COVID-19 Updates: July 23, 2020
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COVID-19 resources in
Orange, Durham and Wake Counties |
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Originally posted by ABC11
With cases growing by 2,000 or more seven times this month, wearing a mask has never been more important. Raleigh Fire Department will give out free face masks Thursday. The giveaway will take place from 10 a.m. until 2 p.m. at Fire Station 21 off South Hall Road in Raleigh.
Free COVID-19 testing will be available on Saturday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. in Durham at St. Joseph AME Church on Fayetteville Street.
Families who need help putting food on the table can stop by two groups giving away meals Thursday. Food is available at Bethel Family Worship Center in Durham from 9 to 11 a.m. and Carrboro High School from 9:30 to 11:30 a.m. The meals are first-come, first-serve.
Links to the Orange County Health Department mask flier (included above) in English and additional languages, are provided below:
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Gillings School drops GRE requirement
for 8 graduate degrees |
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Leaders at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health are committed to creating a more equitable world through inclusive teaching, research and practice. This includes recruiting a highly diverse student population that will become the next generation of trained public health professionals.
To support this mission, the Gillings School will no longer require Graduate Record Examination (GRE) test scores from applicants to the Master of Public Health degree — the School’s largest degree program — and most other master’s-level graduate programs. This change is effective immediately.
The Gillings School is the nation’s No. 1 public school of public health — per 2019 rankings from U.S. News & World Report — and has been practicing a holistic portfolio review of potential applicants for years.
“Mounting evidence suggests that GRE scores disadvantage women and minorities and do not necessarily predict which prospective students will be successful in public health training programs,” said Laura Linnan, ScD, senior associate dean of academic and student affairs.
The GRE also can present a significant barrier to prospective students based on the time spent studying for the test, taking preparation courses and traveling to test sites. GRE-related costs present a financial barrier to students as well, at a time when Gillings leadership seeks to reduce the financial burden of attending graduate school.
For these reasons, and consistent with the School’s mission of “eliminating health inequities across North Carolina and the world,” faculty and staff enthusiastically supported a petition to waive GRE scores as part of applications and to study the impact of the change over the next several years.
The specific degrees that no longer require GRE test scores are: - The Master of Public Health (MPH) degree in all three formats (residential, online (MPH@UNC) and distance (Gillings MPH in Asheville, North Carolina));
- Three health policy and management (HPM) degrees: Master of Healthcare Administration (MHA), Master of Science in Public Health (MSPH in HPM) and Doctor of Public Health (DrPH in HPM); and
- Four environmental sciences and engineering (ESE) degrees: Bachelor of Science to Master of Science (BS-MS), Bachelor of Science to Master of Science in Public Health (BS-MSPH), Bachelor of Science in Public Health to Master of Science (BSPH-MS) and Bachelor of Science in Public Health to Master of Science in Public Health (BSPH-MSPH), all in ESE.
After reviewing a meta-analysis of more than 1,700 studies on the benefits and limitations of using the GRE to admit students and talking with admissions staff, faculty and student representatives, School administrators were compelled to petition the UNC-Chapel Hill Graduate School to waive the GRE requirement for several degrees.
From 2021 to 2024, School leaders will complete a thorough evaluation of the impact of removing the GRE requirement from these degree programs by monitoring the number and diversity of applicants, admissions decisions, enrollment yield and student success based on several key outcome variables. Based on these results, the leadership team will discuss whether GRE scores will continue to be required for other graduate degrees at the School.
“At Gillings, we are constantly striving to increase the diversity of our applicant pool and our enrolled student population,” said Kauline Cipriani, PhD, assistant dean for inclusive excellence. “We believe eliminating the GRE admissions requirement will attract more diverse students to apply to Gillings, train here and ultimately increase the diversity of the public health workforce.”
Applications for the January 2021 start term of MPH@UNC online programs are open now. Applications for all residential programs will open August 17.
