COVID-19 Updates: July 16, 2020
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Orange County Schools opts for more strict COVID-19 rules; will begin with only online classes |
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Originally posted by ABCNews11
CHAPEL HILL, N.C. (WTVD) -- Schools in the Triangle are considering moving to all online classes for the upcoming school year.
Orange County School Board met Thursday morning and unanimously agreed to spend at least the first four weeks of the 2020-2021 school year with only virtual classes.
Superintendent Dr. Monique Felder began the meeting with her recommendation for moving all classes online due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
"(I am) recommending that while we continue to work toward Plan B--and we will be ready for Plan B--given the state of COVID-19 in this county at this time, we pivot to Plan C, remote learning, and reassess the status of COVID-19 in the district in a few weeks, in order to determine at that time if we are in a position to shift to Plan B," Felder said.
RELATED: Your Wake County Public Schools reopening plan questions answered here
All school board members who spoke during Thursday's meeting agreed that the school year should start with no students in physical classrooms. However, disagreement began when they started talking about specifics.
A major point of contention was how long Orange County Schools should be online only and what would the board want to see before allowing students and teachers back into school buildings.
"In a district that closes for snow flurries, I just have a personal, difficult time justifying asking our staff to work during a deadly serious pandemic," Orange County School Board Chair Hillary MacKenzie said.
School board members debated between being online only for the first four weeks or the first nine. Ultimately they voted unanimously on a motion to be online only for "at least the first four weeks," with a caveat that they would meet again Monday.
In Monday's meeting, the board is supposed to talk about the specific measures they want to see before bringing students and teachers back into the classroom. All board members agreed that the school district may remain in Plan C for longer than the first four weeks.
Gov. Roy Cooper announced earlier this week that school districts would be allowed to have a mix of in-person and online education but could also go exclusively online if they so chose.
Orange County Schools is just one local school district considering a more stringent approach to learning during the pandemic.
MacKenzie said she planned to communicate with leaders of Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools, which is set to meet later Thursday on the same topic. MacKenzie said she thought it would be beneficial if both school districts were on the same page and had schedule's that matched up.
Durham Public Schools also has a meeting scheduled Thursday afternoon where leaders will discuss the same dilemma.
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North Carolina COVID-19 Cases
The North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services (NCDHHS) reports 93,426 COVID-19 cases, 1,588 deaths, and 1,134 hospitalizations, as of July 16, 2020. For more information regarding live updates (NCDHHS updates the site every day at noon), please visit the NCDHHS website.
Orange County Health Department also has a COVID-19 dashboard webpage, with information on COVID-19 data in the county. The dashboard will be updated every Tuesday and Thursday.
There are currently 1,035 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Orange County, and 45 deaths.
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Orange County 'Staycation' Guidance |
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In Orange County, NC we’re lucky to have access to so much beauty and outdoor options. We are also well situated for some exciting day trips to nearby cities and counties.
Please visit the Orange County 'Staycation Ideas' webpage to access our list of 35 Ways to Have a Fulfilling Staycation When Cabin Fever is Setting In |
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CDC Employees Call Out Agency's
'Toxic Culture Of Racial Aggressions' |
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More than 1,200 current employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have signed a letter calling for the federal agency to address "ongoing and recurring acts of racism and discrimination" against Black employees, NPR has learned.
In the letter, addressed to CDC Director Robert Redfield and dated June 30, the authors put their call for change in the context of the coronavirus pandemic's disproportionate impact on Black people and the killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and Rayshard Brooks. NPR obtained a copy of the letter, which is published below.
"In light of the recent calls for justice across this country and around the world, we, as dedicated public health professionals, can no longer stay silent to the widespread acts of racism and discrimination within CDC that are, in fact, undermining the agency's core mission," the letter reads.
The letter offers a rare glimpse inside a famously opaque federal agency, where career staff often work for decades and information is carefully filtered to the public through the press office.
Dr. Camara Phyllis Jones, who was a medical officer at the CDC for 14 years and remains in contact with current employees, says that after the letter was sent to Redfield, it was circulated among the 11,000-person workforce for signatures.
As of Monday afternoon, 1,204 staff members had signed the letter — more than 10% of the agency's workforce — and the number of signatories is growing, Jones says. She adds that at least one division head signed, and about 300 employees chose to endorse the letter anonymously. Only current CDC employees could sign the letter, and each person could sign it only once, according to Jones. Any CDC employee could sign, not just people of color. The racial breakdown of the signatories was not known.
