppliers face in maintaining patient services, especially in rural areas. He highlighted that logistical difficulties and economic pressures—like tariffs and financial uncertainty—are making it harder to provide essential, often unprofitable services that are still crucial to communities. 

“I am worried about the ability of not just Hart, but suppliers in general, to continue to provide any level of service at all to these patients, particularly in the rural communities where it’s further away,” Hunt said. “There are some things we will not do for people in some of our farming communities because it’s just too far to drive. If we can do it via UPS, we’ll do that. But some of these products require specialized instruction and training for people to make sure they’re using them right.” 

These strains are limiting their ability to offer in-person support for complex products, reducing access for patients who need specialized training. Additionally, financial constraints are making it difficult to retain staff, which further impacts patient care and timely product delivery.

“At the end of the day, if these tariffs hit, you will likely have suppliers that will close. And then a lot of suppliers that are left will shrink their product offerings to only those things that are most profitable,” Hunt said. 

Wheelchair Accessibility Is at Stake

Marc Krizack, CEO of RoughRider America, a company that provides all-terrain wheelchairs to people domestically and abroad is experiencing first-hand the uncertainty of tariffs. 

Krizack said that rural communities have unique accessibility needs and RoughRiders wheelchairs are designed to offer rural users as much mobility as possible. 

“In rural communities, there’s different needs. Some people are farmers and they want to be able to get into their field,” Krizack said. “Or it’s just the road between their house and and their mailbox is all gravel and difficult to cross with standard wheelchairs.”

“Getting around outside the house is a bigger hurdle in rural communities. It requires traveling further distances,” said Dr. Carrie Henning-Smith, co-director of the Rural Health Research Center at the University of Minnesota. “You might not have a walkway from your home. You might not have a sidewalk in front of your home. You might have a lot of land that you’re on or that you’re near and getting around that can be really tricky.”

As supplies run low in his California warehouse, Krizack faces mounting uncertainty and expense due to looming tariffs. RoughRider’s Chinese manufacturer requires a 90-day lead time for production, so Krizack must place orders months in advance, gambling on future costs and navigating an increasingly unpredictable pricing landscape.

“I have to kind of be able to figure out 90 days, plus another three or four weeks for shipping, in advance what’s going to be happening with the tariffs. I have to guess the tariff policy, but I have no idea,” Krizack said. “And the other big problem is, I’m so small that a little change (in tariffs) is significant for me.” 

Trump’s sweeping tariffs sparked a trade clash with China, leading to escalating duties on both sides. A May agreement cut U.S. tariffs from 145% to 30% and set a 90-day deadline for a broader deal, with China agreeing to ease key export restrictions.

As of June 2025, the Trump administration said they would impose a total 55% tariff on Chinese imports by combining a 10% baseline tariff, a 20% China-specific duty, and existing 25% tariffs from Trump’s first term.

Krizack said that if he had to move all his manufacturing to the US, his costs would triple, making the wheelchairs prohibitively expensive for customers. 

As he faces the uncertainty of the future, Krizack said he is committed to the RoughRider mission but also can only bear so much financial loss. 

“I have been involved in this field since 1977 really, and it’s what I’m committed to doing. It’s a good thing to do, and I like to do it,” Krizack said. “But at the same time, it’s got to be worth it. There’s some point at which I don’t want to be a volunteer.”

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The post Trump’s Tariffs Will Hurt Rural Healthcare Centers and Medical Suppliers, Experts Warn appeared first on The Daily Yonder.

Few fish are as synonymous with Michigan as whitefish. Pushed to the edge by invasive species, their struggle is the tip of a cataclysmic species collapse that could change our way of life.

A Florida company has acquired all the ferry operations to the island and raised prices to the tourism Mecca. An Up North legislator wants to give the island more control.

A new report on four Michigan nursing home chains scrutinizes their use of affiliate companies to pay themselves for services, as complaints about care mount.

More than 250 Michiganders signed a letter calling for the restoration of evening ferry services to and from Neebish Island, which were cut in 2024.

MUSKEGON—New luxury homes, yacht slips, and trendy hotels and restaurants are cropping up along the glittering waterfront of this west Michigan city.

Nothing unusual for the Lake Michigan coast, long known for beach towns that cater to summer vacationers and wealthy second-homers. But to those familiar with Muskegon’s blue collar history, it’s a stunning transformation.

