One of Virginia’s poorest cities is also its least healthy, new rankings show

For the second yr in a row, Petersburg ranked because the least wholesome locality in Virginia whereas Falls Church took over first place.

The rankings, launched Wednesday by the Robert Wooden Johnson Basis and College of Wisconsin’s Inhabitants Well being Institute, are supposed to supply an annual snapshot of greater than 90 measures affecting well being and high quality of life in counties throughout the USA. Researchers think about behaviors together with smoking and extreme ingesting but additionally embrace measures like violent crime charges and entry to grocery shops to evaluate the general well being of a group.

As in earlier years, although, the gulf between Virginia’s highest and lowest-ranked counties underscores the correlation between wealth and well being outcomes — a disparity that well being officers have lengthy struggled to equalize. Falls Church, a majority White metropolis in Northern Virginia, has a median family earnings of almost $147,000 a yr, based on the latest U.S. Census knowledge. Petersburg’s, then again, is lower than half of that, at simply over $43,000 a yr.

The bulk-Black metropolis south of Richmond has struggled with declining wealth for many years. As soon as a affluent group fueled by the railway and tobacco industries, its demographics shifted sharply within the Nineteen Seventies when White residents started transferring out of town following college desegregation in Virginia. That exodus, coupled with a declining railroad trade, led to job losses and continued relocation by each residents and companies. By 2009, town’s tax income wasn’t sufficient to cowl its expenditures, based on the Federal Reserve Financial institution of Richmond.

Medical suppliers are additionally briefly provide. At a city corridor with Gov. Glenn Youngkin earlier this yr, metropolis leaders expressed concern that their group of over 33,000 had no pressing care clinic inside metropolis limits. Petersburg’s ratio of residents to main care suppliers is 1,420 to 1, based on this yr’s county well being rankings, in comparison with 330 to 1 in Falls Church. And its fee of preventable hospital stays for situations that could possibly be managed in outpatient settings was greater than double that of Falls Church.

COVID-19 additionally performed a task. In 2021, Petersburg’s untimely dying fee — a measure of residents who died earlier than the age of 75 — was already almost seven instances larger than Arlington’s, the top-rated county final yr. Final yr’s report didn’t embrace deaths attributed to the virus, however these had been factored into the rankings in 2022, based on Molly Murphy, a group scientist with the College of Wisconsin Inhabitants Well being Institute.

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