Change Your World Week Winter 2021 (Archived)

In 2019 a highly contagious mutation of a human variant of coronavirus started spreading in Wuhan, China. This variant would later be labeled COVID-19 by scientists and spread person to person all over the globe. Most countries in the Eastern Hemisphere have gotten a handle on COVID-19 going into 2021, but one of the countries struggling the most with COVID-19 is the United States. In recent months the United States has started to better manage vaccine distribution and due to the high vaccination rates currently in the United States, the infection rate has started to drop.

Young people’s education has been disrupted the most throughout the COVID-19 pandemic having to switch to online learning. Many students have also dropped out of higher education simply because they could no longer afford it due to losing a job or a parent/guardian losing a job. The effect that COVID-19 has had on education has affected more than students however, it has also affected educators, faculty, and parents/guardians. Educators have had to reformat whole lesson plans and courses to be online and for a lot, it has been a struggle. Some classes are next to impossible to teach online. Educators who teach in K-12 have had to start resuming in-person education again, but many have to foot the bill for protective equipment for their classrooms. 

To add to this, without in-person education many students have gone hungry. Students who live in poverty often relied on the school to provide breakfast and lunches as their main source of nutrition for the week. When schools shut down state by state last March (2020) many families were sent into high-stress situations as they did not have the income to provide food for their children. Recently as schools began to re-open students are still not heading back full time which means they still are not getting the nutrition they need.

Almost one year ago now, the United States started implementing stay-at-home orders, incentives to stay home, Pandemic Unemployment Insurance (PUA), contactless ways to get food and other goods, and new shopping protocols to follow when in stores. One year later, a lot of these things have expired. On June 1st, 2020, the Michigan stay-at-home order was lifted due to the benefits of the increased lockdowns, but soon after the cases in Michigan started rising, and rapidly. In July, the bonus of $600 in the PUA expired and many people had burned through their stimulus checks from March and April, so without PUA, many people suddenly could no longer afford to live. Many people had wrongfully assumed that the people receiving PUA had a cushion of money due to the stimulus checks and PUA, but a lot of Americans pre-pandemic were living paycheck to paycheck, and that continued throughout the pandemic with the stimulus and PUA. A lot of students stopped receiving PUA once the Fall Semester began even though many students were the ones who needed PUA the most. 

In 2020 we saw a huge resurgence in the Black Lives Matter movement mostly due to the murder of George Floyd. Accompanied with the justified outrage behind the historical (both past and present) treatment of Black Americans and Floyd’s murder, the impacts of COVID-19 on Black Americans have been disproportionate in comparison with other demographics and have raised concern for Black communities around the United States. 

As the number of COVID-19 deaths continues to rise in the United States, Black Americans are becoming especially mindful about their disproportionate statistics when it comes to the impacts of COVID-19. Black Americans make up 12.8% of the population in the United States (U. S. Census Bureau, 2019), yet the mortality rate for Blacks is 2.2 times higher than the rate for Latinos/Hispanics, 2.3 times higher than the rate for Asians, and 2.6 higher than the rate for Whites. For every 100,000 Americans (of their racial/ethnic grouping), about 43 Blacks have died from COVID-19, while the rate for Asians is 18, Latinos/Hispanics is 19, and Whites is 17 (APM Research Lab, 2020). One recent study found that in New York City, Blacks are 5 times more likely to contract COVID-19 than members of other races (DiMaggio et al., 2020).

Social Media usage has been shown to increase in situations of natural disasters and other crises. As the cases of COVID-19 increase so does misinformation on social media. As people are spending less time together they tend to gather and share information on social media. There have been many people who have noticed the common themes in misinformation circulating about COVID-19 online. There have also been several people comparing COVID-19 to the seasonal influenza on social media. The information being spread can strongly influence people's behavior and alter the effectiveness of the countermeasures deployed by governments. Social media platforms provide direct access to an unprecedented amount of content and may amplify rumors and questionable information. Social media has given people all over the world "fake news" about COVID-19. This could affect the information someone knows and it could change how they act in situations. COVID-19 is a very serious issue that should not be handled on social media because it could affect someone terribly. Social media has a huge impact on important issues by making people learn information that is not true.

