(Katherine Frey/The Washington Post)

Her neighbors called covid a hoax. She risked her life to save them.

By Peter Jamison

The pandemic hit late but hard in the Appalachian highlands — the mountainous region that includes Southwest Virginia and Northeast Tennessee — and over the winter many of its victims had ended up on ventilators tended by Emily Boucher and her fellow nurses at Johnston Memorial Hospital.

They were enduring the traumas known to ICU workers across the world: days filled with death, nights ruined by dreams in which they found themselves at infected patients' bedsides without masks. But they were also enduring a trauma that many doctors and nurses elsewhere were not: the suspicion and derision of those they risked their lives to protect.

Conspiracy theories about the pandemic and lies recited on social media — or at White House news conferences — had penetrated deep into their community. When refrigerated trailers were brought in to relieve local hospitals' overflowing morgues, people said they were … Read more »