Not long ago, the shore of the 4,232-acre Muskegon Lake, a drowned river mouth that connects the city to the big waters of Lake Michigan, was so fully dominated by polluting factories that you could tell which ones were operating by the color of the water that day. It took decades of activism and more than $80 million to repair the damage, mostly on the public dime. 

The result is a lake with cleaner water, a gentler shoreline and better habitat for fish and wildlife. Good for swimming, fishing, boating and — for investors with the means to buy the land that industry left behind — capitalizing on the view.

“Are you looking for the ultimate first-class waterfront community?” asks an advertisement for Adelaide Pointe, one of several new developments cropping up on vacant former factory sites. 

A two-bedroom condo there lists for upwards of $700,000.

To many, the lake’s emerging cachet is something worth celebrating. It brings people, tax revenue and other benefits to a shrinking city of 37,000 people, where the median household income is nearly $25,000 below the state average. 

But Jen Sanocki and many of her neighbors feel conflicted. They look at the new homes, marinas and vacation rentals catering to wealthy out-of-towners, and wonder who, exactly, was meant to benefit from the cleanup that taxpayers funded.

“It’s going to bring some economic value to my neighborhood and Muskegon in general,” said Sanocki, president of Muskegon’s Nims Neighborhood Association. “But it does kind of feel like we’re creating a gated community on the water.”

Muskegon Lake and its namesake city are at a familiar crossroads for Great Lakes manufacturing communities that, after decades of industrial abandonment, suburban flight and economic malaise, have been made marketable again thanks to a massive publicly funded cleanup of the region’s most polluted waterways.

It leaves residents, policymakers and developers to grapple with a tricky question: Can cities like Muskegon embrace the wealthier newcomers who now want to live there, while ensuring that residents who endured the city’s darkest years get a fair share of its brighter future?

From ruin to rebirth

This story is part of a Great Lakes News Collaborative series examining the region’s “blue economy,” a term used to describe communities whose wealth is derived from and dependent upon water.

The term inspires visions of people living in harmony with nature. But for much of the Great Lakes’ modern history, it meant letting industry exploit the region’s abundant water for profit, with little concern about the consequences. 

Fishing species out of existence. Carving shipping channels to connect the Great Lakes to the ocean, which opened a gateway for invasive species. Building shoreline factories to easily access shipping routes, and then dumping toxic waste in the water.

Like many other Great Lakes waterways, Muskegon Lake became a casualty. 

“The stink from factories was the smell of money, as people referred to it,” said Alan Steinman, who has spent decades studying the lake and is the Allen and Helen Hunting Research Professor at Grand Valley State University’s Annis Water Resources Institute. 

Lumber barons built mills on the waterfront starting in the mid-1800s and then filled in the shallows with sawdust and debris until the lake had shrunk by 16%. When there was nothing left to log, heavier industries moved in: steel, paper, a coal-fired power plant and factories building car engines and war machines. 

Many of those who could move, did. Amid white flight to the suburbs, Muskegon’s white population dwindled from 98% in 1940 to 55% today. Those who couldn’t move — either because of their economic circumstances or racist housing policies — remained in the shadow of industry.

The lakeshore was so ugly and unsafe, Muskegon was built with its back to the water.

City Manager Jonathan Seyferth, a longtime resident, spent his childhood swimming at what’s now the local Boys & Girls Club, without realizing it sits on waterfront property. Virtually all of the windows faced inland.

“The lake was an afterthought,” Seyferth said. “It was a resource that we used.”

The Clean Water Act of 1972 ended the era of unregulated dumping, but it would take decades more to recover the water quality and habitat that had already been destroyed.

The United States and Canadian governments added Muskegon Lake to a list of 43 Great Lakes Areas of Concern — the region’s most degraded waterways — and partnered on cleanups with a citizen group known today as the Muskegon Lake Watershed Partnership.

As industry gradually retreated from the lakefront, those partners stepped in to dredge contaminated sediments, excavate hundreds of millions of pounds of industrial debris, plant trees and reopen wetlands. 

In the early days, a cleaner lake seemed so out of reach, “we had to prove to people that it was even possible,” said Kathy Evans, a longtime member of the watershed partnership. 

“They had to see it to believe it.”

But after several decades and more than $80 million (mostly federal dollars with other public and private sources mixed in), the lake is now clean enough to remove from the Areas of Concern List — and for a new debate about how its future should look. 

Who benefits?   

On a macro level, cleaning up Muskegon Lake has been an economic boon for Muskegon.

Researchers at Grand Valley State University found in 2018 that the local economy had enjoyed a 6-to-1 or better return on investment, including rising housing values and more tourism. The rate of return is climbing higher as developers remake the lakefront.

