State and local health officials have arranged for free testing in Boone, Lincoln, McDowell, Raleigh and Wyoming counties next week.
Testing is free, and people don’t need to have symptoms or insurance to get it. The West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources does require identification, though, like a driver’s license.
Both the Cabell and Kanawha health departments said their staff are investigating at least five cases of COVID-19, all related to recent travel to the Myrtle Beach area.
This comes after the Preston County Health Department identified another cluster of positive cases earlier this week, which also were linked to recent Myrtle Beach trips.
Contact tracers in Cabell County are investigating the situation. The local health department advises anyone who might have the disease to quarantine.
This comes roughly a week after state health experts shared concerns regarding an increased potential for disease spread in the southern counties, following church outbreaks and a likely increase in out of state tourists.
The testing sites in southern West Virginia are at the following locations:
COVID-19 has forced Lou Ortenzio to assume a new role.
“My new job,” Ortenzio, executive director of the Clarksburg Mission in Clarksburg, West Virginia, said, “is getting here in the morning, finding people clustered around and having to tell them, ‘You’ve gotta go.’”
The mission offers emergency shelter to up to 50 people a night and has a dorm for men and another for women and children, each of which can accommodate about 20. It also offers services and support for those in recovery from drug addiction. The facility went into lockdown in March to protect its residents from contracting and potentially spreading COVID-19.
“It’s awful,” Ortenzio said of the need to turn people away, “but I’ve got to protect the folks who are here.” The mission has provided a few tents, but far more assistance is needed. “I don’t know where to tell them to go.”
Harrison County, of which Clarksburg is the county seat, has been vexed by homelessness. The county has the second-highest reported per-capita homeless population in the state. To date, there’s been no coordinated response to address it.
But on an April weekend, a group of volunteers with the Harrison County Task Team on Homelessness began a process they hope is the first step toward a long-term solution.
Credit Jesse Wright / 100 Days in Appalachia
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100 Days in Appalachia
Marissa Rexroad, pictured here in 2019 when she was still a member of the Clarksburg Mission’s staff, is leading the charge to house people experiencing homelessness in Clarksburg during the COVID-19 outbreak.
Equipped with a COVID-19 screening tool developed by the West Virginia Coalition to End Homelessness, they hit the streets to assess and prioritize needs and began placing people in a local motel, with funding provided by the coalition and the United Way of Harrison County. The next step is securing more permanent housing.
“We’ve had a lot of stumbling blocks along the way,” said Marissa Rexroad of past efforts to address homelessness in Harrison County. Rexroad is a longtime advocate for her community’s homeless residents, a former employee of the Clarksburg Mission and an organizer of this new initiative. She hopes that out of the COVID-19 crisis the community will pull together in pursuing a solution.
Step by Step
Across the state of West Virginia, advocates for the homeless are mobilizing.
It’s been more than a month of “really chaotic contingency planning,” said Zach Brown, CEO of the West Virginia Coalition to End Homelessness. The coalition has been focused on two primary objectives: ensuring that homeless shelters have the supplies they need to guard the safety of those within their walls and working with communities to keep people who are living in encampments in place and safe.
“It’s definitely not the time to be razing or disbanding encampments,” Brown said, “because you run the risk of scattering those people to the wind.” Keeping the encampments intact, he said, makes it easier to get information out about safety precautions, and the camps serve as a central location for portable hygiene facilities and food drops.
Meanwhile, the task team in Clarksburg is taking action to get some people off the streets and into a safer environment. Over the weekend of April 18-19, they assessed the needs of about 20, the majority of whom have been living in abandoned buildings.
Priority for being moved into one of the motel rooms that have been made available is being given to those with psychiatric issues that prevent them from properly caring for themselves, those with chronic health issues and anyone over the age of 55. People began moving into the rooms that Sunday. Rexroad then began to arrange housing-focused case management.
“A big piece that we’ve been missing in Harrison County,” she said, “is a local street outreach provider who’s linked to housing.” Task team members are stepping in to provide that service.
The task team will continue to provide case management by phone and will be checking in with folks daily to ensure they have what they need. For some, the solution will be permanent supportive housing made available through the Clarksburg-Harrison Regional Housing Authority. For others, it might be assistance with a deposit and first month’s rent on an apartment and linkage to social services that can help them gain firmer footing.
These most immediate measures are steps in a longer-term solution Rexroad and members of the task team have been working on for nearly a year, long before COVID-19 was a threat to their Appalachian community.
