Like many health reporters who led their outlet’s coverage of the coronavirus, Emily Woodruff started 2021 with stories of hope. Vaccines made their way to Louisiana, and readers were so eager to get a shot that we started a vaccine newsletter to keep them updated. Woodruff covered the vaccine rollout from inside a local pharmacy, giving readers a unique perspective into the behind-the-scenes of a family who was also facing the personal toll of the coronavirus.
But soon it became clear: Despite early demand, Louisiana’s sluggish uptake of vaccines would complicate our path out of the pandemic. To demonstrate this, Woodruff went inside hospitals – the only local journalist to do so in New Orleans – and reported on the massive number of patients in need of care during the delta wave, which hit Louisiana before most of the country. She also visited a rural hospital to report on overflowing emergency rooms and patients waiting days for transfers.
Woodruff also covered how hospitals fared during the devastating Hurricane Ida while also living through it, spending nights hunkered down on the 19th floor in a powerless hotel room. In the early days after the storm, she visited a senior apartment home, where she found chaos unfolding as residents’ fear over their health issues came to light. Later, she examined how emergency plans failed the most vulnerable in stories about disabled people and their caregivers.
As the only full-time health reporter at any newspaper in Louisiana, Woodruff’s coverage has been remarkably vast. In between the stories mentioned above, she’s covered how the pandemic influenced the opioid epidemic, how hospitals and schools have navigated mandates, other diseases impacted by COVID and nursing home plans that allowed for a disastrous evacuation of hundreds to a warehouse. Her careful reporting on Louisiana’s many fragile groups is both thought-provoking and influential during a time of rapid updates and rampant misinformation.