How COVID-19 has Affected New York City Special Education Teachers

Special education teachers have faced even greater struggles having to educate the next generation during a pandemic.

The education system plays a vital role in developing the next generation. On average students spend about 8,884 hours in school over the course of nine years. During this time, students discover who they are and what they wish to become.

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected the ability to ensure that students are receiving that top notch education. Due to the pandemic schools across the nation were forced to resort to remote learning. This means that students would be attending classes from the comfort of their own homes over sites like Google Classroom, Webex, and Zoom.

“I teach a 12:1:1 special education class, fully remotely, I currently have 11 students,” said a source who wished to remain anonymous whom I will refer to as Nicole. She served as a para, an educational worker who isn’t licenced to teach but aids in the classroom and helps students individually, for 12 years before becoming a special education teacher in late 2016. A 12:1:1 class consists of up to 12 students, with one teacher and one teacher’s assistant.

“My students currently range from emotionally disturbed ADHD to autism spectrum disorder. They are all District 75 students.” District 75 is made up of 57 schools, across New York City, that provide highly specialized instructional support for students with significant disabilities. These disabilities include: autism spectrum disorders, significant cognitive delays, emotional disturbances, sensory impairments, and multiple disabilities.

“With all things there are pluses and minuses there.” Nicole said as she talked about teaching her students remotely. “On the plus side, I learned a great deal more about finding connections with children.” This is something Nicole discovered she had the capability to do in an online setting. “It’s a lot harder to build a bond over a computer. I didn’t know that we could and we certainly can.” Nicole said as she recalled the time she had spent building bonds with her students and their families. “I am intimately connected with them because I get to see them and their families everyday.”

“I was really out of my depth and I struggled a lot. It felt like I wasn’t a teacher.”

These connections that are being built virtually show how teaching is still something that can be done passionately even through a pandemic. Nicole, who is a fully remote teacher, has been able to manufacture something that she never thought possible. Being able to create a strong foundation with her students' parents seeing them everyday over the camera and interacting helps the children with their learning as well.

“They have full access to me, they have my home phone number,” Nicole explains. When prior to the Coronavirus pandemic this was not considered a norm. “They are speaking to us regularly and constantly. Usually, if my kids need me and we’re in a school building they wouldn’t give me a call.” Looking at this change, of bringing work into her home, brought comfortability and allowed for Nicole to give her students more access to her.

But Nicole also says working from her living room means “There’s no line between work and home.” She has lost the feeling of relaxing after a long day at work.. “My job has changed, in that at 6 P.M. I get parent phone calls and child phone calls and they need help.” This is a change that she had to become accustomed to. This metaphoric “line” has also changed for her students. They feel they can reach out to Nicole since their homes have become their workspace as well.

“It usually takes three to four weeks to set a routine.” Nicole said this is typically the process when teaching in-person. “But this year it took more like eight weeks.” Her students had to learn a new classroom etiquette, which consists of learning how to mute and unmute their microphones, and not speaking over one another. “Then I had to teach things I’ve never taught them before. I had to spend a class a week teaching them how to upload a document.” This was something that Nicole said was difficult at first but she kept her students engaged and taught them in her own unique way. “I made it fun. I had scavenger hunts with them, I told them to run around the house and upload pictures of things. One time I had them upload their favorite Fortnite characters.” She said if she knew they were having fun they would retain the knowledge, and wouldn’t struggle when it came to posting their homework.

Mona Danziger, who became a special education teacher in 2018, has been working for the New York City Department of Education since 1999. “Teaching remote was probably one of the hardest things I’ve ever done,” said Danziger. “I was really out of my depth and I struggled a lot. It felt like I wasn’t a teacher.” Danziger faced the rigors of teaching during a pandemic and was in search of any help possible. She attended multiple professional development sessions which aided in teaching her online programs that would help her keep her students engaged.

Photo of Mona Danziger teaching her students in-person. Photo Credits: Anonymous Student

Photo of Mona Danziger teaching her students in-person. Photo Credits: Anonymous Student

Nicole said that all special education students are required to have an Individualized Education Program (IEP). An IEP is a legal document that is put into place, as required by United States law, for every special education student in the nation. According to the non-profit, Education Alternatives, IEPs were first introduced in 1975 when the right of students with disabilities to attend public schools were legally recognized under the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (EHA).” These IEPs are curated by the student’s parents, teachers, and administrators. The purpose IEPs serve is to give specialized learning experiences to ensure that the students get the most out of their education as possible. IEPs are required to be reviewed once a year to make any necessary changes. Students are evaluated every three years so that administration can decide whether or not the student is still eligible to receive special education.

Danziger simplifies the process of writing an IEP by explaining how they should be written as if the person who is reading it never met the student. The goal is to give, whoever is reading the IEP, the child’s story. “Writing one from scratch, for me, takes about two to two and a half weeks.” Between work, family, and her personal life Danziger has to take the proper amount of time to correctly write out an IEP. “I’m not one to do things halfway. I take pride in my work so I’m not just going to do something to get it done.” This dedication shows how much Danziger cares for her students and wants them to get the best help for their education.

With the transition from in-person learning to remote learning a lot of the hands-on experiences were taken from special education students. Both Nicole and Danziger have mentioned how they have seen both decline and progression in their students since the pandemic has started. They were hopefully, mostly for the students’ sake, that in-person learning resumes as quickly as possible. Danzinger said how the students miss being able to have fun with their friends in school. There have been successes and failures in remote learning but students and teachers alike are looking forward to getting back in the classroom.

Masked and Ready: How Local Activists Fought for Racial Justice Amidst the Pandemic

On any given day, 22-year-old Isis Benitez has to navigate through a protest to get to her job as a community health promoter at the Planned Parenthood health center in Poughkeepsie. Pro-life activists — sometimes in groups, sometimes as individuals — stand firm in front of the entrance to the center, wearing scowls and wielding signs advising against abortion. 

Benitez notices their anger; towards her workplace and the services they provide, towards the people who depend on these services and towards the world, in general. She uses the word “dismayed” to sum them up.

Last summer, Benitez found the roles reversed. This time, she was the protester, fighting for a much different cause: A demand for racial justice, she says, and a reimagining of policing in our country. In Poughkeepsie, where Benitez has lived since she was five years old, this took the form of protests, rallies and marches, the latter of which she participated in frequently. 

Unlike the protesters she encounters on a regular basis at her place of work, these marches were blanketed in solidarity and strength. “It was just a totally different, powerful, strong, amazing energy that was going on,” Benitez said. “When you saw those protests, those rallies, those marches, everything over the summer, you saw so much anger, forced into power; you saw so much strength, forced into power.” 

Isis Benitez representing Planned Parenthood at a rally last summer.

Isis Benitez representing Planned Parenthood at a rally last summer.

“Power” is a term being used frequently to describe last summer’s mobilization of the Black Lives Matter Movement. 

After George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin in May of 2020, protestors rallied nationwide, fueled by outrage towards a system that continued to let them down — and had been doing so historically. Behind the Black Lives Matter social movement — the origin of which dates back to 2013 — protesters took to the streets to make their voices (and their demands) heard. 

There was one factor at play, though, that made last summer unlike any civil rights movement in our country’s history: It was set against the backdrop of a global pandemic. Despite this, the mobilization of the movement continued throughout the summer; thanks largely in part to the efforts of local activists. 

A year ago, COVID-19 was still a relatively new enemy. Across the country, states were still adhering to strict lockdown restrictions, and for many Americans, it had been nearly two months since they had left their residences for anything other than essential outings. According to the New York Times COVID-19 case tracker, on May 26 — the day after Floyd’s murder — the United States had a seven-day average of 21,842 new cases. (Comparatively, this number seems less alarming. Consider, however, that at the time, it was double the seven-day average from just two months prior.) 

Across the country, the Black Lives Matter movement mobilized in overwhelming numbers, in spite of the spreading pandemic. According to the New York Times, which compiled data from four national polls in June of last year, there were anywhere between 15 and 26 million people who attended a Black Lives Matter protest from June 4 to June 22, making the demonstrations the largest our country has ever seen. 

Even without this data, visual evidence alone lent itself to the sheer size of the movement — and inspired even more people to take to the streets. Footage of NYPD officers shoving protesters into unmarked vans flooded social media; Images showed peaceful protesters being tear gassed by police to clear Washington, D.C.’s Lafayette Park, in order for President Trump to hold a photo-op in front of a church. Wide- and aerial-shots captured the massive crowds who had come out to march. 

“Looking at that movement, one would think that there was very little impact of the pandemic on it,” said Brian Obach, professor of sociology at SUNY New Paltz. “People were more distanced, people [were] masked, but otherwise [it was] a pretty unimpeded turnout.” 

While Floyd’s death was the catalyst for last summer’s activity, it was in no way the first of its kind. The police killings of Eric Garner, Tamir Rice and Michael Brown — all of which happened in 2014, to name a few — received national attention and news coverage. And while these incidents sparked isolated outrage, it was nowhere near the level of what occurred last summer. 

Obach, who has conducted research and contributed to journals on the topic of social movements, cites one important factor of Floyd’s death that set it apart from the countless other police killings of Black people throughout our country’s history: video footage. 