Rexroad and her team had mapped a multifaceted plan to create a housing-first program, placing people in housing then providing them with mental-health, substance-misuse or other supports as needed, linking already-existing services in the county in a more organized context.
Credit Jesse Wright / 100 Days in Appalachia
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100 Days in Appalachia
But when coronavirus arrived in West Virginia, and Harrison County was deemed a hotspot for community spread, the plan accelerated. The most immediate priority, said Rexroad, who is also the United Way of Harrison County’s housing and communications director, is to help protect the community from the advance of COVID-19; secondly, “to begin building relationships with those on the street and begin the process of getting them into the appropriate program and helping them to stabilize” for the long term.
“I think we’ll start to see our community become more understanding as they see that [homelessness] can be effectively addressed,” she said.
The task team requested $5,000 from the Harrison County Commission to help finance the project for the next 30 days. If approved, equal funding would be provided by the commission, the United Way and the West Virginia Coalition to End Homelessness.
At its Tuesday, April 21, meeting, the commission tabled the request and asked for additional information.
Commissioner Patsy Trecost recognizes the funding as only a first step. Sometimes, he said, “you have to throw a Band-Aid on as a temporary solution when you know you really need stitches.”
“I am on board with the $5,000 allocation to give to the United Way, as a nonprofit organization, to do what they want with it, and move forward with the housing,” he said.
Guidance from Up the Road
For a model of an effective community-wide response to homelessness in a time of crisis, Clarksburg advocates looked 40 miles up the highway to the city of Morgantown.
Rachel Coen, the West Virginia Coalition to End Homelessness’s chief program officer, said that the people of Morgantown, which already had a housing-first program in place, have really stepped up since the outbreak of COVID-19.
“This has brought everybody together in a way that they’re very much relying on one another,” she said. “Everybody’s moved forward in a way I’ve never seen before.”
Support, Coen said, has come from, among others, the county commission, the health department, the police and EMS, the hospitals, the United Way and Bartlett Housing Solutions, which provides supportive services locally to those in need of a home.
Keri DeMasi, Bartlett’s executive director, said that her staff “pulled the trigger very, very quickly, a little bit ahead of the curve” in addressing the coronavirus outbreak in Morgantown, providing their clients with information on proper sanitation, distancing and the availability of resources. “We know our clients and we know their vulnerability.”
The staff is now making certain that those they serve are receiving meals and medications; they’re getting them to necessary doctor’s appointments and coordinating virtual support services. They also have a Facebook group to circulate information. For more than a month, Bartlett staff has been taking the temperature of everyone they serve at their emergency shelter. “My favorite part of the day,” DeMasi said, “is when I see that all temperatures are normal.”
“This community has just been unbelievably responsive,” she said. “Not just the other agencies in this community but the citizens.” For example: She posted a request for Easter baskets, and within an hour the need was met.
Filling the Gaps
Zach Brown said that, as of last week, to his knowledge there had been no confirmed cases of COVID-19 among those being housed in emergency and temporary shelters in the state.
At the Clarksburg Mission, the staff is taking every precaution to protect their residents and the broader community. They’re taking in no new residents; those within are closely monitored.
Not everyone is able to cope; many can’t take the close quarters and careful scrutiny. “If people wander away, if they’re AWOL, then they’re asked not to come back,” Lou Ortenzio said.
Credit Jesse Wright / 100 Days in Appalachia
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100 Days in Appalachia
The Clarksburg Mission, in North Central West Virginia, is a faith-based emergency shelter that has expanded in recent years to serve the needs of a community hit hard by the opioid epidemic. It now offers sober living dorms for men and women, emergency beds for veterans and a sober living home, in addition to its support programs for people in recovery.
Marissa Rexroad is hopeful that out of this crisis will come an awareness “that we have major gaps in our system, and maybe give us an opportunity to educate folks about what addressing this in an effective manner looks like. We have not had that opportunity yet.”
“When you have a crisis like this,” Brown said, “you sort of hope the better angels of people’s nature are gonna rise to the top and things like the bureaucracy or politics or moral viewpoints of homelessness are just gonna go away, and we all come together and work toward one solution.”
“All it takes is all of us,” Ortenzio said. “That’s what we say. It really takes an effort of the entire community to try to solve the disconnection problems that we have and the isolation that folks suffer.”
This article was produced with support from the One Foundation.
The West Virginia Legislature recently passed a major foster care bill, which provides more resources for foster care parents among other provisions.
This bill is part of ongoing reforms to the state’s overwhelmed child welfare system, as officials work to manage the futures of nearly 7,000 children in state custody. Last year the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources announced it had selected Aetna Better Health to help manage health services for foster children.