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Covid-19 and Health Equity — Time to Think Big |
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The following article is from The New England Journal of Medicine
Authors: Seth A. Berkowitz, M.D., M.P.H., Crystal Wiley Cené, M.D., M.P.H., and Avik Chatterjee, M.D., M.P.H.
The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed the magnitude of U.S. health inequities — which the World Health Organization defines as “avoidable, unfair, or remediable differences” in health. It has also highlighted structural racism — institutions, practices, mores, and policies that differentially allocate resources and opportunities so as to increase inequity among racial groups. Covid-19 mortality rates are more than twice as high in Black, Latinx, and Indigenous populations as in White populations, and the data reveal a strong socioeconomic gradient.1-3 As physicians with diverse identities (Jewish male, Black female, and South Asian American male) whose work focuses on health equity, we are acutely aware that our profession failed when vulnerable people needed us.
Recognizing that health inequities have structural causes warranting policy-level solutions, we believe that the Covid-19 health equity disaster carries some lessons from which we can derive actionable policy targets for both advancing health equity and improving the pandemic response.
The pandemic has demonstrated that our public health response cannot be divorced from public policy — federal and state legislation, federal and state program administration, and local ordinances. People cannot adhere to social distancing when it means leaving their basic needs unmet. Even before Covid-19, many Americans faced unmet basic needs. Now, one in four workers have lost their jobs, foreclosures and evictions threaten to reach record highs, and the prevalence of food insecurity has tripled, resulting in miles-long queues for food pantries.4 These devastating effects pressure the people who are most vulnerable to Covid-19 to take health risks just to make ends meet. Moreover, inadequate federal support for basic needs and insensitivity to variation in what people need to weather this crisis lead to anger misdirected at state-level public health measures such as social distancing. That anger, in turn, contributes to decisions to lift these measures prematurely. Public policy should enable people to socially distance, not motivate them to oppose it. |
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Public policy must also equip state and local governments to respond to Covid-19. The Federal Reserve has made available more than $2.3 trillion to support the financial system during the pandemic but has offered far less support for state and local governments. Often unable to run deficits, these governments must cut spending when revenue declines. Such cuts will probably have several detrimental effects: scaling back public health efforts, defunding state programs addressing basic needs, and spurring public-sector layoffs that stall economic recovery.
These policy failures disproportionately affect marginalized communities with high rates of underlying medical conditions. Moreover, in a pandemic, anything that increases the opportunity for disease transmission affects everyone. Such is the paradox of inequity: even the well-off are worse off than they would be if systems were more equitable.
Beyond revealing the need to integrate public health efforts with broader public policy, Covid-19 has demonstrated once again the outsized roles of structural racism and social determinants of health. When exposed to the same virus, Black, Latinx, and Indigenous Americans have more severe disease and higher mortality than White Americans. These disparities are structured by the conditions in which individuals are “born, grow, live, work, and age.”1,2 Greater investment in hospitals and clinics that serve marginalized communities is sorely needed.3 But clinical care alone cannot compensate for a lifetime of accumulated disadvantage, nor will it dismantle the structures that perpetuate health inequities. |
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To achieve health equity, we need to reach beyond the health care system — and think big. New social policies on a few key fronts could advance both health equity and the Covid-19 response.
First, we propose establishing a universal food income. Food insecurity is a health equity issue that disproportionately affects racial and ethnic minority groups, people with lower incomes, and rural communities.4 The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is effective but has its limits: benefit levels are often insufficient to permit a healthy diet, and many people with incomes above the SNAP cutoff are nonetheless food-insecure. Universal basic income is now a serious policy consideration in the United States, but objections that unconditional cash payments might be used insalubriously are common. Alternatively, we suggest a universal food income that would provide all U.S. households with a monthly electronic benefit transfer payment whose use would be restricted to SNAP-eligible foods.