But in a working class city that is 30% Black, some fear the benefits of Muskegon Lake’s cleanup are accruing primarily to wealthy, mostly white newcomers while racial minorities and low-income residents get pushed out of the newly desirable neighborhoods. 

There’s a term for the phenomenon: “eco-gentrification.”

“There’s a lot of perceived positives” stemming from the lakeshore’s redevelopment, said Marria McIntosh, who leads an anti-gentrification nonprofit called Thredz Inc. “But how can our community benefit from it?”

No fewer than four major residential or mixed-use developments are planned or underway on the former industrial sites along the water, most of them made possible with the help of state and locally public incentives. When finished, they’ll boast a combined thousands of housing units and investments approaching $1 billion. For-sale signs have cropped up on other properties.

Ryan Leestma, who owns the Adelaide Pointe development on the site of a former steel foundry with his wife Emily, said the new condos, marinas, breweries and other amenities, help Muskegon compete with other waterfront cities that have built their economies around a wealthier clientele. 

“We have more beaches than anybody else. We have more state parks than anybody else,” said Leestma. “But certain demographics wouldn’t go to Muskegon because there wasn’t premium product.”

Amid Muskegon’s newfound popularity, the city’s average home value has skyrocketed from $109,000 in April 2020 to $174,000 today. 

The average resident’s paycheck hasn’t grown in equal measure, leading to worsening income inequality and housing affordability issues that have been made worse by investors buying affordable homes in the neighborhoods near the water and flipping them into vacation rentals.

The risk is “a glittering lakeshore in one corner of the city, and then in the other corner you’ve got a bunch of houses in ruins and dilapidated infrastructure,” said Amanda Buday, a Grand Valley researcher who has studied residents’ attitudes about the Muskegon Lake cleanup. 

A push for access and affordability

Another key tension point: How to ensure the average person can easily access the cleaner lake their tax dollars paid for, when the shoreline is ringed almost entirely by private property.

For decades, many of the vacant former factory sites along Muskegon Lake were treated as de facto parks, accessible to anyone who cared to wander in with a fishing pole. But recently, fences have been erected on the perimeter of some, while others have filled in with homes and boat storage garages. 

“It’s a huge topic,” said Sanocki, the neighborhood association president. The lake’s cleaner image means “people want to look at it, people want to be at it, people want to see it. People want to touch it.” 

City officials too have a desire for more public parks and beaches, Seyferth said. But they can’t force investors who bought the former factory sites to maintain unlimited access just because their predecessors did. 

“If the city was able to fork over a couple million bucks, we could go buy a piece of property and it wouldn’t be a problem,” Seyferth said. “We can’t afford to do that, so it ends up being more piecemeal.”

Instead, the city is mulling new public access requirements for waterfront developments, and has teamed up with the local chamber of commerce and other allies to persuade developers that open waterfronts are good for business. At Adelaide Pointe, for instance, the Leestmas have agreed to open their shoreline to the public in exchange for permission to use the municipal marina’s boat ramp and lift.

At another planned development called Windward Pointe, on the 122-acre site of the former Sappi paper mill, city officials negotiated public features like boardwalks and fishing docks and an option to buy several lots for a public park. 

And they recently unveiled a vision to expand the public lakefront near downtown Muskegon by swapping a city-owned campground for part of a property that now houses a boat storage facility, and then buying additional land from a shipping port company. 

City officials are also trying to combat gentrification by building affordable housing on city-owned lots and capping the number of short-term rentals allowed in Muskegon. 

“We’re starting to see Muskegon mentioned in the same breath as Grand Haven, Holland, Traverse City and Ludington when it comes to places that people think of vacationing and being on the beach,” Seyferth said. But avoiding negative consequences for longtime residents is “something we’re really conscious of.”

McIntosh said while it’s encouraging to see developers making portions of their properties accessible to the public, it’s not a substitute for truly public land. She wonders whether low-income and minority Muskegonites will feel welcome. 

“If I’m walking down that sidewalk and I’ve got my 5-gallon pail, and I’ve got my fishing rod, and I’ve got my cutoff shorts and my white T-shirt that is not so white anymore … and you in your $700,000 house are looking out your window, and you see me,” she said, “public don’t seem so public at that moment.”

The past is never far behind

Those who pushed for Muskegon Lake’s recovery say they’re now focused on protecting the investment taxpayers made in a cleaner lake, while managing new environmental challenges that the cleanup program was not designed to address.