“We've had many shootings, murders, however you want to look at it; police violence against Black people for decades,” Obach said. “And it's not unknown — these things are reported.” 

Obach explained, however, that in Floyd’s case there was dramatic video footage. Americans could see “how horrible it was. That sets it apart from many of these other cases where there's no footage at all, or it's not clear.” Obach explained that the graphic nature of that documentation “had a significant role in the mobilization we saw.”

Poughkeepsie-based activist Tracy Hunter argues, however, that the footage of Floyd’s murder was not an anomaly. “People saw what happened to Eric Garner,” Hunter said, referring to the famous case on Staten Island in 2014. Garner was a Black man from Staten Island who was suffocated after being placed in a prohibited chokehold. “That was on video, that was on TV. I don't know why that didn't bring more people together. But he certainly was strangled to death while we watched it on TV, and it didn't bring people out.” 

Hunter — “Pronouns her/she. That’s her/she, and the reason I use the word ‘her/she’ is because I’m a Black woman” — has been a member of the Poughkeepsie chapter of the End the New Jim Crow Action Network (ENJAN) for nearly a decade, since 2013. The group, which dates back to 2012, says it’s dedicated to ending mass incarceration and the expansion of the criminal justice system, which they say “disproportionately targets African Americans and Hispanics.”

Prior to the pandemic, ENJAN would hold bi-weekly meetings at the Family Partnership Center in Poughkeepsie, in addition to town halls and public education sessions on “issues that were happening around the jail or mass incarceration,” Hunter said. “We were very hands-on, in-your-face, meeting people one-on-one, prior to COVID.”

Shuttering of businesses and stay-at-home orders changed this, of course; It was around this time that Benitez joined the group. A lifelong activist, she heard of the group through her boss at Planned Parenthood, where she focuses on community engagement and outreach. Upon joining, Benitez got to see the group grow first-hand after meetings were switched to a virtual platform. She specifically references a meeting early on in the pandemic where there were “a decent 30 people” on the call. “It was dope to see that for ENJAN,” Benitez said. 

Eli Appelson — a student at Vassar College — joined ENJAN around the same time as Benitez. He believes the shift to Zoom meetings was a direct catalyst for the group’s growth, as “the virtual environment is conducive to anyone being able to come.”  

While Hunter agrees with her ENJAN colleagues, she also believes that this uptick in new members isn’t unlike trends she’s seen within the group in the past. “Whether it's virtual or in-person, you’re gonna have people who can make it, you're gonna have people who can't make it,” Hunter said. “It’s just life in general, you can’t always control that.” 

Also out of the group’s control was the attention and increased attendance they would see after Floyd’s murder. According to Appelson, the group’s Instagram account grew from just 100 followers to nearly 3,000 after the mobilization of the Black Lives Matter movement — “A terrible metric,” Appelson said, but one that “shows that people finally started paying attention.”

More specifically, according to Hunter, the events of last summer made “white people realize that black people are not crazy.” 

With the renewed attention, ENJAN broadened their goals; Rather than focusing all their attention on ending mass incarceration, they began holding discussions on the history of racism in American policing. Despite the ongoing pandemic, the group was expanding and reaching people in new ways.

Across the river in Kingston, another activist group was feeling disheartened as the pandemic continued to spread. The O+ Festival was dealing with the reality that their marquee event — a massive music and arts event, where underinsured musicians and artists perform in exchange for healthcare services from onsite doctors, dentists and other specialists — would not be possible for 2020. This was a major challenge for the organization, which has grown to include and assist hundreds of artists and musicians each year since the first festival, in 2010. 

As Black Lives Matter took to the streets, cofounder of the event, Joe Concra, immediately understood the importance art would play in the movement. “Historically, art has always led the way in social movement change,” Concra said. “You look through any big movement politically in the world and it usually has art at its forefront.” 

With this belief in mind, there was no hesitation when three artists with ties to O+ — Jalani Lion, Dina Kravtsov and Mat Schulze — requested the organization’s assistance in securing a space for a mural in support of the cause. The resulting piece, aptly-titled “Black Lives Matter,” is located at 695 Broadway in Kingston and “memorializes and honors Black lives,” the organization says, “By calling for an end to systemic racism, racial violence and police brutality.”

Concra believes that art is a gateway to change. As he puts it, “Visual protest leads to action, and to things that actually change people's lives and change people's daily struggles.” He has seen this first hand; In graduate school at Marist, amidst the beginning of the Gulf War, Concra was asked to help paint a banner to bring to an anti-war march. Upon arriving at the gathering — which was held on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. — Concra and his colleagues were placed at the forefront with the sign they had been commissioned to make. 

“It really made a lot of press, the pictures of that banner. So the words got out, but the visual got out. And it spread like wildfire,” Concra said. In a time prior to social media, “spreading like wildfire” meant coverage in newspapers, in which Concra says “You couldn't see any humans, you could just see that sign.”

This led Concra to a realization; “You can really have an impact with visual language.”

This form of language (visual) has probably never been more important than during a pandemic, when forced isolation has led to a rise in already high-levels of media and news consumption. Last summer, photos of the words “Black Lives Matter” painted across streets in cities and towns across the country were some of the most visible and viral images of the Black Lives Matter movement.

“We're visual people. We drew before we wrote, before we had language,” Concra said. “So I think that we are good at that, and I think that's why people respond.”

“We've been through this before. There's always been that down, and then the wind comes in and blows it the other way, blows it high.” - Tracy Hunter

As the summer came to an end, temperatures dropped in the Hudson Valley and people were forced back inside; activists were no exception to this. At the same time, the election of President Joe Biden caused some white allies of the movement to back off of the still pressing issues that plagued Black Americans; going “back to brunch,” as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez put it. 

“Mobilization is very difficult to sustain. You can only go to so many protests, and in large numbers; there's only going to be a quarter of activists that remain,” Obach said. “But we refer to waves of protest for a reason. They come in waves and waves break and go down.” 

When opening Twitter or turning on the news, footage of masked protestors in overwhelming numbers no longer fill up feeds; But that doesn’t mean the Black Lives Matter movement — or its goals — have been forgotten. 

According to Obach, it’s groups — like ENJAN — that have been around since before the mobilization, that will continue the work and be strengthened. “They're not going to be the 10,000 people in the street kind of organization, but maybe before they had a core of five people, and now they've got a core of 20 people, because people came in from this movement,” Obach said. “A small percentage of those people will remain engaged and remain in these organizations, and it’s these organizations that sort of carry the ball forward.”

For Benitez, the fight is far from over. 

“Can I stop looking the way I look? Can my family stop looking the way we do?” Benitez said, “Yeah, you can sit back and relax, but we can never.” 

The Mental Health Pandemic In The LGBTQ+ Community

You are twelve times more likely to attempt suicide if you are a transgender adult compared to cisgender individuals. Around 40% will attempt or consider taking their own life. Pause for a moment and try to comprehend the sheer number of people affected in the transgender community alone; now understand that they are not the outlier when discussing mental health in the LGBTQ+ community.

If you are suffering from mental illness, substance abuse, and/or suicidal thoughts, know this: you are not alone. If you need help, you can skip to the bottom of this article and find resources linked below. Now if you’re ready for a deep dive into the LGBTQ+ community experience with mental health and COVID-19 the article will continue.

Ashley Salas, a 21-year-old electrical engineering student at the University of Connecticut, shared her battle with mental health. But these didn’t start with the pandemic. It started in New York when she was in primary school and knew something was different about her. “Even as a kid I was depressed, not all of it stems from my sexuality but it did contribute to it. I had a lot of internalized homophobia because of how the LGBTQ was talked about by people. I had known since PreK, I already knew.”

The lack of support extended to her life at home, since in her Christian upbringing the idea of being homosexual was thought to be a sin, and that as a sin plagued Salas. “I told my mother when I was 15 and told the rest of my family when I was 16.” Her experience at home unfortunately is not unique, nearly 50% of LGBTQ youth don’t feel safe at home. In 2020 alone, 29% of LGBTQ+ youth reported experiencing homelessness, were kicked out, or ran away. This number does not even cover the severe cases transgender members face, with nearly 40% experienced housing instability.

Salas’ romantic partner came from an even more unwelcoming home. “My partner’s family is actually more unaccepting and she hasn’t told her family we’ve been dating for over two years now. Her family voted for Trump for both terms, they just don’t like the idea of children knowing about LGBTQ+. Her mom stopped watching the Hallmark after having their first gay movie and called it an abomination.”

This internalized homophobia followed Ashley as she struggled with her sexuality throughout middle school, often identifying as bisexual. “When I was 13 years old I told people I was bisexual. Performative heteronormativity. So for a time, I thought I was bisexual. Even then I did some experimenting even though I knew I was lesbian.” Heteronormativity is the belief that heterosexual relationships are the preferred or default form of relationships. Coupled with social expectations and culture, this belief helps alienate non-hetero relationships and in cases like Salas, encourages suppressing individual identity and conforming to what society views as normal.

Not only does heteronormativity make it difficult for Ashley to openly be herself, but it also affects dating life as well. “It was tough too because even when I came out, I had friends with benefits during high school and I was led on in certain aspects. It’s not just the aspect of being someone’s secret it’s knowing that they would never have a relationship with me and I ended up depressed knowing I would end up alone. It’s so much easier entering a hetero relationship.”

