Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin, 39, was released from hospital on Wednesday after suffering from covid-19 pneumonia, according to his personal physician.
Woodfin announced on Dec. 30 that he had tested positive for the virus but was experiencing mild symptoms. On Jan. 4 he was admitted to Princeton Baptist Hospital with pneumonia, three days after his grandmother died from covid-19-related illness.
“My Grandma went home to be with the Lord this morning. It doesn’t matter how much you prepare for the call. It’s still so unsettling, devastating, and shocking all at the same time,” Woodfin tweeted on Jan. 1.
Woodfin won a runoff race for mayor of Birmingham in October 2017. He previously worked as the president of the Birmingham City School Board (2013 to 2015) and as an assistant city attorney for Birmingham from 2009 to 2017. He attended Morehouse College, where he served as president of Student Government Association. He earned his law degree from the Samford University Cumberland School of Law.
Politically, Woodfin describes himself as a moderate Democrat. He has been compared to Jackson, Mississippi Mayor Chokwe Lumumba. Both were backed in 2017 by Nina Turner, then-president of Our Revolution, a progressive political action organization spun off from Sen. Bernie Sanders‘s 2016 presidential campaign to continue its work to get people involved in the political process and elect progressive candidates. Turner recently filed her intention to run for Congress.
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Doctors caught Woodfin’s covid infection early, the mayor said in a statement after he was released from the hospital. “I’m grateful and thankful that I stayed in touch with my primary care doctor, and he encouraged me to come into the hospital, where they were able to detect covid pneumonia in my left lung.”
Black Americans are infected with covid-19 at nearly three times the rate of white Americans, according to a survey in August by the National Urban League.
Alabama has a population of about 1.3 million African Americans or 26.8 percent of the state’s population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau data of July 2019. The latest Alabama Health Center Covid-19 Survey showed that 38.12 percent of Black Americans tested positive for the virus.
There has been an increase in covid-19 related hospitalizations in Alabama, with records showing 3,064 people in the state’s hospitals on Monday.
