What will it take for the local African-American community to take the Coronavirus seriously? For the most part, our leaders are silent as the infection, sickness, and death rates in our community continue to rise.
Last week, Governor John Bel Edwards wisely announced that the state has reverted to phase 2 of Louisiana’s COVID restrictions. He did so because there has been an increase in both COVID cases and hospitalizations in the state.
While the governor shifted us back to phase 2, it is a modified version of his original order. This time he has ordered bars to close unless they also serve food and has cut most businesses back to 50 percent occupancy. Churches are being allowed to assemble at 75 percent occupancy.
The governor’s orders send mixed signals that reflect political pressure. Some have ignored the COVID rules altogether, and many African-Americans seem to have ignored the rules completely.
In Monroe, some churches continue to meet under what they consider “COVID-SAFE” religious gatherings.
Our community is highly vulnerable to COVID because of our ethnic history of diabetes, Sickle Cell Anemia, High Blood Pressure, and a plethora of other underlying conditions related to our cultural diet and lack of medical care for more than a century.
We see the effects, but still, many churches continue to gather without taking the extreme cautions necessary to guarantee worshippers’ safety.
Preachers are preaching to congregations without masks. Choirs are singing without masks. Doors, pews, restrooms, microphones, and anything touched by worshippers are not sanitized before and during worship assemblies.
A worshipper who has tested positive can pass the virus to another worshipper sitting six feet away by something as simple as passing the church offering tray from one person to another.
That one person can infect 50 people in one worship session.
We must be careful.
In our home, everyone who walks in our front door gets a Lysol spray down before they touch anything. Even then, my wife and I keep our distance. If I leave and come back home, I have to go through the sanitization ritual.
Even though schools initially said they would follow CDC guidelines, the Monroe City Schools does not take the COVID virus seriously. Inside classrooms, social distancing is not observed; instead of nine or ten students in a class, there are some classes with as many as 25.
School buses, which initially were to have one student per alternating seat, now have as many as 30 or more students per bus.
The District does not require the testing of teachers and depends on an honor system. The district’s lax attention has resulted in school administrators, teachers, staff, and student infections. The district requires in-person attendance for teachers but refuses to cover their testing costs, which prompts many infected persons to show up for work to avoid pay loss.
The Monroe City School board has a 5-2 African-American supermajority but refuses to address the increasing number of COVID infections in the district. The board has yet to place a single item on its agenda about the impact of the pandemic.
In our community, hundreds of Blacks take to the streets daily without masks or observing social distancing rules.
As a community, we must take this matter seriously. Our leadership must speak. We’ve had prominent leaders to be infected from school board members, principals, pastors of churches to the President of the NAACP. It’s a growing problem.
Somehow, we must continue to shed light on this problem.
We are affected more than others, but we are doing less to protect the most vulnerable.
We must speak with a united voice until more hear our warning and take it seriously.