When Ashley eventually found someone she was able to connect with, a year into their relationship the pandemic hit. Originally from New York, Ashley had family that she could stay with during the beginning stages of quarantine but this separated her from one of the few people that could understand her.

“It was more of an emotional drain [because] you couldn’t do the activities you wanted to do,” Salas said. “I couldn’t see my girlfriend for [almost] 4 months so it was like a long-distance relationship. I felt isolated.”

Ashley attended high school in New York City, Manhattan. Despite it being fairly liberal and dominated by democrats, these posters were not rare to find. In a 2019 school climate survey from the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network, 86% of LGBTQ youth reported being harassed or assaulted at school, which can significantly impact their mental health. LGBTQ-related discriminatory policies and practices are not rare, nearly 60% of students reported having experienced some form of discrimination. It could be as simple as holding hands with your partner or wanting to represent yourself through clothing and school projects. Anything connected to LGBTQ+ could and would be restricted and involved students could face disciplinary action.

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After being open towards her identity Ashley faced another challenge, religion. “When I came out to my mom and cousin I cried. I had a general belief in God but didn’t agree with the Christian tenets. I told my cousin I would go to hell and I felt I wasn’t loved by god because I was gay. There were poster boards in the subway where it said if you were in any of these groups you’re going to hell.”

Her conflict with Christian tenets but desire to connect with God directed her to Islam. “Oddly enough, the experience that caused me to convert to Islam was the first time I slept with a guy. I don’t want to say it like this. It felt like I raped myself. I consented and it wasn’t anyone’s fault except for mine and I wanted to go through with it. Because it went through that way I felt disgusted with myself and felt so used by myself. It wasn’t a great feeling and I had immense regret. I like to live life without having regrets and you shouldn’t regret moments in your life because you have so much to live for. I felt like this because I went against my own morals and felt ashamed. People say you can try out many things but when you already know you know. It was one of the lowest points in my life and I had no one to blame but myself.”

The event put Ashley into a depressive and suicidal state. “It impacted me emotionally and mentally. When you are in your lowest place it’s where people seek God.” It was in this state when she thought about the world religions module her high school offered and the course about Islam. “That day I wore a hijab and I haven’t read the Koran but I felt like I needed God in my life and the next day I converted.”

“I had the most serene journey, I never had that calm in my life even as a kid. It lasted two days and I made that change and knew it was correct” Salas said. “I told my mom and she was upset and told me that I had a demon in my body because I was gay and sent me a video to repent. It hurt me but I was really calm, after half an hour I put her to the side and I felt really calm. When I went home to my family, wearing a hijab they were confused and asked why I was wearing that. I felt upset because they were attacking me as a lesbian and a Muslim.”

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How COVID-19 Affected the Growth of Mental Health Care

[The CDC reported that nearly 40% of Americans noticed increased or new symptoms of mental illness and substance abuse during late June of 2020, in their August weekly update.

Timothy Doak, a counselor at the LGBTQ Well-Being Insititute, spoke briefly of the sudden surge in demand. “I’m much busier than I usually was. I’m constantly having clients on a waiting list. There has been a huge increase in mental health services

Being on zoom there has been increased accessibility to reaching people where they don’t have to take an hour of their day to come to visit. They can come during lunch break and sit.”

The LGBTQ Well-Being Institute in the Hudson Valley is a non-profit organization and, the newest addition to The Center’s programs. Some programs they provide are counseling services, support groups, and workshops aimed towards supporting individuals towards a fulfilling life.

A recent trend in advice that Doak would give to his clients surrounds scheduling. “Consistency in scheduling, we as humans look for structure, we look for things to be consistent. When we have too much free time and there’s a lot of downtime people can become frustrated and anxious. It’s finding that consistency during the day that can help.

Some minor things Doak says you can look out for are when do you make your meals, talking to family and friends, looking for a separate space. “I really encourage people to work outside their room, just to change the scenery. Establishing a consistent schedule is something that really helps”

The director of Well-Being Institute, Signy Furiya, shared how COVID-19 affected the institute. In 2005, the organization had a total of three employees. Now following the pandemic, their staff has grown five times their original size with fifteen employees. “We had a significant increase in the number of inquires, number of clients we’ve seen. One of the groups that started with two people, we’re now up to 12 group members every single week.”

When asked what programs were affected Furiya talked about their program teen’s night and chill out. Teen’s night and chill out were programs offered by the center where youth could meet at the center and play games and watch movies together. However, because of the pandemic these programs were shifted online. “It was beautiful seeing K through 12 and up being comfortable and it brought the center alive. We meet on discord now but it’s different.”

Furiya briefly talked about one of their client’s experiences during COVID-19 due to their identity as a transgender woman. “One client had recently come out as a trans woman and was fired from her job because she was giving pushback from how the establishment was handling safety during COVID,” Signy said. “[When] she started using the women’s restroom she was fired. This was definitely a way of using the COVID-19 to fire her. To lose your job in covid, in a space where you suddenly can’t work and can’t interact with the community, starting a discrimination suit, it’s a lot of stress. This client made an enormous stride to pressure and fight for her rights”

Concerning safe housing, Furiya expressed her concerns. “Other people had living situations that are not healthy for them, can’t find housing because of the housing freeze, other people aren’t moving out. That’s been a challenge. This has already been a challenge for marginalized groups especially with transgender members”

Both Doak and Furiya contributed the spike of mental health and suicide in the LGBTQ+ during 2020 to isolation.

Signy explained how the pandemic added to existing factors. “With depression with the isolation, many of the community don’t have the family support, they could have families that cut ties with them or have interactions that are intermittent. They don’t have the support that other people have in their community” Signy said.

For Doak, isolation already existed around the LGBTQ+ community.

”The biggest thing is the isolation aspect, the LGBTQ+ is already fairly isolated especially in the Hudson Valley. The community is strong but it’s not for everyone. In terms of jobs across the board it’s already hard to find a job. For those who present outside the norm it’s really hard for them to find a job because of the implications,” Doak said.

Closing Advice and Sources to Reach Out to.

For those who feel unsafe at home but want to get help Doak talks about others who also can’t find a safe space at home. “I have a few clients that don’t feel safe at home. They can take a walk and we can do a phone session while they’re on a walk. Maybe in a car, through talking, or through zoom. I always ask do you feel safe, do you feel comfortable. My first advice is to find a space where you feel comfortable in the experience.”

Hudson Valley LGBTQ Community Center - (845) 331-5300

Ulster county mobile and mental health - 1-844-277-4820

The Trevor Project - 1-866-488-7386.

National Suicide Hotline - 800-273-8255

LGBT National Hotline - 888-843-4564

Contact Tracing As of Now

A year of COVID-19 driving people into their homes in fear of spreading the virus has gone by and the nation approaches a possible relief in vaccine rollout. The first responders and essential workers have been hard at work through this long year while the restrictions have been in place. Easily forgotten, the COVID-19 contact tracers, which were hired throughout pandemic, have not been reported about as frequently.

Not all contact tracers were the same. There were the people who made simple calls and those who did the footwork to check in with COVID-19 patients and the people with whom they had interacted. All across the country, tracers did have the same training model, one provided as a course by Johns Hopkins. 

The beginning of the pandemic had the Governor Cuomo call for the state to have at least 30 contact tracers per 100,000 citizens. Some lower population counties, such as Jefferson, trained health workers already on staff in contact tracing. Other places and the state in general put out open hiring for contact tracers.

Colleges also had to start their own COVID-19 tracing efforts to be able to have safe in person classes. There needed to be a constant way to let anyone in a class know if they were at risk.

You Get A Call

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After your COVID-19 test, your phone rings about it being a positive case. You will get called by the lab first, which spurs people to tell friends and family they have been interacting with. 

The contact tracer will then call you. They will check to see if you have been informed of your positive test. They will ask if you have any symptoms. They will ask where you have been and who you interacted with.

You will be asked to quarantine and asked if you have everything you need in terms of food and medication. If you are on a college campus, you will have to follow its quarantine protocols.

 If you have no way of getting necessities, they have numbers for services that can help you. They will go on to call the people and places you interacted with to ask them to quarantine.

If for some reason you do not agree to a quarantine or don’t answer the phone, the contact tracer will pass the case to their supervisor who will send someone out to physically check on you and ask you to quarantine.

Collegial Culture

After the summer of 2020, colleges across the state opened for a fall and spring semester in limited circumstances. In order to maintain safety on campuses, the colleges would have to take charge of tracking the virus across their campuses.

Imagine being a college student during a modern day pandemic. How do you stay safe? A majority of online classes are a start that most colleges took.

Some colleges were able to keep numbers down, like SUNY New Paltz. Associate athletic trainer Allison Lindsay and her colleague, Bryan Lurie, were asked by the school to head the contact tracing on campus at the beginning stages.

The school runs testing through Enzo Labs, a clinical reference lab with locations all over the tri-state area, which runs pool testing. After a positive test, the lab then contacts the school’s contact tracing team. The speed at which New Paltz can let people know is tied to the lab’s speed according to Lindsay.

