This week on the Minnesota Native News Health Report, disparities in who’s getting sick, and preparing for a possible second wave. Laurie Stern reports.
Transcript
This week on the Minnesota Native News Health Report, disparities in who’s getting sick, and preparing for a possible second wave. Laurie Stern reports.
The headlines this week were ominous: Covid-19 surges in some states that repopened, warnings about a second wave, and the possibility of a European travel ban targeting people from the United States and other countries where the virus is still out of control. Dr. Anthony Fauci told the House Energy and Commerce Committee he is concerned about states reopening too quickly. On the bright side, he expects new, efficient universal, local tests to be be available nationwide by fall. And he is hopeful about a vaccine.
Fauci (:13) We’ll be able to make them available to people – as I said to this committee months ago – about a year from when we started – which would put us at the end of this calendar year and the beginning of 2021.
Until there is a vaccine, state and tribal officials in Minnesota recommend we take this time to form lasting habits. This is Dr. Olivia Beckman, clinical director of the Bemidji-area office of the Indian Health Service.
And what you know, I think this is what's great in some ways is about having this time now to get really good at our techniques. You know, I in our work building, I go down one set of stairs, because I can use my arm, you know, with the kind of doorknobs that you can just push rather than having to touch and I go up the other side, because that way, I only have one doorknob for each full cycle that I have to touch even though there's four doors. So you know, you start thinking through some of these things ahead of time, then when things are more likely to have, you know, viruses on touchable places like doorknobs we won't be touching those.
Also on the Zoom call was Daniel Frye, the Bemidji Area Director of the Indian Health Service. Yeah, it's all these little simple techniques, even if you're if you're using a public washroom. When you leave, grab an extra piece of paper towel and Open the door with with the paper towel. It's all these simple things. It may seem like a small thing at the time, but they just add up, right? It's like an interest, you just keep doing it over and over and over again and let these things add up as you go. So you're just reducing any exposure that you may have.
Yeah, and I think it's not, you know, it's not so much you know, whether that paper towel is what's meant. It's the fact that you're thinking about it all the time. And like touching our face. I've watched so many different, you know, programs where you try to count how many times they touch their face, you know, and there's been some really funny bloopers online on that. But it's a big deal that we touch our face all the time. And so some people that have really frizzy hair, maybe choosing to put their hair back and use hairspray during that season where, you know, if the hair isn't flying around in your face, it's not going to reach your face as much and make you want to scratch it. Right. So things like that are just little details that we're all going to be figuring out what works for us, too. To keep us from touching our face, keep us washing our hands and, you know, just practicing good hand hygiene.
You do it long enough it just becomes habitual.
Frye, Beckman and others say that good hygiene habits developed now will be even more important when flu season starts and may even help us avoid viruses like the common cold.
State of Minnesota officials says the number of new cases is way down since the peak in early May, but they are seeing clusters, including among young people in Southern Minnesota since bars and restaurants repopened last week. More trouble are the disparities showing up in who is testing positive.
People of color represented 40 % of the people getting tested, but 90% of the positive results.
This is Kris Ehresman, Director of Infectious Diseases and Epidemiology at the Minnesota Department of Health. She’s speaking of the Twin Cities testing sites that ramped after the protests over George Floyd was killed.
These data reinforce the concerns we’ve expressed before about the uneven nature of Covid impacts on people of color not because of biology but underlying health conditions and job exposure risk.
The data – like so much else these days – reinforce the need for systemic change to address the problem of disparities.
Our Leech Lake/slash North Minneapolis correspondent Jennifer Cortes weighs in now with how she’s been dealing with the pandemic.
Jennifer tape
Jennifer says her work with the Native youth acting troupe Ikidowin has slowed down because of the virus. Friends and relatives work at a couple of fast food places, so she is hoping to find work there. For MNN I’m Ls.
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