Emergency Preparedness and Response:
December 30, 2020 |
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How to Celebrate New Year's SafelyThe safest way to celebrate the new year is to celebrate at home with the people who you live with or virtually with friends and family. Staying at home is the best way to protect yourself and others. Read more about the CDC guidance on how everyone can make New Year's Eve celebrations safer. |
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COVID-19 Vaccine FAQ:Is the COVID-19 vaccine safe?
NC DHHS says:
Scientists had a head start. The vaccines were built upon decades of work to develop vaccines for similar viruses.
Tested, safe and effective. More than 70,000 people volunteered in clinical trials for two vaccines (Pfizer and Moderna) to see if they are safe and work to prevent COVID illness. Volunteers included Black/African American, Hispanic/LatinX, Asians and others. To date, the vaccines are 95% effective in preventing COVID-19 with no serious safety concerns noted in the clinical trials. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) makes sure the vaccines are safe and can prevent people from getting COVID-19. Like all drugs, vaccine safety continues to be monitored after they are in use.
You cannot get COVID-19 from the vaccine. You may have temporary reactions like a sore arm, headache, or feeling tired and achy for a day or two after receiving the vaccine. |
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Orange County Health Department
COVID-19 Vaccine Plan
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COVID-19 Variants
Viruses constantly change through mutation, and new variants of a virus are expected to occur over time. Sometimes new variants emerge and disappear. Other times, new variants emerge and start infecting people. Multiple variants of the virus that causes COVID-19 have been documented in the United States and globally during this pandemic.
The virus that causes COVID-19 is a type of coronavirus, a large family of viruses. Coronaviruses are named for the crown-like spikes on their surfaces. Scientists monitor changes in the virus, including changes to the spikes on the surface of the virus. These studies, including genetic analyses of the virus, are helping us understand how changes to the virus might affect how it spreads and what happens to people who are infected with it.
Multiple COVID-19 variants are circulating globally. In the United Kingdom (UK), a new variant has emerged with an unusually large number of mutations. This variant seems to spread more easily and quickly than other variants. Currently, there is no evidence that it causes more severe illness or increased risk of death. This variant was first detected in September 2020 and is now highly prevalent in London and southeast England. It has since been detected in numerous countries around the world, including the United States and Canada.
In South Africa, another variant has emerged independently of the variant detected in the UK. This variant, originally detected in early October, shares some mutations with the variant detected in the UK. There have been cases caused by this variant outside of South Africa. This variant seems to spread more easily and quickly than other variants. Currently, there is no evidence that it causes more severe illness or increased risk of death.
Learn more about the COVID-19 variants you have heard about in the news:
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/transmission/variant.html
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By John Eligon
Published Dec. 23, 2020
Updated Dec. 25, 2020
New York Times
"He made me feel like a drug addict," Dr. Susan Moore said, accusing a white doctor of downplaying her complaints of pain and suggesting she should be discharged.
Lying in a hospital bed with an oxygen tube hugging her nostrils, the Black patient gazed into her smartphone and, with a strained voice, complained of an experience all too common among Black people in America. Susan Moore, the patient, said the white doctor at the hospital in suburban Indianapolis where she was being treated for COVID-19 had downplayed her complaints of pain. He told her that he felt uncomfortable giving her more narcotics, she said, and suggested that she would be discharged. “I was crushed,” she said in a video posted to Facebook. “He made me feel like I was a drug addict.”
In her post, which has since circulated widely on social media, she showed a command of complicated medical terminology and an intricate knowledge of treatment protocols as she detailed the ways in which she had advocated for herself with the medical staff. She knew what to ask for because she, too, was a medical doctor.
But that was not enough to get her treatment and respect she said she deserved. “I put forth and I maintain if I was white,” she said in the video, “I wouldn’t have to go through that.” |
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 Dr. Susan Moore, in a screenshot from a video she took while hospitalized with Covid-19.
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After Dr. Moore, 52, complained about her treatment, she received care that she said “adequately treated” her pain. She was eventually sent home, and on Sunday, just more than two weeks after posting the video, Dr. Moore died of complications from Covid-19, said her son, Henry Muhammed.
Dr. Moore’s case has generated outrage and renewed calls to grapple with biased medical treatment of Black patients. Voluminous research suggests that Black patients often receive treatment inferior to their white counterparts, particularly when it comes to relieving pain.
“It’s had a huge impact,” said Dr. Christina Council, a primary care physician in Maryland who is Black, of Dr. Moore’s experience. “Sometimes when we think about medical bias it seems so far removed. We can sit there and say, ‘OK, it can happen to someone that may be poorer.’ But when you actually see it happen to a colleague and you’re seeing her in the hospital bed and literally pleading for her life, it just hits a different way and really hits home and says, ‘Wow, we need to do something.’”