Enzo Labs performs weekly testing on SUNY New Paltz campus.

Enzo Labs performs weekly testing on SUNY New Paltz campus.

Students at SUNY New Paltz who had positive tests or interacted with people with positive tests receive calls and a text message from the school’s system. Lindsay said that the adoption of using the text message system helped because “most students don’t have voicemail set up or it’s full,” which would get in the way of efforts to get a positive case into quarantine.

Lindsay attributes the success in keeping numbers down to how personal the contact tracers know the community they were calling. “When you say you ate at the SUB [student union building] I would know what that is and who to call where as someone calling from off campus wouldn’t,” Lindsay said, explaining why  small knit groups are easier to trace. Lindsay also attributed it to students and faculty working within the health guidelines to lower cases.

Tracing the State

The beginning of the pandemic had many new sites talking about these available jobs in the pandemic. By what were they like and how well are they getting done?

Jefferson County has had over 6,000 total COVID cases since the beginning of the pandemic. . Compared to more populated Erie County which had over 87,000 positive test results since February 2020 or Orange County that had over 13,000 positive cases. Jefferson has a population of around 111,000, while Erie County has nearly 270,000 and Orange County has around 384,000 people.

In more rural places like Jefferson trained their health workers they already had on staff instead of hiring new workers. Lisa Lagos, a public health educator for Jefferson County, became one of the county's contact tracers. All different kinds of county employees got training. “We’ve had employees from The Workplace (the county’s training and employment department) trained, people from IT.”

These workers have been dealing with untold stress and resistance from the job. M., a former contact tracer explaining some emotional strain he experienced.

“I had to talk to a family where all the family had COVID, their kids, like teen-aged, both the parents were in the hospital and the grandparents were dead. I had to keep calling them but I just didn’t want to, because they were already going through so much.”

Experiences like these require a lot of empathy.

M. worked out of Madison County, which has had just over 4,300 positive cases of COVID since February, 2020. This is a much lower number than other counties in New York and is a smaller percent of the population infected over the year compared to Erie County.

The training for COVID tracers from Johns Hopkins taught them how to deal with people in grief. However, there is only so much that people can be trained for situations like these. Contact tracers have to work with a lot more empathy than many other professions.

There have been individuals through this pandemic that have made the jobs harder for contact tracers. M. let me know of an event where a positive case would not specify to the tracer which bank she worked at after their test but before she knew the results, so they had to call all the banks in the county.

In a December NPR article, a survey found New York, among many other states, did not have enough contact tracers to control its caseload.

The overall COVID-19 positive cases had their highest point last April where it then lowered in the summer. This was until right after the holiday season, where cases statewide hit an all time high attributed to interactions over Christmas and the New Years.

This rise led to many counties with low populations and thus low amounts of contact tracers asking for the state to provide assistance. M. mentioned how the amount of cases would lead to not being able to call people until the day before their quarantine would end because of the numbers that the limited contact tracers were working with.

During this time after New Years, Jefferson County also had an increased caseload. “At that point we reached out to the state health department and said yes, we would like some of your contact tracers to help out,” Lagos said.

Now with numbers down again there is less work for contact tracers. M said that when he left they had long stopped looking for new contact tracers where he worked.

What happens next with contact tracers as the vaccine rolls out?

The Connection

Campuses work with the counties they’re in to contain COVID-19. Lindsay, who contact traces for New Paltz, spoke about how the school set up their testing and tracing efforts with the county to best treat the area.

College towns are different from any ordinary town. People come from other counties and other states to attend colleges. This leads to higher population densities and people coming from areas with different COVID-19 rates.

Jefferson County has a SUNY community college. Jefferson has had fewer cases but also contains less people to test and less tests done.

Across the country, campuses are micro communities that have been tasked with self tracing to reduce the spread. Each campus has to keep track of its cases and be open with the people on campus to help keep them safe. This leads to strong guidelines that work and weak guidelines that fail, while contact tracing can’t stop this.

Has contact tracing worked? There is a terrifying toll on people doing this job that wouldn’t be seen on a college campus.

College campuses have isolated groups living on the campus that the schools can track. There are no grieving families on campus and there are no at risk children or elders living with them.

Moving Forward

Contact tracing as a philosophy has been around for decades. The use of it during this pandemic has been a light towards how it will need to be set up in the future.

Lindsay explained that as the school’s protocol for COVID-19 was built on previous emergencies; the next event will also have the benefit of being built with the experience of this pandemic.


The Realities of Being Black and Pregnant in a Pandemic

About two weeks after the lockdown in March 2020, tears of joy rolled down 25-year-old Samantha Stewart’s face. She was pregnant. The unexpected surprise occurred when she was already six weeks along. She lived with her mother, brother and boyfriend, and her mother was excited at the thought of having a baby around. Although she was happy about the news, Stewart did worry about pregnancy as a Black woman because she knew about the disproportionate mortality rates.

According to the CDC, Black mothers’ mortality rate between 2014-2017 was 41.7 deaths per 100,000 live births. This means that Black mothers are three to four times more likely to die than their white counterparts. With these statistics in mind, Black women have bittersweet feelings about pregnancy. There is a history of racial disparities within the healthcare system that play a significant part in the deadliness of pregnancy not only for maternity but Black mortality in general.

“As a Black woman, I was worried about being pregnant, period. Pandemic aside, I was already aware of the mortality rates for Black mothers so I was really nervous about what to expect when it was time for me to give birth.”
— Samantha Stewart
Samantha Stewart during the summer of 2020. Photo courtesy of Stewart

Samantha Stewart during the summer of 2020. Photo courtesy of Stewart

In Our Own Voice: National Black Women’s Reproductive Agenda is a reproductive justice partnership dedicated to uplifting Black women leaders on a national and local level. They reported that Black women are twice as likely to die from complications like heart attacks, blood clots, excessive bleeding, infections, and strokes. The many factors that contribute to poor maternal health for Black women include lack of access to high quality and medically appropriate care, shortage of providers and health care organizations, social, economic, and environmental stressors.

For the majority of Stewart’s pregnancy she remained healthy until a complication arose at the end. Stewart had preeclampsia, which is indicated by high blood pressure and protein in her urine, which could be life threatening. “I was upset, mostly at myself because I felt like I did something to cause it,” said Stewart. “I was also scared about having my baby premature.” The most effective way to treat preeclampsia is to deliver the baby, so the doctors induced labor at 36 and a half weeks, which is considered late preterm. She was admitted into the hospital on a Sunday and didn’t give birth until Wednesday.

“The labor itself was hard. I tried to be stubborn and go without the epidural but after a few hours, I pretty much begged for it,” said Stewart.

Aside from labor pains, the pandemic also made this process more challenging for Stewart than she expected. Her mother took her to the hospital but only one other person could stay by her side for the delivery. As the father of their child, her boyfriend Tyler was her ideal support to be inside of the delivery room. When Stewart and her mother first arrived, it was during the late shift, and to her advantage the nurse allowed Tyler to come and her mother to leave. Stewart and her boyfriend Tyler spent a week in total at the hospital. “We didn’t know that he wouldn’t be able to leave after the delivery so he actually had to call out of work for the rest of the week,” said Stewart. If he did leave, he would not be able to come back and Stewart would be by herself with their new baby. Luckily, the couple had nothing to worry about because he had paid time off.

With the virus’s ability to spread rapidly, the hospital, The Brooklyn Hospital Center, didn’t want to risk exposure. But Stewart and Tyler had more to worry about than newly minted white parents. According to the New York Times, in several states, COVID-19 has been disproportionately infecting and killing Black people. In the first half of 2020, Black people’s life expectancy fell by an astonishing 2.7 years. Whites now outlive Black people by six whole years. The gap hasn’t been that wide since 1998. Pre-existing conditions and lack of resources and healthcare worsen these rates.

While Stewart was giving birth, everyone except for her had to keep their masks on. Since she knew that it was required for the baby’s safety, she was not fazed by it. “We were almost a year into COVID so I was pretty used to seeing people wearing masks, so it wasn’t disorienting,” Stewart said. Rather than thinking about anyone else in the room, she was focused on delivering the baby despite the unexpected turn of events with her health. Things didn't go according to the birth plan she typed up and had placed in her diaper bag.

Although the process felt chaotic since it wasn’t what she anticipated, there was a reward at the end. Her baby girl, Samaiyah, was born. Even with the epidural injected inside of Stewart, she was conscious and aware. She was able to hear Samaiyah’s cry before actually seeing her. Stewart was facing up when the baby was placed in her arms immediately after Tyler cut the umbilical cord. “When I looked at her, I felt so warm inside and I just felt more loved than I ever felt in my whole life,” Stewart reminisced.

Her time at the hospital put her on an emotional rollercoaster, especially being there after giving birth. The whole time they were there, Stewart had an IV filled with magnesium stuck in her arm to keep her blood pressure down. After delivery, there was a lot of time spent making sure that the magnesium didn’t become poisonous and assuring that the fluids were leaving her system. Nurses were constantly checking her vitals and that she was bleeding too much. Stewart actually stayed an extra day in hopes that she would be able to leave with Samaiyah. Since she was born premature, the baby had to stay in the hospital three days later than her mother and Stewart felt disappointed when the baby wasn’t discharged with her. She wasn’t worried about her wellbeing because the doctor’s knew what they were doing, but the thought of not having Samaiyah home was difficult. “I was trying to be strong but it was hard, especially when I would go see her,” said Stewart. “Every time I left, I would have to put her back in her little incubator and it would just make me sad.”