Climate change is warming the water and fueling toxic algae blooms. PFAS foam showed up last year, its source unknown. And the new wave of shoreline development raises the potential for habitat destruction and polluted runoff from chemically-fertilized lawns, rooftops and parking lots.

“I just hope that we don’t have any more of our restored habitat ruined,” Evans said.

She was referring to Adelaide Pointe, which has been cited by the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy (EGLE) for violations including dredging the lake bottom, damaging wetlands and covering a habitat restoration project with rock rubble.

Many Muskegon residents were angry about the violations — a furor that only grew when they learned of a March 7 letter in which the owner, Leestma, begged a top Trump administration official to “override” EGLE’s authority.

Writing to EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, Leestma complained of being “targeted” by state regulators and implied Muskegon residents should be thankful for his development. He called it “sorely needed,” while comparing Muskegon to Detroit and Flint and falsely claiming it has “half the education and half the median income of the rest of the state.” 

Muskegon’s household income is 65% of the state average. It has a slightly lower percentage of high school graduates than the state average, and half as many bachelor’s degree holders.

McIntosh, the anti-gentrification advocate, saw the letter as offensive but unsurprising.

“That’s the kind of mindset that people bring,” she said. “Like, ‘you should be happy we’re doing anything in your broke community… and most of the developers feel that way.’”

Leestma eventually reached a settlement with EGLE that requires him to repair some of the environmental damage, and imposes fines that vary from about $200,000 to $500,000 depending how thoroughly he complies. 

He may have a polarizing personality, he told Bridge Michigan, and he regrets the letter. But he sees his development as a step toward a prospering Muskegon that has “room for everyone.”

“If this site was totally fallow and there was nobody here, there’s no spending going on whatsoever,” he said. “But I can tell you, there’s 200 more employees now than there were a year and a half ago.”

Unfinished business, unresolved debates

Meanwhile, the legacy of Muskegon’s industrial past still looms over the effort to remake the rest of the waterfront.

At the former Sappi paper mill property, redevelopment plans call for a mixed-use district with housing, a marina, shops and parks. But first, someone needs to clean up the pollution Sappi left in the soil and groundwater, including PFAS and explosive levels of methane. Taxpayers are again dipping into their pockets, this time with a $15 million state cleanup grant.

Rory Charron, chief operating officer for developer Parkland Properties, said the company has experience making dirty sites clean and usable again. The long-term goal, he said, is “doing something safe and meaningful for Muskegon and West Michigan, which will serve as a catalyst for future economic growth and development.”

While she watches that process play out, Evans is keeping an eye out for opportunities to shield more of the lakeshore from development. A “for-sale” sign recently cropped up on a wooded wetland where a creek drains into Muskegon Lake.

“We should get that,” she said, before listing off all the potential benefits for fish, wildlife, and the public. 

She knows Muskegon’s economic fortunes and development patterns will only keep changing, and debates about the benefits and drawbacks of those changes aren’t going anywhere. 

But amid it all, she said, she hopes that “people in the future feel like they belong to the lake, rather than the lake belonging to them.”

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The post An $80M cleanup made Muskegon Lake trendy. Will ‘eco-gentrification’ follow? appeared first on Circle of Blue.

This article is part of a collaboration with the Associated Press, Capital B, and Flint Beat. The work is part of the AP Inclusive Journalism Initiative supported by the Sony Foundation.

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Chimére L. Sweeney, a Maryland middle school teacher, was preparing to lead one of her first online classes after the pandemic shutdowns in March 2020 when she said she suddenly felt like someone placed a lit match on her spine.

Over the next several weeks, Sweeney’s vision became blurry, she frequently experienced vertigo, and she had difficulty processing basic information. She figured she had COVID-19, but because she didn’t have any of the primary symptoms — cough, fever, and shortness of breath — she was unable to qualify for a hard-to-find diagnostic test. 

In the ensuing weeks and months, Sweeney said she often felt like she had to convince her physicians that she was truly in pain. Ultimately, it took Sweeney two years to be formally diagnosed with a long-term case of COVID-19.

“No one can save this body like me,” said Sweeney, who’s 42 and lives in Baltimore. “The goal for me was to live.”

For Black Americans with long COVID, the first 100 days of the Trump administration have been particularly challenging. The White House has ordered drastic cuts to federal programs that provide funding for research for long COVID and other chronic diseases, including the Office of Long COVID Research and Practice. Those living with or working to treat patients with these illnesses are afraid of how these changes will impact them. 

