Every Friday, BPR's Helen Chickering talks withNC Health News founding editor Rose Hoban about the week’s coronavirus headlines and emerging issues linked to the pandemic. This week they discuss the metrics amid the start of North Carolina’s Phase-2 reopening and the many roles churches are playing in the coronavirus pandemic.
HC: When the governor read the list of businesses allowed to re-open or expand services, I was not surprised that bars didn’t make the list but was somewhat surprised about gyms.
It sounds like the gym folks were surprised too. So, I mean, I haven't had a chance to dig into what was behind that. And like you, I was not surprised by bars at all. I think there's still too much of a risk, here's so much virus circulating We've had a couple of days where there's been sort of record numbers of positive tests in the state. Now that number of tests positive over the total number of tests still is hovering around 7%. But you know, there's still a lot of virus out there.
HC: And wondering if that’s why Phase-2 is longer, five weeks compared to two.
Yes. I also thought that was interesting. Keep in mind like it's going to take time for people to get out there and then, you know, you've got this virus circulating and you know, it can take five days, seven days until people start getting symptomatic. So, there's this lag time and then we may end up seeing that, you know, two weeks out is when we start seeing hospitalizations go up, if the rates of positives go up. I think we've talked about the fact that I don't envy them making any of these decisions. And you know, they've got these four metrics, but the hospitalizations metric, it's steady, it's not going down. And then the other metric that's going up is we're still seeing more people testing positive. So, I think it's still a little bit squishy and I think that's behind the reticence to open up even further. But the flip side of it is that there's starting to be a clamor for it
HC: Speaking of some of the loudest voices calling for re-opening have been from churches.
Right. There was a group of churches that sued the state and a federal judge basically said, yeah - we can't restrict the number of people who are inside. The flip side of that was the North Carolina Council of Churches came out with a letter this week saying, you know, as a pastoral duty, we have a duty to protect our parishioners, congregants. There's a lot of churches that aren't going to open. I ended up at a press event yesterday in Durham with a group of primarily African American pastors who were like uh-uh, basically we are not opening back up. They made the point that, you know, we've seen that African Americans have been disproportionately affected in this pandemic by the virus and there's a lot of preexisting conditions in the African American community - rates of diabetes and heart disease. So, I think that these pastors were like – no.
Churches and connecting communities: One of the things that we talked about this week in terms of churches is that whether you're opening or not, there's a lot of rural churches that are stepping into the gap when it comes to providing internet access for their congregants and their communities. Reporter Liora Engel-Smith found that a number of rural churches had gotten some grants from the NC Rural Center and other places and were setting up Wi-Fi hotspots so that kids could come in and do their schoolwork. And you know, now it's all about telehealth, right? And you can't do telehealth if you don't have a good internet connection. So, folks are seeing their doctors online, but if they don't have an internet connection at home you know, they've got to go someplace that's safe. So that's becoming churches, which I think is kind of cool. (And they also have a potential role as contact tracers in the community)
HC: What’s NC Health News working on for next week?
We've been doing some work on what's happening with vaccination rates for kids because, you know, they haven't been able to get to their well-child visits in the past couple of months. And then we're taking a deeper look at one of the communities where there's been an outbreak in a chicken plant.
Rose Hoban is the founder and editor of NC Health News,as well as being the state government reporter. Hoban has been a registered nurse since 1992, but transitioned to journalism after earning degrees in public health policy and journalism. She's reported on science, health, policy and research in NC since 2005. Contact: editor at northcarolinahealthnews.org