The faith that Stewart had in the nurses and doctors made her optimistic about her baby’s health. The worries she once had faded away because she felt heard and taken care of. The hospital she induced labor at had given her a good experience especially with dealing with her condition. The staff was mostly women and women of color, which also made her feel seen.

However, that is not always the case, especially with COVID-19 around. There are issues surrounding health care for the Black community.

Racial disparities spanning from employment rates and health play a major role in the Coronavirus’s effect on Black people. The University of South Carolina found that members of the Black community are more likely to have diabetes, asthma, and heart disease, among other comorbidities, than their white counterparts. Poor nutrition only makes matters worse. America’s Black population is also more likely to live in food deserts-- they have less access to fresh fruits and vegetables due to low income or being far from healthy stores. Social factors stemming from structural racism -- a system of where public policies, institutional practices, cultural representations and social norms work in ways to maintain racial inequity -- allow this community to be more susceptible to these conditions.

While COVID-19 impacted employment for many communities, it also allowed for some people to work from the comfort of their own homes. But Black people couldn’t do that as easily. The Economic Policy Institute reported that many African Americans are more likely to be essential workers, and those who aren’t are likely to lose their jobs.

Once the lockdown began last spring, Black employees were far more likely to have to put their lives on the line as essential workers, and Essence Magazine, reported last spring that Black women are more likely to be essential workers during the pandemic and can’t afford a sick day.

Unanswered Questions and Underrepresentation

Dr. Allison Bryant from the Massachusetts General Hospital is a high risk obstetrician and has worked with Black mothers during this pandemic. She’s seen Black women who are essential workers and could not afford not to go to their jobs despite the pandemic. “Those were things that couldn’t be shut down and put them at greater risk, including our Black pregnant patients that are out there in the workforce,” said Dr. Bryant. This makes Black mothers even more susceptible to health complications.

Race contributes to health issues and also is a factor that determines the way patients are treated in the health system. According to a 2020 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, by experts at Harvard, NYU Langone and Massachusetts General Hospital, race is subtly inserted into medicine through algorithms and practice guidelines based on their patience’s background. Medical issues also arise because of a lack of empathy for Black patients. Representation for Black women within the medical field is rare. In 2015 the trends in medical education showed that Black graduates made up just 5.7 percent of the graduating class that year. Black women feel safer with doctors of the same race because they are more likely to be heard and cared for under their supervision. Another issue is the “strong Black woman” trope that causes people to have a perception that Black women handle pain well or don’t need as much attention.

Eternity Richardson was 21 and a junior at SUNY New Paltz when she found out that she was pregnant. On March 11, 2020 the school announced that classes would be moved online due to the Coronavirus and two days later New York went into quarantine. Not too long after the shutdown she took a pregnancy test after experiencing symptoms. She was shocked even though she had some speculation because of her late period and her increased appetite, which she assumed was due to the quarantine and being home all the time. Her reaction to finding out was a result of still being a college student, being in the midst of a pandemic, having to tell her loved ones and being a young Black woman who was pregnant for the first time.

While she normally doesn’t feel judged by her family, Richardson was scared to tell them the news, especially her mother. “I was more so wondering if they were going to be disappointed in me because I got pregnant and I’m still in college and haven’t graduated yet,” said Richardson. After telling them the news, she realized that it went easier than she thought and received their support, making the journey a little smoother. However, the reality of being pregnant during a pandemic and dealing with racial disparities also weighed on her.

Eternity Richardson posing for her maternity shoot. Photo credit: @jeffphotography_

Eternity Richardson posing for her maternity shoot. Photo credit: @jeffphotography_

“I was scared overall of not having the best health care and delivery because black women oftentimes are very underrepresented in terms of health. I did experience a lot of doctors being super passive on some of my concerns.”
— Eternity Richardson

She noticed that she went to a hospital that didn’t have many Black women as patients and under- representation in the staff. As a new mother-to-be, there were many things that Richardson wasn’t aware of and would look towards her doctors for guidance. They didn’t tell her much about the labor and delivery process and what to expect during that time. When she went to appointments, she found herself having to ask for information she wanted and felt that she needed to know about. Richardson began to do research of her own so she could make herself aware because she felt that the doctors weren’t being resourceful.

After being overdue for about a week, Richardson started bleeding and it raised concerns for her. She called the doctor because she thought she was going into labor. They told her that it wasn’t time yet and that this was just another part of the process. That left her with more questions, especially as a first time mother, and going to doctors appointments by herself didn’t make it any easier. “It was hard to understand everything going on with my body,” said Richardson.

Just like Stewart, Richardson’s labor was also induced. The original due date was Christmas Day but she ended up giving birth on New Year's Day, 2021. Richardson was in labor for 18 hours. The delivery went smoother than her doctor’s appointments because a midwife that she liked assisted in delivering the baby. Her mother was by her side the whole time with a mask on and wasn’t allowed to leave the room until the delivery was over.

Richardson understood that masks were necessary but felt weird about it. “At some points I didn’t even know who was in the room or recognize anyone,” Richardson recalled. “It felt very impersonal and just wasn’t an ideal situation.” Other than that, she was comfortable and gave birth to her son, Jahmel and fell in love at first sight.

“Wow I created somebody, he is half of me literally,” Richardson rejoiced.

In total, she spent three days in Mount Sinai hospital. After giving birth she was anticipating getting some sort of rest but it felt impossible. Nurses were constantly coming in and out and the baby was in the room with her the whole time rather than being placed in the nursery. However, Richardson saw the beauty in the journey to becoming a mother and would do it all over again.

Baby Jahmel days after delivery. Photo courtesy of Eternity Richardson

Baby Jahmel days after delivery. Photo courtesy of Eternity Richardson

While her delivery went well, the road leading up to it was filled with passivity from her doctors. The public policy and advocacy organization, Center for American Progress, reported that instances where health care providers don’t listen to Black women’s experiences or needs can lead to complications or worse, it could be life threatening.

According to Dr. Bryant at Massachusetts General Hospital, maternal mortality is rare but is more common within certain populations. In discussions surrounding this topic, she noticed an undercurrent of people not listening to Black women during their pregnancies or even when they would come back after having their babies. The patients knew their bodies, and knew when something was wrong and still wouldn’t receive the help they needed. So Dr. Bryant allowed mothers to come back with their families after birth and discuss their concerns, so that they wouldn’t be alone. However, with COVID-19 around, that campaign has been on pause.

For women who feel neglected in hospitals or mistrust doctors or health care providers, there are alternatives. Some people opt towards home births or birthing centers with the help of a doula -- a trained professional who provides physical and emotional support for mothers before, during and after labor to maintain their health. Chanel Porchia-Albert, founder and executive director of Ancient Song Doula Services in Brooklyn, NY became a doula in 2008 after giving birth to her first child. The experience she had with a midwife and doula at her home birth, inspired her. Porchia-Albert created her own affordable service to give women, especially women of color, the support and attention they need during pregnancy regardless of their background.

“You have this individual who can come in and offer you nonjudgmental support through the emotional and physical aspect of things, and help you advocate for yourself through your process,” Porchia-Albert explained.

Stewart’s original plan was to deliver at a birthing center after doing research about Black women’s mortality rates from giving birth in hospitals. She saw someone on social media who had a good experience at a birthing center and decided to go that route. She got in contact with the center she came across, especially after finding out that her cousin who had a baby right before her went as well. “It seemed like a pretty seamless process but ultimately I feel like it wouldn’t have worked out because I had preeclampsia,” Stewart said. The complications that arose would’ve caused her to be sent to the hospital anyways, and due to the fact that she was allowed only one support person, the doula couldn’t assist her at the hospital.

The restrictions formed by the pandemic affect doulas as well. Just like every other form of work, there are some adjustments that had to be made during these uncertain times. Ancient Song Doula Services already gave out mutual aid, but that became more expansive this past year. They give out 50 plus boxes of groceries and diapers, wipes and other essentials each month. Porchia-Albert also wanted to enhance providing information and education to those who are afraid of what it means to go to the hospital to have a baby. “Also to figure out alternative ways for folks to be able to feel nurtured and supported throughout their process, while still being mindful of that fact that there is a pandemic still happening,” said Porchia-Albert. She had to find creative ways to support the doulas that are supporting families as well. A process that was once so personal and intimate has been modified by technology and personal protective equipment.

Motherhood during a Pandemic - Two New Realities

Aside from the actual virus, COVID-19 has caused limited interaction which impacts pregnant women's experiences as it is generally a special time to share with loved ones. The fear of catching the virus and the general symptoms of pregnancy became their realities. Less interaction during this phase in their lives causes feelings of isolation and loneliness.

Before the Coronavirus changed the world as everyone knew it, friends and family were able to tag along on doctor’s visits and visitors were allowed in the room after the babies were born. Even outside of appointments and the delivery room, this was usually an occasion that brought people together and for mother’s it allowed them to have that village of support.

