He was dialing his phone, but it seemed like Jim Nunnelly was in a full sprint, chasing the source of the information in a public health flier that had floored him like a wanted poster with his name on it.

“Black people should be very cautious with COVID-19,” read its headline.

His calls are taking him deeper and deeper into the Centers for Disease Control. He’s seeing the vast Atlanta campus he knows well because Nunnelly made his career as a public health professional and he’s been there.

It’s as big as the University of Michigan campus that he graduated from nearly a half a century ago, he says.

Someone in the CDC had put all the alarming truths together on that flier, echoing truths Nunnelly has been trying to lay on Kansas City for years:

“. . . people with underlying conditions have a higher risk for severe illness from the coronavirus . . .”

“. . . Black people have the highest rates of these conditions . . . Asthma. Heart disease. Obesity. Diabetes. Chronic kidney disease . . . “

He wanted to thank the person. He wanted to talk with whoever so specifically understood what Nunnelly knew.

Long before the news began to report that Kansas City’s black neighborhoods east of Troost were suffering the most from coronavirus cases and deaths, Nunnelly had dedicated his semi-retired years to crusading for justice in health care in his community — warning of the “co-morbidities” behind his neighborhoods’ shortened lifespans.

“We already knew that!” he says of the dire virus reports.

He’s chasing after the CDC information, the same way he has been filling his popular Facebook page with health tips and warnings, running a weekly live chat on diabetes, and now ranging out in his mask into the field to warn of the dangers of coronavirus and the need for more testing.

He never stops.

Decades of local and national public health neglect are “coming home to roost,” he said.

“African-Americans are no longer willing to sit in the back of the healthcare bus.”

The flier, which he has posted online and shared every way he knows how, includes the final indignity as a footnote at the bottom: “Black people have among the lowest rates of coverage, access and use of the U.S. Healthcare System.”

After 27 calls — he can see them all on his dialing history — he’s only gotten close to the source at the CDC.

But his persistence is clear, just as when he fights to get the public health community to work on addressing the pernicious underlying health and social conditions that make so much of the black community more vulnerable when a virus sweeps across the city.

There seems to be this awakening, he said, that the nation and Kansas City were unprepared for the virus, he said. But he and other public health professionals know the truth about the U.S. and its commitment to the needs of public health, especially in minority communities.

“We’ve been unprepared for a long time.”

By Joe Robertson, LINC Writer