The administration canceled a National Institutes of Health grant that supported an effort called Researching COVID to Enhance Recovery, or RECOVER. That $1.7 billion program was the single largest federal funding mechanism for research into long COVID, which is generally defined as instances when symptoms of the illness last for three months or longer.

And these changes are occurring at a moment when the nation’s top public health official, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., promotes conspiracy theories about COVID’s origins and questions the efficacy of the vaccine.

Taken together, those cuts disproportionately affect Black Americans, who, according to a 2023 report by the U.S. Census Bureau, make up about 32% of long COVID cases — second only to Hispanic Americans, who comprise about 36% of those patients. As many as 20 million Americans are estimated to have contracted long COVID.

Sweeney said she’s increasingly concerned about the reductions to these essential programs. 

“Long COVID has been one of the most devastating attacks on our workforce and economy because healthy people who became infected with COVID and now live with long COVID simply can’t work or have been forced to reduce their hours,” she said. “Black people are often more likely to be ill with the condition, but they often do not have the money or privilege to retire or stop working. They must return to work.”

Even before the administration’s cuts to programs designed to help the nation address the disease, studies have shown that Black Americans with long COVID encounter significant disparities in health care when compared to their white counterparts.

Researchers have found that Black long COVID patients report experiencing implicit bias, microaggressions, and other forms of discrimination when seeking treatment for their symptoms.

“They would ask questions like, ‘Are you on drugs? Or do you work? Or, what do you do for a living? Do you have insurance?’” Sweeney said of her physicians. “I’m, like, ‘You all must not be reading my chart because I am an educated Black teacher. I am generally healthy.” 

Discouraged by her own encounters with the medical system, and similar accounts from other Black Americans, Sweeney in 2024 founded the Black Long COVID Experience, a website dedicated to providing information about the illness and a resource for patients to find doctors or, as she calls it, “long COVID advocacy for Black folks.”

A cure for long COVID

Brooke Keaton, of Charlotte, North Carolina, is a former elementary school teacher, who — because of her long COVID diagnosis —  is dependent on government disability.

The 44-year-old mother of two — Bria, age 6 and Jaren, age 14 — said that she has experienced cognitive decline, asthma, heart issues, neuropathy, extreme spinal pain, numbness and weakness in her hands, and severe fatigue. 

Keaton says she belongs to several long COVID support groups, partly to make sure there are Black faces in the groups and also to learn what treatments and diagnoses non-Black patients are receiving.

She said she’s struggled to get physicians to take her symptoms seriously. One of her health care providers recently misdiagnosed a heart condition as anxiety. A new doctor finally helped uncover that she had inappropriate sinus tachycardia. 

“I don’t know that if I were not Black, if things would have gone differently,” Keaton said.

Keaton said Black people with long COVID have had to advocate to be included in research studies. Some patients have testified before Congress and written letters to representatives, all to make sure their voices were being heard.

“We are sick people, but we’re doing it to help find a cure,” Keaton said. “We need research. Our ultimate goal is for us to find a cure.”

Long COVID awareness in Black communities

Zanthia Wiley, an associate professor of medicine in the division of infectious diseases at Emory University School of Medicine, said the difference in treatment plans and outcomes between Black and white patients with long COVID often comes down to socioeconomics and access to medical care.

“If you are a bus driver and you have to drive your bus from 8 to 5 every day and you cannot take time off to go and see a doctor, then that is going to decrease the likelihood of your long COVID being diagnosed,” said Wiley. “I think also there is decreased awareness — and not just in Black people, but in the community — with respect to long COVID.”  

There are around 400 long COVID clinics in the nation, according to a report by the Long COVID Alliance, a network of patient advocates, researchers, and drug developers who inform the public about post-COVID care.

Wiley said most of the clinics are in urban areas or close to academic institutions. That reality can affect access for Black patients living in rural or exurban areas, particularly in the South.

In communities without long COVID clinics, Wiley said, physicians are seeking three key pieces of information: If a patient’s symptoms stem from other medical problems; if what a patient is reporting is actually long COVID; and how the disease can be treated.

Wiley said the lack of resources is all the more troublesome when you add deep federal cuts to research. 

“I am definitely worried about the tragic, chaotic loss of funding that is going to affect people and populations in general,” Wiley said. “And a lot of times in these scenarios, those who are affected the most are those who have, unfortunately, the smallest voice.”

Heather-Elizabeth Brown contracted COVID in 2020, before the release of the vaccine. She spent 31 days on a ventilator in a coma in a Royal Oak, Michigan, hospital, just outside of Detroit. When she finally woke up, she had to relearn to walk and eat. 