Both Stewart and Richardson, along with every other pregnant person during the past year, had to attend doctor appointments by themselves. As a first time mother and as a Black woman, having no back up during the appointments was frustrating for Richardson. “Going by myself in this new experience, didn’t make me feel like I wanted to go through this process alone,” said Richardson.

Richardson was a student when she first out that she was pregnant. The transition from in person to remote classes, dealing with the emotional and physical changes from her pregnancy and the pandemic became overwhelming. She took a leave of absence for the Spring 2020 semester. “It was horrible, I’m pregnant, I’m super tired, I’m missing classes and I can’t get Blackboard to work,” Richardson recalled. “I just needed to wrap my mind around one thing.” She also thought about the state of the world during that moment and the fact that she couldn’t go outside freely.

She eventually came back from her leave of absence and deals with the new reality of being a mother and the pressures of being a student. Her family at home gives her the support that she needs for her son, Jahmel even though she remains the most hands on with him. Although it can feel unbearable, she keeps her baby as motivation to keep going.

Unlike Richardson, Stewart regarded all of her prenatal appointments as regular doctors visits, so being alone didn’t feel too challenging. Her boyfriend was always right outside waiting for her. The only appointments that felt hard to do without someone else in the room were the ultrasounds. “It wasn’t a moment that I would imagine I would be by myself for,” said Stewart. Even though he was close by, seeing the baby in her stomach with her boyfriend by her side would’ve made those times even more precious.

Although she lives with her mother, brother and boyfriend, she sometimes feels alone. Stewart misses being able to see other family members and her girl friends, but they also hesitate to come around out of concern for the baby's health. However, she does remain thankful for the help that she receives in the house. “It’s still pretty difficult with their help so I always think that I couldn’t imagine doing this by myself,” said Stewart.

There are many things that Stewart wanted to do with her baby, Samaiyah, who is almost six months old. Little outings to the park, visiting loved ones or even taking her to run errands were what she anticipated the most. However, taking her out and possibly coming in contact with the virus seems to be too much of a risk to take. Being in the house so much has gotten to Stewart emotionally, and sometimes Samaiyah feeds off of her energy. The little moments when Stewart’s mom takes Samaiyah on car rides or when Samaiyah spends time at her other grandmother’s house, along with trips to the doctor are the times she is in different environments.

Isolation, keeping safe during a pandemic, and the emotions from pregnancy impact women’s mental health greatly. A study from the U.S National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health looked into worries specific to pregnancy and those that stem from COVID-19 and the depression and anxiety that they face as well as resilience. They found that Black women were more likely to meet the criteria for depression due to worries of unemployment, prenatal care, their birthing experience and needs after giving birth. Black women reportedly knew more people that died from the virus than their white counterparts and they also had higher rates of resilience.

In these times, being connected with loved ones is harder than before. The support that new mothers received pre-Covid is now virtual. “I think it’s hard, the notion of the village and the people who would have been in your house helping to take care of your baby and giving you a break so you could get some sleep are not available to you,” said Dr. Bryant.

The uncertainty in life, unemployment and fears of public health are impacting reproduction.
With stay at home orders in place, many people believe that this era would be reminiscent of the Baby Boom generation. However, researchers predicted that there will be a baby bust resulting in 300,000 to 500,000 fewer births this year. “People were expecting that there was going to be a baby boom right like everyone staying home and having babies but truly there was a decrease in our birth rates around COVID meaning fewer conceptions in the beginning of the pandemic,” said Dr. Bryant.

Vaccine rollouts have become more consistent with each day, and it could be a step towards some form of normalcy. There are controversies surrounding the COVID-19 vaccinations, especially for pregnant women. CDC recently suggested that pregnant women take the vaccine because they are more likely to get severely ill than non pregnant women. According to their recommendation, clinical trials to test the safety of vaccines during pregnancy is still underway. They also found that breastfeeding mothers who received the vaccine have antibodies within their milk and it can protect their babies.

The vaccine isn’t required but is supposed to help slow the spread of the Coronavirus. It is new to the public and has different effects on different people. With this in mind mothers, such as Stewart and Richardson, are contemplating the choice to go for it. Stewart is not against it, but wants to be sure that it is really safe. She remembers learning about Black people being used to test vaccines in school, and that makes her a little skeptical. However, as long as there are no damaging risks, she will get it. “I don’t want to always have to worry about catching this illness,” said Stewart.

There is still more that needs to be done to convince Richardson. She still isn’t sure how she feels and never believed in vaccinations. “As much as people think the pandemic is going to be over, it’s not,” Richardson said. “We have a whole new way of living.” She isn’t 100 percent on board but the more she sees people receive the vaccine, the more she thinks about it.

Despite their beliefs about the vaccine, one goal remains the same for all mothers; the ability to raise happy and healthy babies in this socially-distanced world.

Diana's Capstone

First Responders Experienced Conditions Similar to a War Zone During the Pandemic –– Now they Must Heal.

By Diana Testa

New York –– The pandemic came into the world like a tornado, sweeping up all the normalcy in our lives and turning it upside down. And as a result, we are fighting another crisis alongside COVID-19 –– mental health. There’s been lots of conversation around what people can do to cope with the general stress of the pandemic, but our disaster response workers were hit on an entirely different level. Like healthcare workers, EMTs and firefighters –– many of which are volunteer workers –– were thrown to the frontlines. And though the nature of these jobs was stressful even before the spread of Covid-19, they have gotten more than they ever bargained for.

Madison Engrassia –– an EMT in East Islip –– was working in what was the epicenter of the world at one point. “We had the highest call volume in the entire world,” Engrassia says. Her hectic day began the very second she clocked in at 6 a.m. and ran way past the end of her 6 p.m. shift. “We were going from one alarm to the next and there were usually around 10 holding, so we would get back around 9 p.m.,” she says.

According to SAMHSA –– Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration –– a study conducted in 2018 found that 69% of EMS professionals didn’t have nearly enough time to cope between traumatic events and as a result, suffered from depression, stress, post-traumatic stress, suicidal ideation, and a host of other functional and relational conditions.

“I remember specifically being told over the radio that I’m not getting what I need to take the patient to the hospital because there were no resources left for us.” Engrassia says. This was her last straw, and she literally sat down and cried. And she wasn't alone. "My supervisors told me that they would cry on their way to or home from work. It was a huge demand that we weren't used to at all,” she says.

EMT Madison Engrassia and her coworker Angela Halloran on duty for Exchange Ambulance, a volunteer squad based in East Islip, Long Island.

EMT Madison Engrassia and her coworker Angela Halloran on duty for Exchange Ambulance, a volunteer squad based in East Islip, Long Island.

The Already-Stressful Nature of The Job

Burnout and trauma are not rarities among first responders. Mental Health America –– the nation’s leading community-based nonprofit organization dedicated to mental health advocacy and assistance –– says that healthcare workers and first responders are experiencing conditions similar to a war zone, and it is crucial to provide them with resources to cope with the trauma.

The CDC agrees, saying first responders are feeling PTSD, and that frequent exposure to physical harm to themselves, in this case via Covid-19, is exactly akin to the violence of battle.

A survey conducted by MHA from June to September 2020 reported that 93% of healthcare workers during the pandemic experienced increased stress, 87% experienced anxiety, 77% reported frustration, 75% felt overwhelmed and 76% experienced exhaustion and burnout.

Doctor Amy Nitza, the Director of the Institute for Disaster Mental Health at SUNY New Paltz and a psychologist who specializes in providing mental health training for disaster mental health and trauma recovery, says that the pandemic has elevated the baseline level of stress that is experienced on a day-to-day basis by these workers. “I think it is important to note that the pandemic is an acute sort of trauma situation for a lot of people that are still doing their day jobs, responding to all kinds of other emergencies and being exposed to these other sorts of acute trauma,” she says. “Now on top of the chronic stress they experience daily, there are these waves of acute stress from the pandemic.”

Constant Changes in a Time of Uncertainty

Emergency agencies underwent abrupt and constantly changing protocols throughout the pandemic –– adding another layer of stress to the worker’s job. They prepared for every call as a Covid-risk, and wore full-body suits, eye protection, and N-95 masks. And as the pandemic unfolded, safety protocols differed and changed between non-centralized departments in New York.

County dispatch protocols changed in mid-March for fire departments in the Hudson Valley region after an enormous uptick in people reporting respiratory problems. Josh Simmons, a volunteer firefighter at the St. Remy Fire Department in Kingston and a part of the Research Associate Department at SUNY New Paltz, says he was notified if there was exposure, a positive test, or a quarantined person at the site. But there was a major issue with this information. “That’s all self-reported, and the dispatcher can only work with what they are told,” he says.

Firefighter Joshua Simmons outside of station 2 at St. Remy’s Fire Department. Photo by Diana Testa.

Firefighter Joshua Simmons outside of station 2 at St. Remy’s Fire Department. Photo by Diana Testa.

By April, his department was wearing PPE for every call. Though Simmons noticed a lag in the beginning of the pandemic at the station with following social distancing protocols and wearing masks at events. “Everyone came around eventually because the nature of the job is to trust each other,” he says.

