Tag: quarantine

Education Reporter Daphne Young brings 99 percent good news and holiday cheer for the uplift we’ve been craving.

For the Muslim community at CSP Solano, COVID-19 brings the gifts of the opportunity to fully exercise the practices of Islam.

At the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections (PA DOC), any sentence is a death sentence in the COVID-19 conundrum. COVID-free for 7-8 months, State Correctional Institute Frackville opened gates wide for intake of COVID-positive-tested prisoners and, federal funding. The only medical remedy? – drink water – verified contaminated water.

When we least expect it, trouble comes. “I came in contact with a door handle, now I got COVID-19. It’s bad enough my immune system is compromised. I have emphysema and I might not make it out of this.”

The East Oakland Youth Development Center aka EOYDC is a deep anchor in the Deep East Oakland community, helping Black and Brown families navigate the uncertainties of the historic COVID pandemic. Regina Jackson and staff have sustained this community lifeline and shined a light on the creative choices possible when critical disruption occurs.

200+ exclusively Black prisoners were brutally assaulted under Soledad State Prison Warden Craig Koenig’s command at 3 a.m. Monday – Tuesday Koenig reacted with a massive excuse binge after receiving numerous emails from the angry wives about their brutalized loved ones.

The stories of veterans do not get told often despite all the things they did for this country. I am an advocate for human life, so I am against wars of aggression. It is still important to recognize these veterans because the country would be different without them.

“I for one believe that if you give people a thorough understanding of what confronts them and the basic causes that produce it, they’ll create their own program, and when the people create a program, you get action.” – El Hajj Malik Shabazz aka Malcolm X

Dr. Kim Rhoads, MD, MS, MPH, is an associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF); director of the Office of Community Engagement at UCSF; and member of the COVID-19 Equity Task Forces in both San Francisco and Alameda County.

Preventive medicine is the best medicine, especially in a capitalist country where the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed long encrusted health disparities that have been in place for centuries. Presently, people have had their ability to move around freely curtailed by the COVID-19 pandemic quarantine’s shelter-in-place policy.

The coronavirus pandemic and quarantine has created a massive mental health challenge to an already terribly inadequate mental health system that has been teetering on collapse in the Black community since mental health became a science in this country.

It is not an option for the much anticipated “Black Woman Is God” exhibit to be canceled; it is scheduled for Oct. 21, 2020 and is one of the premiere annual events of the Black Bay Area.

“Ingenuity is the reigning order of the day” would be my choice of words if I had to sum up the COVID-19 pandemic’s quarantine into a sentence for small business owners.

“American prisons are death traps. They are the places with the highest rate of coronavirus infection in the world. Incarceration in the time of COVID skirts the genocidal cruelty of death by disease of the Nazis.” J. Fernandez

On April 30, 2020, at least half of the nearly 300 prisoners in my assigned cellblock (J-housing unit) here at Indiana’s Pendleton Correctional Facility refused to accept meals in protest of our treatment, or lack thereof, related to the coronavirus pandemic and it’s spreading within PCF.

Distance learning has proven to be a failure in many cases over the last two months throughout the Bay Area and the nation for a myriad of reasons. For example, teachers were never trained adequately in how to pivot from classroom teaching to a cyber environment; school districts had to organize distance learning without having planned for its implementation; huge portions of the student body in the Bay’s Black and Brown neighborhoods don’t have access to the technology needed to be able to engage; and many students have no internet access at home.

Since quarantine has been going on, many of us have been surfing through streaming services trying to find interesting shows and movies. During this time I saw a title that caught my eye: “All Day and a Night.” A young man who ends up getting life in prison reflects on his decisions that got him there. On top of that, it’s a Netflix original that’s based in Oakland, California.

Prisoners on the west side of Chippewa Correctional Facility at Kincheloe, Michigan, have been locked down since Jan. 30, 2018 – eight men crammed into cubicles designed for four, in old, mold-infested cattle barns containing approximately 320 men each, sick and healthy alike – under the guise of a “quarantine” for the influenza virus epidemic that has spread throughout North America and the world.

As the Ebola outbreak rages and there are projections of more than 1.4 million persons infected in the next few months, the African Union and the regional bloc ECOWAS have taken a back seat as the international media uses this virus to stigmatize Africa and Africans. Pious statements have been made by the World Health Organization (WHO) as the World Bank warns that Ebola could have “catastrophic” economic costs on the region of Western Africa.