A managed care model is essentially privatized government services. In most states, including West Virginia, Medicaid is managed through similar private care models.
This shift to a managed care model is a result of House Bill 2010, which was sponsored by Republicans and passed into law last year.
Roxy Todd sat down with two of the managers of Aetna’s new managed care system, Todd White and Kathy Szafran.
***Editor’s Note: The following has been edited for clarity and length.
Todd:There are some concerns that a for-profit companies, such as Aetna, have profits in mind over the welfare of people and children. Here in West Virginia, you know, there’s no denying we have a broken foster care system. How will this shift help address that?
White: Sure. So we’ve been here for over 23 years. What we’re looking to do is not take money from the system and ship it to a for-profit company. In a managed care model, the goal is to shift the care from like an emergency room setting, from an inpatient setting, to more of the preventive services. So you see those utilization numbers go up, with the hope that the emergency room utilization will drop. And so our job is to make the state’s program as efficient as possible, while driving all the healthcare outcomes.
Szafran: And when you look at it from the perspective of where do we start intervening our current foster care system, we’re intervening in a very reactive way. We’re the ones who aren’t getting involved when, you know, children have experienced a lot of adversity. Families are totally falling apart. And the services that many of these kids end up needing tend to be very high-end, expensive services, because of the amount of complications they’ve experienced.
Todd:As you know, there’s current litigation here against the state of West Virginia on behalf of foster care children who allege the DHHR has rampant issues with institutionalization for children, inadequate mental health services, and overextended caseworkers. And meanwhile, we see that in Texas, there’s also been a similar lawsuit. And that state has been embroiled in this litigation for years. And Texas moved to a managed care model in the 1990s, I believe. So how is the shift going to improve the underlying issues that are really affecting our foster care crisis here in the state?
White: So I’ve thought about this a good bit. And so a lot of the issues that we see on the general Medicaid side over the last several years, it’s not an issue with the services that are available, you know, through the benefit structure, it’s really the resources from the provider side and where do we expect to come in and be able to help the program is to take some of the load off of the CPS workers. We’ll have a care coordinator working with the family as well. We’re really hoping to kind of go in and take some of the load off these folks that’s been doing this by themselves for quite some time.
Szafran: Yeah. And I can’t emphasize enough the importance of care managers in the communities, knowing the communities and knowing the families. That’s another very positive part of how I approach this. It will allow the continued development of community resources as the care managers work with the CPS staff, to best serve children, where they’re at, and assisting families. Also, looking at this with a trauma-informed lens, and really understanding the ramifications of trauma and how it affects children and families, short term and long term. I think that is very significant for a managed care organization to adopt this cutting-edge science approach to well-being. I think it’s very critical, and I think that the outcome will be positive for West Virginia.
Todd: You mentioned trauma-informed care. Here in West Virginia we have a shortage of mental health providers that specialize in taking care of children who have a background in trauma. So how do we address this shortage?
Szafran: Oh, that’s the fun part of the job. Part of the training collaborative is going to be connecting and training throughout the state. And one of the beauties of being trauma-informed is more and more people are coming to the table and wanting to learn. There’s a variety of trainings that we can utilize. school systems now are coming and saying we want to become trauma-informed schools, and different health providers. It’s something I’m very, very proud to say that I’ve been part of. It is critical to all of our children and to our families that this is how we see the world, and it’s much more than a training. It’s much more a paradigm shift into how we evaluate, how we work with, and how we deal with each other. So when you said, mental health professionals, trauma-informed care is the bus driver, right? Good trauma-informed care is the lady who works in the cafeteria. Everyone can be trained on how to be sensitive to trauma in the lives of others, so that you don’t have to be a licensed mental health professional. You can be an incredible teacher, you can be an awesome foster parent, and still be very cognizant of what that means to be trauma-informed. So whoever the caregiver is for the child can impact that child and help them heal. If they understand that the behavior that they see is more of a way a child is trying to explain what’s happening, not just a behavioral disruption. So I think that’s really critical that we continue educating and training throughout the state.
The federal judge overseeing the bankruptcy case of OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma set a June 30 deadline to file claims against the company. That includes governments, entities such as hospitals and, for the first time, individuals with personal injury claims. There is no guarantee that people who became addicted to opioids or their families would receive any money, and the judge emphasized that those claims would be open only to people who believe they were harmed by Purdue. Purdue plans to spend $23.8 million to advertise the deadline, an unusually large amount to notify potential creditors in a bankruptcy case.