Ulster County added a section about Covid-19 in their pre-call screening in effort to mitigate first responder’s exposure––which Ephraim Minskey, an EMT at New Paltz Rescue, felt did a great job of reducing some stress. Yet the fear of the unknown still crept in. “It sounds kind of silly but there was this fear of people not telling the 100% truth in the beginning,” he says. “Like if a mother was really worried about their daughter having some sort of allergic reaction but she also had a cough, they might neglect to tell us that because they feared how it would affect our response.”

A New Paltz Rescue Ambulance outside of a Covid-19 vaccine site at the Fairgrounds in New Paltz, New York. Photo by Diana Testa.

A New Paltz Rescue Ambulance outside of a Covid-19 vaccine site at the Fairgrounds in New Paltz, New York. Photo by Diana Testa.

The Need for Mental Health Support

As a group, this cohort has witnessed death, illness and tragedy –– the need for mental health support is dire. SAMHSA provides a one-hour training course by the Commission on Accreditation for Pre-hospital Continuing Education, CAPCE, created to address the mental stress first responders endure; it provides coping strategies, resources and exercises to help reduce the impact of traumatic events. The course was developed after the trauma first responders around the country experienced during the opioid crisis, and had to respond to an immense number of overdose calls.

The CAPCE also offers an online course, Service to Self, for EMS and fire personnel to address healthy coping mechanisms, techniques and how to individually and organizationally care for eachother.

Simmons says that since the trauma firefighters endured during 9/11, there has been a shift in the fire department culture surrounding mental health support. “It’s reflected in the training and attitudes but in terms of actually having services provided, they are exclusive to larger professional departments,” not smaller volunteer oganizations like his, he says.

Engrassia, on Long Island, says there were programs in place through her paid squads prior to the pandemic for traumatic events.“They'd have a team come talk to you after something completely traumatic that affected you in some type of way, such as an infant cardiac arrest, and there were resources to reach out to through the department,” she says.

Engrassia feels that there should have been additional support provided to them during the pandemic. “I really do think that there should have been something for us to cope because a lot of us just broke down eventually.”

Stigma Around Mental Health

Reaching out for help is not always easy in these fields, though. Simmons says that the stigma around mental health is a real issue among fire departments. “We have loose procedures for when we come back from a really harrowing experience, and just form a circle of support for each other to kind of agree that what we saw was messed up. It’s definitely not a group therapy thing, we don’t talk about our feelings too much,” Simmons says, explaining that it's in part out of fear that anyone will think they’re not up to the next emergency.

Joshua Simmons wearing his CSBA mask outside of the St. Remy fire station in Kingston, New York. Photo by Diana Testa.

Joshua Simmons wearing his CSBA mask outside of the St. Remy fire station in Kingston, New York. Photo by Diana Testa.

Though there has been improvement, mental health continues to remain stigmatized. Nitza says this is not about who can handle the stress and who can’t. “The conversation has been, from a mental health training perspective, a lot easier because we're not having to convince people that this is a problem for them in a way that we have in the past,” she says. Nitza feels like people's eyes have been opened a little more to the fact that struggling with mental health has nothing to do with being weak.

“Let's face it,” Simmons says, “in this culture we don't teach young men how to discuss their feelings. We have finally gotten to a point as a society where we teach them that it’s okay to feel.”

Access to Mental Health Resources

Engrassia had access to mental health resources with her volunteer squads, but only if you sought them out. “A team would come to you if you asked, but I think I'd much rather have had a monthly or bi-weekly scheduled meeting already set in motion because sometimes it’s hard to ask for help,” she says.

Now that the intensity and initial fear of the unknown the pandemic brought on in the earlier months of its arrival has dwindled down, these disaster response workers are left to cope with the things they endured. And many departments do not have professional mental health assistance available to workers due to tight budgets.

As a volunteer firefighter, Simmons is not provided with any kind of counseling service through the St. Remy station –– with a “shoestring” budget of around $200,000 for vehicles, their maintenance and fuel, and equipment. While departments with paid first responders and firefighters are often provided with healthcare, volunteer departments don’t have leftover money to spend on mental health programs. “It’s an impracticable thing with the budget we have and it’s not like we have volunteer therapists to talk to,” Simmons says. “Which is weird now that I’m thinking about it, because I’m a volunteer to do dangerous things!”

Firefighter Joshua Simmons outside of St. Remy Fire station 2. Photo by Diana Testa.

Firefighter Joshua Simmons outside of St. Remy Fire station 2. Photo by Diana Testa.

It’s not a stretch to think we will be faced with another crisis in the future. As we move out of the pandemic, it is imperative that EMS personnel are provided with resources to cope with the trauma, increased anxiety and depression, and burnout they experienced. While professional mental health services are mostly limited to larger departments within cities, small community-run departments need access to programs as well –– or at least need to further create a culture that acknowledges the importance of asking for help.

Unsung and Underappreciated: Retail Workers in COVID-19

Retail workers are exhausted, anxious and barely make enough to scrape by to do society's thankless work.

Danielle Clapham, 19, worked at Stewart’s in Defreestville, a suburb of Rensselaer, for nine months. (Photo courtesy of Jared LaBrecque)

Danielle Clapham, 19, worked at Stewart’s in Defreestville, a suburb of Rensselaer, for nine months. (Photo courtesy of Jared LaBrecque)

Ding.

The electronic buzzer sounds and Danielle Clapham glances up from the ice cream counter she’s scrubbing. A man in his early 40s steps into the Stewart’s shop in Defreestville and takes a right, disappearing into the narrow bread aisle at the front of the store.

The tension in the air is palpable. Clapham eyeballs the customer and gets a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach.

He isn’t wearing a mask. The risk of confrontation rises and the 19-year-old part-time Stewart’s employee gets increasingly anxious as she makes her way to the cash register in preparation. It seems like the “NO MASK, NO SERVICE” sign taped to the front door didn’t convey its message very well.

The man browses the humming drink coolers, meticulously choosing his selection of sugary beverages for a few minutes. He finally makes up his mind, lumbering towards the counter with two 12-packs of Diet Coke and a two-liter lemonade bottle tangled in his arms.

Clapham reaches underneath the counter. She takes a single blue surgical mask from a thin cardboard box as the customer approaches the register. A Plexiglass shield hung from the ceiling becomes Clapham’s main defense against the man’s potentially lethal exhalations.

“Would you like a mask?”

It’s less of a question and more of a polite but firm demand. She holds the mask up at his eye level and stares at him as he briefly glances at it.

“Oh, yeah,” he flatly mumbles. “Thanks.”

The tension deflates like the last helium balloon left hanging days after a kid’s birthday party. He grabs the mask from Clapham’s outstretched hand and stretches its loops over his ears as she begins to ring him out.

Minimum wage retail employees face dilemmas like Clapham’s just about every shift: constant anxiety about negligent customers. The convenience store chain Stewart’s, with over 330 stores from New York to southern Vermont, has a mask policy that states that “anyone not wearing a mask/cloth face covering will be denied admittance as per the NYS Department of Health emergency regulation.”

“UNSKILLED” AGAINST THE WORLD

Retail employees have heavy loads to carry on their shoulders. They work at some of the lowest paying jobs in the country, come face to face with hundreds of customers a day and are under substantial pressure to work despite the conditions. In fact, nearly 160 retail workers died from COVID since the pandemic started and over 35,000 were infected or exposed, according to the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union.

“I would get physically ill before I had to go to work,” Clapham said. “My stomach would hurt so bad every time because I didn’t want to go. I once had a panic attack there.”

This sort of paranoia over the possibility of catching COVID or dying from it leaves some workers desiring counseling. A study from Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health examined grocery store workers’ mental health while working. Of the 104 employees, 14 desired counseling for the constant risk of being exposed to COVID.

“The inability to practice social distancing consistently at work was a significant risk factor for anxiety and depression in this essential worker cohort...these mental health findings support the need to implement further preventive strategies and to provide additional mental health assistance to essential employees,” the study read.

The same study also indicated that customer-facing retail workers were nearly five times as likely to contract COVID compared to the average population. The risk of experiencing severe COVID symptoms isn’t uniform across retail stores’ workforce. On average, frontline retail workers are 40 years old, according to a study from the Urban Institute. About 20% of these 20 million workers are between the ages of 19 and 24, while another 20% are between the ages of 55 to 75.

This older age group is more susceptible to contracting COVID, too. Eight out of 10 deaths caused by COVID-19 are of people aged 65 and older, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They are also more susceptible to severe illness due to preexisting medical conditions such as heart disease, cardiovascular issues and diabetes.

When stress is thrown into the mix, it becomes a serious health concern.

“I would get physically ill before I had to go to work. My stomach would hurt so bad every time because I didn’t want to go. I once had a panic attack there.”
— Danielle Clapham

Stress increases one’s risk for heart disease, metabolic issues and mood disorders, according to University of Iowa industrial psychology professor Adam Butler. It also increases the likelihood of weight gain and unhealthy eating habits. There is a direct correlation between job stress and poor health, especially in a time when young people and older citizens are forced to work against an invisible, deadly threat for relatively little compensation.