A spokesman for Indiana University Health, the hospital system where Dr. Moore complained of poor treatment, said in a statement that he could not comment on specific cases because of privacy laws.
“As an organization committed to equity and reducing racial disparities in health care, we take accusations of discrimination very seriously and investigate every allegation,” the statement said. It added that “we stand by the commitment and expertise of our caregivers and the quality of care delivered to our patients every day.”
An intricate mix of socioeconomic and health factors have made Covid-19 particularly devastating for Black and Latino communities. Black people have died at 3.6 times the rate of white people, and Latinos at 2.5 times the rate of white people, according to an analysis by the Brookings Institution.
Dr. Moore tested positive for the coronavirus on Nov. 29 and was admitted to the hospital, according to her Facebook post, which she wrote on Dec. 4. She wrote that she had to beg the physician treating her to give her remdesivir, an antiviral drug some doctors use to treat Covid-19.
Dr. Moore said she received a scan of her neck and lungs after her doctor denied she was short of breath, despite her telling him she was, and after he told her he could not justify giving her more narcotic painkillers. The scan detected problems — pulmonary infiltrates and new lymphadenopathy, she said — and so she began receiving more opioid pain medication. But she said she was left in pain for hours before a nurse gave her the dose.
“This is how Black people get killed, when you send them home and they don’t know how to fight for themselves,” Dr. Moore said.
Dr. Moore’s experience highlighted what many Black professionals said they regularly encountered. Education cannot protect them from mistreatment, they say, whether in a hospital or other settings.
Born in Jamaica, Dr. Moore grew up in Michigan. She studied engineering at Kettering University in Flint, Mich., according to her family, and earned her medical degree from the University of Michigan Medical School.
She was no stranger to the challenges of getting proper medical care, said Mr. Muhammed, her 19-year-old son. She had sarcoidosis, an inflammatory disease that attacks the lungs, and was frequently treated at hospitals.
“Nearly every time she went to the hospital she had to advocate for herself, fight for something in some way, shape or form, just to get baseline, proper care,” he said.
In her struggle with the coronavirus at I.U. Health North Hospital in Carmel, Ind., Dr. Moore wrote in an update on Facebook that she eventually spoke with the hospital system’s chief medical officer, who assured her that she would get better care and that diversity training would be held. She got a new doctor, and her pain was being managed better, she wrote. |
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 Dr. Moore with her 19-year-old son, Henry Muhammed
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But even as things seemed to be improving at the hospital, Dr. Moore still felt that the care was lacking and that the medical staff became less responsive, according to Mr. Muhammed, who spoke to her daily. While she did not really feel like she was well enough to be discharged, she was eager to get home to take care of her parents, he said.
When she was battling Covid-19 in the hospital, she took time to order him new slippers because his had broken, Mr. Muhammed said. In his last conversation with her, she told him she was going to help him go to college.
“Even to the bitter end she was thinking of other people,” Mr. Muhammed said.
The hospital released her on Dec. 7, he said, and she was sluggish and tired when she got home. The hospital called several times to check up on her, he said, and when she did not respond, it sent an ambulance. His mother could barely walk and was breathing heavily when the ambulance arrived. She was taken to a different hospital 12 hours after being discharged from the previous one, she said on Facebook.
“Spiked a temperature of 103 and my blood pressure plummeted to 80/60 with a heart rate of 132,” she wrote.
Dr. Moore described her care at the new hospital as compassionate, and said she was being treated for a bacterial pneumonia in addition to Covid-19 pneumonia. Her condition would quickly deteriorate, however. The last time Mr. Muhammed spoke to her, just before she was put on a ventilator, she was coughing so badly she could barely speak, he said.
Doctors intubated her on Dec. 10, Mr. Muhammed said. The medical staff set up a Zoom call in her room, and more than a dozen relatives spoke to her, hoping she could hear them even though she appeared unconscious, he said.
By last Friday, Dr. Moore had become 100 percent reliant on a ventilator to breathe, her son said, and doctors told him she might not make it. He visited her with his grandparents and told her that he loved her and to not worry about him.
“If you want to fight, now is the time to fight,” he recalled telling her. “But if you need to go, I understand.”
Two days later, Dr. Moore’s heart stopped beating. |
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North Carolina COVID-19 Cases
The North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services (NCDHHS) reports 524,279 COVID-19 cases, 6,574 deaths, and 3,337 hospitalizations as of December 30, 2020. 63,571 people have been vaccinated as of December 28, 2020.
There are currently 4,949 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 63 deaths in Orange County as of December 29, 2020. 3,043 people have been vaccinated as of December 28, 2020.
For more information regarding live updates (NCDHHS updates the site every day around 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.
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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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