The CDC has released an abundance of information about masks and why wearing them is effective in preventing the spread of COVID-19. However, these facts were widely overlooked due to the political climate that they were presented. Former President Donald Trump's administration has a rather abysmal record in supporting facts, and that has led to many people not fully trusting the data. The CDC has proven that basic two-layer cloth masks help reduce respiratory particles that come from talking, coughing, sneezing, and breathing by 80% or more. Masks should have never become a political weapon, but sadly that is exactly what happened. Many political figures worldwide have repeatedly downplayed the risks of COVID-19, resulting in poor management of the virus resulting in high infection and death rates. By downplaying the risks and falsifying the facts put forth by the CDC, Former President Donald Trump has caused a lot of people to reject masks, and not wear them, putting frontline health workers, the elderly, the immunocompromised (this includes small children), and essential employees at risk. The more people who don’t wear masks, the easier it is for the virus to spread which is detrimental to our frontline health workers and our overall fight to return to normalcy. By turning the false narrative of masks not being effective around we can all make it easier on those at the forefront of this fight, and make sure those who are misinformed from politics are made aware of the invalid information being pushed on them. Everyone should do their part to destigmatize masks, and should also continue to wear simple cloth masks in public areas even if they aren’t categorized as “at-risk”.

While many people agree that the precautions should be taken more seriously, there are still some who disagree with it and refuse to wear a mask and stay away from large groups. They believe that it is impossible to breathe with the mask on and that they are tired of being bored at home. Some even think that the virus is just all made up by the government and is being used as a form of population control. Unless you have underlying health problems there is not a reason to not wear a mask, even if you don’t think it protects yourself, at least wear it for the safety of others. Many point to the low death percentage and downplay the disease but even though it may be easy for someone younger and in better health to fight off COVID-19, someone’s grandparents or someone immunocompromised might not have the same ability and strength in their immune system to withstand the virus. Small gatherings are deemed safe, but there are still a lot of large parties with hundreds of people and the CDC data supports that large parties and gatherings are super-spreader events. These super-spreader events are delaying the return to normalcy.

The biggest step you can take with helping the situation with the COVID-19 pandemic is to keep talking about it, understand all takes and try to educate those who don’t understand, educate yourself, talk to those who have been impacted by COVID-19, whether it be economically, emotionally, physically, mentally, etc. 

Having an open conversation leads to understanding. To get politically involved in the fight against COVID-19, reach out to local representatives to find out what they plan to do to help your community when it comes to distributing vaccines, COVID-19 prevention protocol, actions for businesses and the local economy, actions being taken to improve the healthcare of those afflicted with COVID-19, and supplying vaccines and personal protective equipment (PPE) to healthcare and frontline workers. 

It’s also good to keep up to date on the COVID-19 case rate in your community, as of right now Bay County has about 18.1 new positive cases each day according to the Bay County Health Department (https://baycogis.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/a17a5f8475214d3f977364059fada62b), and that is just of those who get tested. Getting involved at a higher level politically is signing or starting petitions advocating for stimulus checks to help get people back on their feet and helping them stay at home to help slow the spread. 

Help advocate for vaccines to be distributed to disadvantaged communities by writing to your state legislators, for Michigan, try writing to our state senators Debbie Stabenow and Gary Peters about your concerns over the lack of vaccines and PPE equipment for frontline and healthcare workers and how we need more financial relief. There are a lot of resources that will pre-write letters to your state legislators for you, or you can write one yourself. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s team sends out these links to her email list.

Right here is a link to writing to Debbie Stabenow and Gary Peters about getting more financial relief from a federal level: https://act.ocasiocortez.com/letter/survival-checks-now/?source=em20210210-1889&t=1&referring_akid=1889.2208435.z1JShL.

APM Research Lab. “Color of Coronavirus: COVID-19 Deaths Analyzed by Race and Ethnicity.” APM Research Lab, www.apmresearchlab.org/covid/deaths-by-race. 

DiMaggio, Charles, et al. “Black/African American Communities Are at Highest Risk of COVID-19: Spatial Modeling of New York City ZIP Code-Level Testing Results.” MedRxiv, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 1 Jan. 2020, doi.org/10.1101/2020.05.14.20101691. 

Haddad, Ken. “Michigan Coronavirus Timeline: Key Dates, COVID-19 Case Tracking,

State Orders.” WDIV, WDIV ClickOnDetroit, 27 Apr. 2020, www.clickondetroit.com/health/2020/03/24/michigan-coronavirus-timeline-key-dates-covid-19-case-tracking-state-orders/.

Michigan Radio. “As COVID-19 outbreak spreads, so does misinformation on social media.”,2020, https://www.michiganradio.org/post/covid-19-outbreak-spreads-so-does-misinformation-social-media

Nature.com. “The COVID-19 social media infodemic”,2020, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-73510-5

“Science Brief: Community Use of Cloth Masks to Control the Spread of SARS-CoV-2.” 

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 20 Nov. 2020, www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-briefs/masking-science-sars-cov2.html. 

U. S. Census Bureau. “Race and Ethnicity.” Data.census.gov, U. S. Census Bureau, 2019, data.census.gov/cedsci/profile?g=0100000US.