“Generally speaking, we would prefer to reduce the occupational stressor if possible,” Butler said. “For employees, that might take the form of effectively managing workload or gently reminding customers to be kind. Employees can also take steps to manage their stress response through strategies such as muscle relaxation, a simple breathing meditation, or cognitively reframing the situation.”

Yet reminding the customer to be kind isn’t a “one size fits all” scenario.

Emily Fego is an employee at Plato's Closet, a chain of secondhand clothing stores, in Danbury, Conn. and worked there during the summer of 2020. During one of Fego’s shifts in early June, a middle-aged woman entered the store without a mask on. Since this is against Plato’s Closet guidelines, as they are a privately owned nonessential business, Fego asked the customer to wear a mask.

“She just said, ‘I have a medical condition,’ and kept walking,” Fego said. “I was so uncomfortable; this scenario was so new to me. My supervisor and I kind of just looked at each other like, ‘what now?’”

Fego’s supervisor approached the woman about wearing a mask. She claimed that masks gave her headaches and impaired her vision. According to InterMountain Healthcare, wearing a mask does not cause headaches due to CO2 buildup, as the CO2 simply passes through the mask. Additionally, according to findings by the American Optometric Organization, dry eyes and irritation can be caused by mask usage, but predominantly on those who wear them for a prolonged period of time; not for a few minutes.

Fego again told the customer to leave the store but this time, the woman agreed to leave only after she was rung up for a purse she wanted. Fego hurriedly cashed her out just to make her exit the shop.

“I remember washing my hands so obsessively the rest of my shift that they were all red and chapped,” Fego said. “I even threw out the scrunchie on my wrist because I was so paranoid it would somehow infect me with COVID.”

DANGERS OF THE JOB

Despite the inherent risks of retail like Fego faced, young people still take jobs similar to hers. While unemployment during the early stages of the pandemic soared, big name retailers like Walmart, Lowe’s and CVS boosted their part-time job openings. According to CNBC, Walmart hired over 400,000 workers in the early months of the pandemic.

When Clapham was looking for a summer job, she wanted something that would help her pay off her student loans but would also give her some spending money for the upcoming semester at SUNY New Paltz. She applied to her local Target and Starbucks, to no avail, until she walked into Stewart’s’ Defreestville location near Albany.

“It was a last ditch effort,” Clapham said. “I just went to Stewart’s because they had paper applications and I sent it in. The next day, the manager called me and I had an interview and then the drug test and then I was hired. It was a bad sign. That usually means no one else wants the job.”

It was her first retail job, as she used to work as a summer camp counselor as a teenager until COVID shut their operations down. Rather than interacting with naive children, she’s interacting with some adults who don’t understand the concept of personal safety.

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At Stewart’s, Plexiglass shields in front of the cash registers are typically hung from the ceiling with a small cutout at the bottom to allow payment and items to pass through. (Photo courtesy of MTA via Flickr)

Plexiglass shields are a common sight at retail stores, providing a physical barrier between an employee and a customer to reduce the risk of spreading the virus. As lockdown protocols relaxed in the summer of 2020, Plexiglass demand skyrocketed as businesses sought ways to get their employees back to work safely. According to Bloomberg, Röhm GmbH, a large German Plexiglass manufacturer, sold so many sheets of the clear shatterproof material that they ran out completely in June 2020. They had to wait until October for supply to return.

A report from the University of Washington indicated that while the shields can block respiratory droplets and protect from surface contamination, they do not replace the need for social distancing, mask wearing and practicing good hygiene.

There’s also the limitation of customers simply ignoring the shield.

“People talked around them and knocked them down all the time,” Clapham said. “Plus, there wasn’t a shield over the ice cream so people breathed straight into it...I felt annoyed. People acted like you can’t hear through plastic.”

If a customer somehow missed the shield or didn’t wear a mask and Clapham caught COVID, she wouldn’t be in a comfortable financial position, either.

Many can’t afford to take time off of work despite being sick. There’s an inherent pressure to “suck it up” and “muscle through it” in American workspaces. The U.S. doesn’t universally guarantee paid sick leave, meaning nearly 1 in 3 employees have no paid sick days.

“One time, I had poison ivy all over my body, like on my face and hands and my doctor said not to go to work,” Clapham said. “But no one would cover me. Everyone said no so I just had to go. I didn’t want to be indecent and not show up.”

Clapham simultaneously worked in a telecommunications role through Grassroots Voter Outreach, reminding people to vote during the 2020 election season. (Photo courtesy of Jared LaBrecque)

Clapham simultaneously worked in a telecommunications role through Grassroots Voter Outreach, reminding people to vote during the 2020 election season. (Photo courtesy of Jared LaBrecque)

A study by Accountemps, a staffing firm, concluded that nine out of 10 employees would go to work sick. Of the people interviewed, the majority were between the ages of 25 and 40, similar to the ages of retail employees likely to stay at one job for years. A similar study done at a Pennsylvania hospital found that over 80% of healthcare professionals went to work sick at least once in the span of a year despite 95% of them reporting they shouldn’t.

With such low wages, many simply can’t afford to take days off, with many relying on these jobs to pay the bills.

According to findings in 2017 by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, less than half of all service workers (restaurant employees, retail workers, low-paying healthcare positions) had no sick leave benefits. This was the lowest percentage rating of all employment sectors studied.

Most of that has to do with the paltry, low earnings retail employees receive.

WAGES AND...SUPPORT?

Retail workers also make much less than full-time workers with college backgrounds. They are paid just $10.10 per hour, on average, with the figure varying depending on the sector.

The unemployment rate of retail workers sits at 6.7% as of March 2021. A study by the Pew Research Center in March 2020 indicated that retail workers had the second highest risk of job loss due to COVID-19, behind the transportation industry.

About two-thirds of retail employees are full-time. Most of these full-timers between the ages of 25 and 54 are more likely to stay at a retail job longer than their younger and older counterparts. Therefore, older and largely vulnerable employees are more reliant on their jobs, while younger employees have the benefit of leaving with little consequence if they’re uncomfortable with the work environment.

“People on the whole did not feel positively about their low wages, or about the low wages offered in general to starting workers if they had longer tenure and a better rate,” said Kimberly Bowman, the Senior Projects Manager at the Brookfield Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. “This most often combined with issues relating to scheduling; low wages plus part time hours equals very low wage; and an acute issue with housing affordability in Ontario cities.”

The Canadian research organization’s primary goal is to improve business operations and employee satisfaction. While conducting research for the Institute’s project called “Job Pathways: From theory to practice,” Bowman found that apart from increases in wage, many grocery store employees also desired increased job security and, surprisingly, recognition for what they do.

“Assuming that pay is fixed for these people, as they're on a certain rate that might be set in a collective agreement, we heard from many people that they were confused or frustrated by the way that 'pandemic pay' was handled,” Bowman said. “There was a very consistent theme from interviews around the importance of being treated with respect by your manager.”

Clapham, on the contrary, never felt her manager was looking out for her. When she was overwhelmed at work one day over repeatedly feeling obligated to cover shifts that her manager needed her to work despite Clapham missing schoolwork, he offered an uncouth helping hand.

“He was like, ‘Why do you never ask me for help? I’m always here for you, you can come to me,’” Clapham said. “He gaslit me when I was having a mental breakdown.”

With big name retailers not offering comprehensive COVID-19 relief benefits or programs, job satisfaction decreases and stress increases.

“Resources help employees reach their goals and can be characteristics of the work itself, such as having freedom and autonomy to do the job, as well as characteristics of the work culture, such as a supportive supervisor or coworkers,” Bowman said.

The Brookfield Institute’s study of retail workers found that grocery store workers prioritized higher pay over all else when working during a health emergency, followed closely by job security and a fair work schedule. (Infographic courtesy of Kimb…

The Brookfield Institute’s study of retail workers found that grocery store workers prioritized higher pay over all else when working during a health emergency, followed closely by job security and a fair work schedule. (Infographic courtesy of Kimberly Bowman)

At Clapham’s Stewart’s location, the majority of employees were older than 40. With Clapham being the youngest employee there for months, she was the least likely to catch COVID but also was statistically the least likely to stay at the job for years. She also didn’t have anyone her age to support her, and with her supervisors always relying on her to come in on days she was off, she grew resentment towards her role.

After working at Stewart’s since June, reminding people to wear masks and cleaning up after them on top of covering understaffed shifts, Clapham quit in March after finding her self-worth and prioritizing her well-being.

“It was getting worse and worse,” Clapham said. “Things weren’t getting done and I had to pick up other people’s slack and I just said f*ck it.”

The past year has forced people to act in their own self interests. We feared for our lives venturing into public. Some of us still do. We wanted to get in and out of public spaces as quickly as possible. It was an “every man for himself” mentality. Appreciation for others and what they bring to our lives has been put on the back burner.

Teenagers, college students and older citizens alike working in the service industry all feel the lack of appreciation. Whether that be from customers, coworkers or managers, minimum wage employees carry a psychological burden on their shoulders.

“I don't think there is much that could remedy the anxiety I had and still have when working during the pandemic,” Emily Fego said. “There's parents not watching their children as they put hangers into their mouths and people wearing bandanas as masks as if that is going to protect anyone from anything. If I wasn't a broke college student, I would definitely not be working because the anxiety it causes is crippling.”