This investigative story was a collaboration between the Missouri Independent and the Documenting COVID-19 project at the Brown Institute for Media Innovation and MuckRock. The story revealed how miscommunication and a lack of preparedness hurt Southwest Missouri’s ability to address the Delta surge in summer 2021.
The two lead reporters were Betsy Ladyzhets (Documenting COVID-19) and Tessa Weinberg (Missouri Independent). In addition to reporting and writing, Betsy contributed to data analysis and visualization, including an interactive chart in Kepler which visualized patients transported out of Springfield-area hospitals during the peak of the region’s Delta surge.
Read the full story at the Missouri Independent and/or at MuckRock, published October 28, 2021.
Betsy Ladyzhets 