NC Coronavirus News Collaborative

A few miles south of Goldsboro, in a county with thousands of acres of sweet potato and tobacco fields and speckled with hog farms, lies a ZIP code with one of the highest COVID-19 infection rates in North Carolina.

On the first day of April, when confirmed cases of COVID-19 had barely broken 1,500 in North Carolina, Marisela Martínez started a housekeeping job through a subcontractor at the Mountaire Farms poultry plant in Siler City.

The dynamics of the global pandemic are driving up the need for more poll workers while simultaneously making people willing to work the polls harder to find.

Days after the North Carolina legislature's passage of a bill that includes a measure to further restrict death investigation records from public access, some lawmakers say they plan to walk back the provision.

While North Carolinians were sleeping early Friday morning, the General Assembly swiftly passed a bill that would shield death-investigation records from the public.

Leaders at health systems around the state say a combination of better medical care and larger stockpiles of protective gear mean they can handle surges in COVID-19 patients more effectively today than they could three months ago.

A day after North Carolina prison leaders reported their first case of COVID-19, about 200 inmates at Neuse Correctional Institution refused to go back to their dorms. 

In the prison's recreation yard on April 2, they staged a protest over new restrictions aimed at slowing the spread of the disease at the Goldsboro facility, where two inmates had already tested positive.

Some of the inmates, said state prisons commissioner Todd Ishee, threatened violence.

Law enforcement agencies across the state refuse to tell the public how they use force when policing their communities, citing provisions in state law they say shield such records from public view.

That's according to a survey of more than a dozen state and local police departments and sheriff's offices in North Carolina conducted over the past two weeks by a network of journalists from across the state.

The email sent to staff at Piedmont Correctional Institution in Salisbury on Friday, June 5, had a sense of urgency.

"ALL HANDS ON DECK!" it began, in capital letters.

North Carolina prison officials announced Friday that they will test all inmates at Caswell Correctional Center for COVID-19, with results expected next week.

The announcement comes a little more than a week after a network of journalists across the state revealed that a nurse who worked at the prison died of the virus. Officials also announced the extension of a voluntary testing program for prison staff earlier this week.

A coalition of more than two dozen media outlets – including North Carolina Public Radio – filed a lawsuit on Thursday seeking the release of a list of records related to COVID-19 that the state had, so far, refused to provide.

The lawsuit names as defendants Gov. Roy Cooper and two of his Cabinet secretaries, Dr. Mandy Cohen, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, and Erik Hooks, secretary of the Department of Public Safety.

Meatpacking plants are breeding grounds for COVID-19 among workers.

Plant employees typically stand shoulder-to-shoulder on their feet for hours at a time, shoving and cutting carcasses. The work causes them to breathe heavily, and if they have COVID-19, they are spreading virus into the air, said Dr. Lisa Gralinski, an assistant professor at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health.

State Senate leader Phil Berger is demanding answers from the North Carolina prison system following a news report Thursday that revealed the death of a Caswell Correctional Center nurse diagnosed with COVID-19.

Barbara Anne Stewart died at a hospital in Danville, Va., on May 7 at age 57.

Five weeks earlier, she had come home from her job as a nurse at the Caswell Correctional Center complaining she didn't feel well.