A new study finds the closure of coal-fired power plants and transition to natural gas generation across the United States over a decade saved an estimated 26,610 lives due to a reduction in air pollution, with about a fifth of those avoided deaths in the Ohio Valley.
The coal-rich Ohio Valley states received outsized health benefits from the shift from coal to gas. The analysis found about 5,300 deaths were avoided in West Virginia, Kentucky and Ohio.
The study, published Monday in the Journal Nature Sustainability, examined the impact of the closure of 334 coal-fired units between 2005 and 2016. During that same time period, 612 new natural-gas-fired units were brought online.
The analysis found that when coal plants closed, air pollution including particulate matter, ozone and other toxic substances decreased in nearby communities, reducing deaths from respiratory diseases, stroke and heart disease.
“We see that on average, across the country, the mortality rate, the number of people dying in a given population size goes down by about one percent when a unit shuts down,” said Jennifer Burney, an associate professor at the University of California San Diego’s School of Global Policy and Strategy and author of the study.
For decades, coal produced and burned in the Ohio Valley played an outsized role for much of the United States.The decline of coal has profoundly changed many communities as employment in the mining and coal generation sectors declined, but Burney said her research shows coal’s decline also has tangible benefits in lives saved.
“It’s really interesting that this is also where you see these really high beneficial impacts,” she said. “People have not died that might have if those plants have been kept on.”
The study also found the closure of coal plants benefited the country’s agricultural sector. Less air pollution allowed more sunlight to reach the earth’s surface, which the analysis extrapolates resulted in saving an estimated 570 million bushels of corn, soybeans and wheat grown near closed coal-fired generators.
In addition, Burney’s analysis estimated air pollution from coal plants also masked some of the warming in the atmosphere.
“It’s like taking off your hat in the sun. You feel the full heat that’s there and that’s what’s happening right now as the air is getting cleaner,” she said. “We’re now seeing the full extent of warming that’s already present, but had been kind of hidden from us by pollution.”
While the public health benefits of decommissioning coal plants are significant, Burney cautioned that does not mean natural gas generators come without similar risks.
“[Natural gas] produces a little bit less carbon dioxide than coal, but it’s still spewing a bunch of carbon dioxide in the air,” she said. “And from an air pollution perspective, just like with coal, when you burn natural gas, you get carbon dioxide but you also get a set of other pollutants that are produced — it’s just a different mix from coal.”
She said more study is needed to determine what kinds of impacts turning on a natural gas plant may have on both communities and crop yields.
Adding plants and trees to the landscape could reduce air pollution by an average of 27 percent, according to a new study. Specialists in environmental science, engineering and geography spent three years analyzing thousands of counties across the country. They found that adding more plants is cheaper than most technologies at reducing air pollution. One of the lead researchers is an engineering professor at Ohio State University named Bhavik Bakshi.
Bakshi began working in the field of sustainability about 20 years ago. He said at that time, a lot of his colleagues were skeptical in the usefulness of trying to look to nature for engineering solutions. “And now things are very different. Now people think that this is very innovative and cutting edge,” Bakshi said.
Bakshi and a team of researchers analyzed thousands of counties across the United States and calculated how much it would cost to add more trees and plants near factories and other pollution sources. They compared these costs to technologies – things like smokestack scrubbers.
Their study shows that plants – not technologies – are cheaper at cleaning the air near a number of industrial sites, roadways, power plants, commercial boilers and oil and gas drilling sites.
The researchers point out that this study could be a lesson to engineers and city planners who want to make society more livable. And many of the solutions for our environmental and health problems might be found in nature.
“Obviously engineers like gadgets, and I certainly do myself. But people do realize that there are some things that nature, and the gadgets that nature has designed and developed over the millennia, are very effective, and oftentimes more effective, and certainly more sustainable, than the things that we have been able to design through conventional engineering.”
Bakshi points to all the plastic pollution that has accumulated in our waterways, largely as a result of techological advancements.
“Many times, you know, technology clearly is important and essential for our wellbeing. But it has also resulted in unintended harm,” Bakshi said.
“One reason why engineering does result in unintended harm is because we ignore the role that ecosystems play in supporting our activities.”
He mentioned the health benefits scientists are learning trees provide to humans. “People are looking at the benefits to cardiovascular health, to mental and emotional wellbeing.”
“What is needed is how do we work together with nature, and don’t just learn from it, but also respect its abilities and its limits. And that raises a lot of opportunities for innovation that engineering has hardly touched upon, for at least 200 years.”
