PublicSource | News for a better Pittsburgh (https://www.publicsource.org/category/covid-19/)
The COVID-19 vaccine rollout in Allegheny County — like in most communities across the country — has been fraught with obstacles that make getting the vaccine harder for those at most risk of serious illness and death from the virus.
Whichever spreads faster — the vaccine or the virus; vaccine science or vaccine misinformation — will determine whether many thousands of Americans live or die.
PublicSource is publishing a list of the locations that have either been shut down or have received citations on three or more visits. And we have created a searchable map and database, so residents can look at whether the restaurants in their neighborhoods have been cited or have been abiding by regulations.
This story was originally published by NEXTpittsburgh, a news partner of PublicSource. NEXTPittsburgh is an online publication about the people advancing the region and the innovative and cool things happening here. Sign up to get NEXTpittsburgh free. As the Covid vaccination campaign ramps up — locally and worldwide — somebody is going to have to give out all of those shots. Duquesne University’s highly regarded School of Pharmacy is attempting to help fill this void, as fast as possible, with a unique online vaccination certification course. “Pharmacists were telling us that they had trouble finding any place that was offering the certification,” says Dr. Tiffany Hatcher, assistant professor of pharmacy at Duquesne.
Several Pittsburghers living with HIV told PublicSource the COVID pandemic echoed many of the scariest and most dangerous parts of living through the HIV and AIDS epidemic, including confusion about the science, social isolation, a reluctance to adopt public health measures and a lack of leadership from the president of the United States.
Overdoses from opioid addiction are on the rise again in Allegheny County and across the country. Experts say the COVID-19 pandemic has been making the problem worse. PublicSource has reported on how recovery workers are trying to adapt and today we are featuring stories from survivors and the loved ones of victims.
When Rachel Kruze’s boyfriend, Curtis Radke, was leaving her car one day back in August, she stopped him.
“You don’t seem well, and I feel like I’m never going to see you again,” she said. The night before, Radke admitted to her that he had relapsed on heroin after she found a syringe in his backpack and confronted him. He used heroin in front of her that morning for the first time before they left for Radke’s work.
While mass vaccination is crucial to ending the COVID-19 pandemic, plans to distribute vaccines say little about how shots will be delivered to the country's two million homebound residents.
Carla Rathway could hear her youngest son's frustration from the other room. She knew the clamor meant the internet was acting up again and keeping 12-year-old Preston from his school work. It happened all the time. "He's like, 'Oh my gosh,' when it's buffering or locking him out,” Rathway said, adding she also overhears him saying, "'I hate this internet.'"
Like scores of Pennsylvania students, Preston, a seventh grader at Belle Vernon Area School District in Westmoreland County, and his brother, 15-year-old tenth-grader Dylan, were in their second month of online learning this October. But the brothers were doing it all without a reliable high-speed internet connection at home, where they live across the county line in Fayette County.
Animals aren’t at a great risk for COVID-19, but the pandemic has upended care at local shelters.
As businesses shuttered in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, a new challenge arose for Pittsburgh’s Animal Friends shelter. With more than 200 cats, dogs and other animals all on-site, Animal Friends couldn’t just shut their doors.
Instead, shelter staff sprung into action. And over the next nine months, the shelter created solutions to continue providing essential care to the animals safely amid the pandemic. Those included partnering with foster homes to house the animals, virtual fundraisers and limiting foot traffic at their campus — among other precautions. “We limited the number of people in the building and implemented a team schedule among staff,” said Cody Hoellerman, chief community engagement officer at Animal Friends.
With the onset of cold weather and rising COVID-19 cases locally, Pittsburgh-area homeless shelters have seen an influx of federal aid yet face unprecedented challenges in keeping an already vulnerable population safe and out of the elements. In December, Allegheny County’s Department of Human Services received $1.2 million from the federal CARES Act. The funding will be allocated to ACTION-Housing/Team PSBG, Community Human Services and Pittsburgh Mercy to help pay the costs of temporary emergency shelter, targeted street outreach and prevention of community spread. Service providers say the funds help. But they’ve faced numerous challenges from the pandemic — from the need for extra space for social distancing to complications in how shelters obtain food — and still rely on financial contributions from the community and other forms of funding to fill the gap.