In a statement to NPR, a CDC spokesman acknowledged that Redfield received the letter and responded to it, adding, "CDC is committed to fostering a fair, equitable, and inclusive environment in which staff can openly share their concerns with agency leadership." |
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Jones says her understanding is that Redfield's response did not address the specific requests for action in the letter. "I find that disheartening and disrespectful," she says.
In the letter, the authors point to a variety of "well-meaning, yet under-funded" efforts to diversify the agency's workforce over the past several decades and assert that none of them have made much difference. They note that Black employees represent only 10% of senior leadership and 6% of the CDC's 2019 class of the Epidemic Intelligence Service, a fellowship program described as "the training ground for tomorrow's leaders within the agency."
It describes an "old boy/girl network," where white managers promote white staff while allegedly stifling and discouraging Black staff, and a "pervasive and toxic culture of racial aggressions." It also says that hundreds of Equal Employment Opportunity complaints have been filed by Black employees in the past decades, many of them unresolved.
"Systemic racism is not just a concept perpetrated outside these walls," the letter reads. "It is a crushing reality for people of color in their daily lived experiences here at CDC."
The authors make seven demands for action, including diversifying senior leadership, addressing racism in the CDC's culture, and publicly declaring racism a public health crisis in the U.S.
The CDC has stumbled in its attempts to address the disproportionate impact of the coronavirus on Black Americans and other communities of color. Although data are incomplete, Black and Latino people in the U.S. are at least two times more likely than white people to die from COVID-19 and three times more likely to get sick.
Congress required the CDC to report data to lawmakers about COVID-19 and racial disparities. But the agency's first report, sent to lawmakers in May, was panned by Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., as a "lazy, four-page copy and paste project" that mostly consisted of links to CDC webpages. The agency's follow-up in June was longer, but also "incomplete" and "still inadequate to the task at hand," according to a written statement from Murray.
"CDC has been MIA on race and COVID-19," says Greg Millett, who worked as a senior scientist there until 2009 and is now at amfAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research.
"I think that it's telling that here I am, sitting on the outside, a former CDC employee, and I've been able to scoop the agency [...] in the data that I've been able to publish on COVID-19's impact on African Americans," he says. "CDC has still not really come up with anything meaningful about what's taking place in Black and brown communities around COVID-19. That to me is shameful, and shows that the scientists who are there who can do that work are not necessarily being empowered to do that work."
"We are hurt. We are angry. We are exhausted," the authors write. "And ultimately, we fear that, despite the global protests, little will be done to address the systemic racism we face each and every day." |
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Failing to address racism's role in causing health problems, the authors say, "is a key reason why we have witnessed little progress in reducing many of these disparities in the United States over the past 50 years."
Jones, who left the CDC in 2014, says she feels encouraged to see Black employees organizing to effect change. "When I first saw the letter, it was a feeling of resonance," she says. "I know that this is no exaggeration."
Her own work was on racism and public health, and she says she felt thwarted and undermined in her attempts to get the agency to address these issues. She says after a lunchtime presentation she gave on racism, she was asked to remove references to how racism " 'unfairly advantages other individuals and communities' off of my slide because that made white people uncomfortable."
After she left the CDC, she served as president of the American Public Health Association and taught at the Morehouse School of Medicine.
Although Millett personally felt supported by mentors during his time at the CDC, he says the environment described in the letter resonated with him, too. He's supportive of the letter's organizers and hopes it can lead to change at the agency.
"We need more Black scientists at CDC who can help understand what's taking place in our various communities," he says. "I do feel that we're on the precipice of actually changing something here."
Jones is less hopeful. She says there are troubling consequences to the sidelining of Black scientists at the CDC, including from working on the impact of COVID-19 on their own communities.