Brown is a member of the Long COVID Alliance.  She said to understand the racial disparities in how long COVID differs for Black patients, it’s vital to go back to 2020 and the start of the pandemic.

“I definitely think that what we saw a lot was patients — and Black patients, first of all — not even having access to the same type of care when the COVID infection happened, not being taken as seriously with some of their symptoms, or not being able to access the tests,” Brown said.

Brown, like other long COVID patients, enjoys legal protections through the Americans with Disabilities Act, which compels employers and others to provide accommodations, such as hybrid work arrangements, for those who are ill with the disease. 

Brown said she is deeply concerned that the Trump administration, which has already reversed policies regarding the needs of people with disabilities, might also roll back aspects of the ADA.

“Even just thinking about the fact that some of that could be rolled back or changed or challenged is terrifying, to be honest, because one of the ways that I’m able to do my job and do it well is because I was able to get accommodations,” Brown said.

Predominantly Black cities like Flint have “been hit in different ways” 

Aisha Harris, a family medicine physician in Flint, Michigan, said she is nervous about the effect of more cuts in funding for long COVID studies, particularly in places such as Flint. 

“Flint has made a lot of small steps as far as progress, even though with those steps, we’ve been hit in different ways,” said Harris, a professor at the College of Human Medicine at Michigan State University. “But the idea of those cuts happening will be devastating and will cause a crisis in Flint that I don’t really want to imagine,” she said. 

According to the July 2024 Michigan COVID-19 Recovery Surveillance Study, a joint project between the University of Michigan School of Public Health and the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, of the 17,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases in the state between March 1, 2020, and May 31, 2022, 22.7% of Black adults reported symptoms of long COVID. 

In addition to Sweeney and Brown, several Black long COVID patients who spoke with Capital B said they often aren’t believed by doctors, that they have to push to be included in studies, and that receiving a diagnosis and treatment can be a challenge.

Raven Baxter, who works on educational initiatives at the Mount Sinai Health System’s Cohen Center for Recovery from Complex Chronic Illnesses in New York City, said clinicians failing to believe Black patients when they report symptoms is a significant issue. 

Baxter, herself a former long COVID patient, said that during a recent seminar she led, about 10% of the health care providers who were in attendance strongly doubted the actual existence of the conditions being reported by those seeking help.

“So education really goes a long way,” said Baxter, who is a molecular biologist and educator. “Unfortunately, people from all walks of life are already experiencing gaslighting in other dimensions, and it’s just unfortunate that that continues and is compounded by what’s happening with the onset of long COVID.”

Although the clinic where Baxter works is privately funded, she said any disruption in federal dollars for researchers could be devastating to the long COVID community. 

The youngest long COVID patients

Stephanie Cunningham, who lives in Warren, Michigan, about 20 minutes outside of Detroit, says doctors suggested that her 8-year-old daughter, Peyton Lee, had invented her symptoms and encouraged her to take Lee to see a psychiatrist. 

“Every time we would go to a doctor, they would dismiss me,” said Cunningham, who works with the Michigan Department of Corrections probation department. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been told through this process that, ‘You appear to be educated, so I’m going to provide you with knowledge, more information than I normally would.’

“What? That’s devastating to hear,” she said, “Not only for my child, but what about the families that are not educated? What about the families that don’t know how to advocate for their child?” 

Amy Edwards is a pediatric infectious disease specialist at University Hospitals Rainbow Babies & Children’s Hospital in Cleveland. Peyton is one of her long COVID pediatric patients. 

Edwards said children over the age of 10 are at the highest risk of developing long COVID. 

“Think about your life from 10 to 20 and everything that you did and everything that you learned and how much it shaped who you are as a person,” Edwards said. “Then imagine you’re already struggling with racism and classism, if you’re also poor, on top of being non-white. And then imagine having chronic fatigue syndrome or something, and long COVID just dropped right on top of that and how much that takes away.” 

Now, with the cuts to federal funding for COVID research, Cunningham said she’s scared for her daughter. 

“This is so new, and no one knows enough about it,” she said. “So, how does this affect Peyton? How does it affect her quality of life? She doesn’t have four years to wait on a new administration. We need this information now.”

The post The Fight to Be Believed: Long COVID’s Toll on Black Americans appeared first on Capital B News.

Michigan now covers more than double the portion of the population it did 30 years ago. Is that growth unchecked, or just enough to cover the most vulnerable?