Telling the story of COVID-19 in St. Louis

“The pandemic was such a huge event. It left scars on a lot of people,” said Penina Acayo Laker, an associate professor in the Sam Fox School and a co-author of the book. “Putting them into a book creates a certain permanence that allows these stories to live on way beyond this time.”

The book, titled “Novel Virus, Old Divides: How COVID-19 Touched Every Piece of Life in St. Louis,” grew out of a listening project commissioned by the city of St. Louis. In 2020, the city reached out to health communication expert Matthew Kreuter, the Kahn Family Professor of Public Health — then at the Brown School and now at the School of Public Health — for help in assessing the needs of city residents. Kreuter and his team at the Health Communication Research Laboratory conducted in-depth interviews with residents, extracted key findings, and reported back to the city.

“As we spoke to more and more people, it became clear that these interviews were very rich,” said Kreuter, also a co-author of the book. “If all that came out of it was a set of action items for the city, that didn’t seem like good enough. It didn’t do justice to the depth of the stories people were telling us.”

The book gradually took shape over the next five years. Through hours of discussion and countless revisions, the teams at Kreuter’s Health Communication Research Laboratory and Laker’s Health Communication Design Studio labored to create something that would truly capture the essence of life in St. Louis during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Mikayla Johnson, a research project coordinator at the Health Communication Research Laboratory and the third co-author, conducted and transcribed all of the interviews and then sifted through them to find the most powerful quotes and stories. Talie Johnson, BFA ‘23, and current MPH/MSW candidate, created original illustrations. Many others contributed insights and ideas.

The book was published this past summer through an interdisciplinary partnership between the School of Public Health, the Sam Fox School and the Brown School. Gene Kahn, a WashU trustee emeritus and a longstanding supporter of public health at the university, funded the initial print run of 1,000 copies. The book will be officially launched at an event October 7 at WashU and online. Here, Laker, Kreuter, and Johnson discuss how and why they created the book.

Mikayla Johnson: At first, we were just thinking about how to share these stories in a way that would capture the emotional weight and impact of what we had heard from people. We didn’t want it to be a dry, text-heavy manuscript that would be read by a handful of professionals and then forgotten. For a while we were talking about doing something online, some kind of digital storytelling, but eventually, we decided that something tangible would have more permanence. People could pick it up and hold it and it could stand as sort of a time capsule of what happened here in St. Louis.

Penina Laker: I think it was the death-and-loss story that was the turning point. [Laker is referring to a story one participant told about her husband’s death from COVID-19. The story became Chapter 6.] When Matt and Mikayla showed us that story, we had to sit with it for a while. We felt it deserved more than just words. We needed something more to convey the emotional impact of what this person was going through. At the time, I don’t think we knew it was going to be a book, but we did feel that there had to be some visuals attached to it.

Johnson: COVID didn’t happen in a vacuum. The outcomes were very much shaped by history and existing inequalities. It’s more understandable when you see quotes that are expressing vaccine hesitancy when you also see that people were bringing up memories of the Tuskegee experiment. There is a history of experimentation on certain communities, often at the hands of people who are in medicine or public health, that shaped how people interpreted what they were being told and what they saw during the pandemic. We felt that we needed a strong narrative voice to provide context and support the stories our participants were telling.

Laker: It’s a book for St. Louis, about St. Louis. These are not fictitious stories. They’re actually real people. There’s real loss, there’s real pain, there’s real struggle, there’s real anxiety in there. And there are real moments of communities coming together. This book is for everyone, but especially for the people who told these stories. Hopefully, they feel we have done right by those stories and we’ve honored their spirit.

Matt Kreuter: A part of this is for people in the future who will want to know what this was like. It was such a momentous time, and sometimes it feels like we are already beginning to forget. And for me, as a public health person, there are so many lessons that we have to learn from COVID-19 about what worked and what didn’t in our approach. So many of those lessons just come screaming across the pages in the words of community members. It’s much more powerful and undeniable than hearing experts talk.

Johnson: I could finally let go of the anxiety around it. People shared their stories with us at a time that was really hard for them, and I felt so much responsibility to ensure that these stories didn’t go unheard. I pulled out the first book, and it finally felt real to me. All that time, all that care, was worth it. We created something beautiful that is true to the stories that were told to us.