"We are squandering genius," she says. "We're squandering insight. We're squandering talent within CDC that could then lead CDC's mission to address the health issues of the nation.". |
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Three Principles to Ensure COVID-19 Recovery Information Reaches Immigrant Communities |
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Originally posted by the Urban Wire: Immigrants and ImmigrationAs immigrant workers and families with low incomes across the country are disproportionately affected by the economic and health impacts of the COVID-19 crisis, state and local communities are stepping in to fill the gaps left by limited federal relief efforts. Not only do these efforts need to be available and tailored to immigrant community needs, but they also must focus on creating effective outreach to immigrant audiences. With offices closed, community visits limited, and ongoing virus transmission concerns as cities reopen, government agencies and service providers should explore innovative communications channels to assist immigrant families. Early in the crisis, we scanned the responses of 10 metropolitan areas with large immigrant populations in a variety of state immigration policy climates and identified some ways localities were working to communicate to immigrant audiences. From our observations, we find effective outreach with immigrant residents depends on three key principles: translation of materials into multiple languages, accessible and trustworthy messengers, and creative ways to transmit information.
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Source: Orange County, NC Health Department
Ensure information is available in multiple languages
Although in some areas of the country the primary foreign language spoken by residents is Spanish, localities must be prepared to offer translations beyond Spanish given the enormous and growing diversity of the immigrant and refugee population in many large cities, such as Houston and Atlanta, as well as in smaller towns, such as Akron and Omaha. Some cities and states moved quickly to make public health information on virus prevention and testing available in multiple languages. Both Chicago and Washington, DC, offered translations of key prevention and program information in languages most commonly spoken among the diverse local immigrant populations.
These cities and others producing crisis-relevant information in multiple languages, such as Houston and Seattle, likely relied on existing multilingual infrastructure. In other cities where this infrastructure does not already exist, limited resources can pose challenges to promoting language access.
Although some government agencies and nonprofits, such as those in the Southwest, routinely make information available in English and Spanish, others publish information only in English or rely solely on cheaper approaches, such as Google Translate, which can result in inaccurate or incomplete translations. Local leaders can repurpose multilingual materials from national organizations like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the International Rescue Committee for general information.
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Source: Orange County, NC Health Department
Create accessible and trustworthy messaging
Providing information in residents’ native languages is only a small part of effective communication. The most helpful materials also use strong visuals and simple, clear language to communicate complex information. New York has used a stoplight graphic to communicate details on who and which health programs are affected by public charge concerns.
To build trust with immigrant communities, materials should clearly communicate which programs immigrants are eligible for by signaling that immigration status will not be considered and personal information not be shared. Close collaboration with immigrant-serving organizations that have trusting relationships with immigrant communities can help ensure government efforts are informed by appropriate linguistic and cultural knowledge and are more likely to reach disconnected families wary of government authorities. These organizations can advise on effective messaging for their communities, disseminate information, and implement government-funded programming.
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Source: Orange County, NC Health Department
Transmit information through creative platformsWell-designed communication materials need to reach their audiences and be accessible on platforms that are easily and routinely accessed. Many families lack Wi-Fi access or home computers to access the internet and may have limited literacy, requiring service providers and government agencies to find creative ways to reach key audiences. Communities and organizations have used social media livestreams, Zoom conferencing, radio, and other telephone-based methods to communicate. After the urgent initial weeks of the crisis, some localities have refined their approach to reach disconnected residents. In San Jose, local authorities conducted a survey of undocumented residents after finding that the Silicon Valley Strong Fund was depleted in three days without the funds reaching those most in need. With the survey, local leaders hoped to identify more effective strategies to reach immigrants who were not able to connect to the online portal and telephone resource when it was first announced. They learned that WhatsApp, telephone calls, text messages, and easy-to-digest graphics or short text messages were better methods of outreach. |
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Source: Orange County, NC Health Department
Why prioritizing language access is critical to reaching all community members
Although cities have launched many innovative efforts to reach immigrant audiences during the pandemic, gaps in recovery remain large. Local agencies face enormous resource challenges, and language access may not be deemed a priority amid the many urgent and competing demands to address the complexity of the crisis. This crisis highlights the importance of investing in language access infrastructure to disseminate urgent information to all community members.
Moving forward, local leaders who want to ensure well-being and recovery in their communities need to consider intentional and thoughtful communication strategies to reach diverse immigrant communities.
For more information on Orange County's multilingual resources for our immigrant and refugee communities, please visit our webpage.
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COVID-19 Community Resources
For more information on COVID-19 community resources in the county, please visit our webpage. Resources on specific topic areas, such as food access, education, housing, and others, are all accessible on our website, or at the links below.
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