The benefit could be tied to the USDA Moderate-Cost Food Plan, which reflects the cost of a nutritionally recommended diet. The policy could be enacted in federal legislation (e.g., the Farm Bill) and, by guaranteeing sufficient income for a healthy diet, would have a substantial public health effect. Furthermore, food programs typically have high “money multiplier” effects — a dollar put into the program often produces more than a dollar in subsequent economic activity — which would support economic recovery. |
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Second, we recommend reforming unemployment insurance. Working conditions vary substantially by race and ethnicity, and precarious employment, low wages, and lack of benefits can undermine pandemic-control efforts. Before Covid, the unemployment insurance system had seen declining income-replacement levels and had not adapted to current labor conditions (e.g., independent contractors and “gig economy” workers are ineligible, despite representing a growing segment of the workforce). The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act addressed many of these issues but will expire on July 31, 2020.5 The fixes should be extended by federal legislation during the current crisis.
But ultimately, state-level reforms that increase the income-replacement rate and broaden eligibility are needed. Unemployment-insurance reform could enable social distancing by making it possible for more people to stay home. It would also help to improve health equity over time by giving workers a better bargaining position. A more robust unemployment-insurance system would make workers feel less pressure to accept dangerous or inequitable working conditions.
Finally, we need policies supporting investment in community development. Neighborhood-level differences in housing availability, education, and economic opportunity are key drivers of disparities. Historical and ongoing segregation, redlining, and underinvestment have led to a lack of high-quality affordable housing and depleted neighborhood resources. |
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Two key pieces of federal community-development legislation are the Low Income Housing Tax Credit and the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). Rulemaking by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation also acts as an important lever for influencing CRA implementation. Community-development corporations, affordable-housing developers, and community-benefit financial institutions should take a strengths-based approach that builds on an area’s assets by expanding affordable housing, mitigating toxic environmental conditions, and increasing local economic opportunity. Such development would not only help communities respond to the pandemic, but would also advance health equity over the long term by improving living conditions.
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Decades of systemic underinvestment have contributed to health disparities, and it is unrealistic to think that health equity will be achieved without a major investment of resources. Where a society devotes its financial resources indicates its values. It is perverse to say that we value health equity if we aren’t willing to make the investments necessary to redress inequities. If the Federal Reserve can come up with $2.3 trillion to support the financial system during the pandemic, providing adequate support for individuals is a matter of political will, not economic feasibility.
The Covid-19 pandemic affects everyone, but not equally. The same patterns of power, privilege, and inequality that run throughout American life are recapitulated in this health crisis. Nevertheless, every American is vulnerable to Covid-19. This fact should inspire values of collective action, solidarity, and universalism. Undoubtedly, some people will think these proposals are radical or ruinous. But if we want to take health equity seriously, now is the time to think big. |
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Orange County Department on Aging:
Upcoming discussion on mental health during COVID-19
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Join us for a facilitated discussion as we openly and supportively discuss mental wellness and the struggles of staying mentally healthy during COVID. A panel of experts will share their knowledge and experiences on how to address the concerns and obstacles we all could experience, as well as strategies for maintaining your mental wellness. Panelists include: - Michelle Chambers, Licensed Clinical Social Worker and owner of Therapeutic Family Solutions
- Nancy Ruffner, Board Certified Patient Advocate and owner of NAVIGATE NC LLC
- Nancy Loeffler, founder of Being With Grief and the author of The Alchemy of Grief, Your Journey to Wholeness, and its Companion Journal
Thu, Jul 23, 2020 3:30 PM - 5:30 PM (EDT)
You can also dial in using your phone.
- United States: +1 (872) 240-3311 / Access Code: 776-460-093
New to GoToMeeting?
For more information
If technology assistance is needed - Please contact Shenae McPherson at 919-245-4243 by Monday, July 20.
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North Carolina COVID-19 Cases
The North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services (NCDHHS) reports 106,893 COVID-19 cases, 1,668 deaths, and 1,188 hospitalizations, as of July 23, 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 1,137 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Orange County, and 45 deaths.
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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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