COVID-19

Today marks the start of the new school year for those on the traditional calendar. But with the highly contagious Delta variant, many are wondering what this academic year will look like for the more than 1.4 million students attending public schools in North Carolina.

Just when schools were getting ready to reopen for the new school year, cases of COVID-19 started surging in the United States, driven in large part by the more contagious delta variant. School administrators around the country are working to bring students back into the classroom safely, while still providing kids an enriching learning environment.

GREENSBORO -- Lightning flashed across the Greensboro sky just outside the Guilford County Schools’ administration building.  None of the 50 or so parents, politicians, and school children standing under a clump of trees ran for cover, a fact cheered by a speaker revving up sign-toting, anti-maskers before the start of a school board meeting.

The Delta variant of COVID-19 is “several-fold” more transmissible than the Alpha variant, making mask mandates in schools more important than ever, a Duke University professor of pediatrics said Wednesday.  Dr. Danny Benjamin’s advice comes as most of North Carolina’s 1.5 million school children prepare to return to classrooms and school boards wrestle with whether to adopt mask mandates amid surging COVID infections.

Limitations of government record keeping, journalism conventions likely helping to obscure the true impact of COVID-19 on migrant communities It’s long been established that agricultural workplaces are among the nation’s most dangerous. The latest census on fatal occupational injuries by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that...

Lack of access, "Trump effect" both acting as roadblocks COVID-19 vaccines are hard to come by in Bladenboro, the small southeastern North Carolina town that was the center of a COVID-19 cluster that pushed its home county into the red zone on a virus alert map.

Department is now required to adopt workplace standards for COVID for healthcare workers – whether others will be covered remains in question The U.S. Department of Labor is adopting new emergency standards to protect healthcare workers from COVID, while its North Carolina counterpart has gone to court to defend its position that the potentially fatal disease is not a workplace hazard.

New guidelines for fully vaccinated people to remove masks are both rooted in science and too early In other times, a “masks off” announcement might have been celebrated. Instead, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stepped straight into controversy. The confusion was palpable.

The total number of vaccinations dropped by 23% over one week in April, an indication that North Carolina still faces challenges in achieving its vaccination goals. Now the state Department of Health and Human Services wants to direct vaccination efforts toward neighborhoods where few people have gotten shots.

When Tal Blevins first heard about the Restaurant Revitalization Fund, he hoped it would be the sort of help that he and his fellow restaurant owners had been anticipating for more than a year.

But it didn’t take Blevins long to realize someone hadn’t accounted for the real costs of opening a restaurant. When he analyzed the conditions of the revitalization fund, which was within the larger $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act, it quickly became apparent it wouldn’t significantly help his Greensboro restaurant, Machete.

The state has a list of agencies and pharmacies who will vaccinate people in their homes for COVID-19, but the list has some holes It’s become easier and easier for most people to find available COVID-19 vaccine appointments but getting vaccinated poses a particular challenge for homebound seniors.

WASHINGTON — Florida’s Nova Southeastern University joined a small group of U.S. colleges on April 1, when the private research university announced that it would require all students, faculty and staff to be vaccinated against COVID-19 before returning to campus this fall.

The red Honda parked on Debee Anderson's lawn saved her and her daughter's life when they fled Hurricane Florence in September 2018. Anderson was picking up medication for her daughter and about to return to her Spring Lake home when a state trooper told her she couldn't, because of river flooding.

Legal loopholes in the moratorium fail to protect some renters Kerston Rankins put all her plans and belongings for a better life in boxes when she moved to Winston-Salem. Five chests of clothes, three cases of DVDs and several other keepsakes, which she and her husband loaded in the car and drove up from Statesville.

Supporters' pleas for school district to allow Jordan High chorus teacher to continue virtual instruction prove unsuccessful     Late last year, Corrine Huber gambled big when she decided to accompany her husband to Denmark for his work.  At the time, it seemed like a safe bet for the Durham Public Schools’ chorus teacher. The Board of Education had implemented remote learning for the rest of the school year.

Nonprofits, food banks expand, but still struggle to serve all the people who can't afford groceries  A crew of workers recently parceled flour, bags of broccoli, bottled water, bread, and other essentials into boxes, as vehicles lined up in the parking lot of a Durham apartment complex.