Marcella Middleton grew up in foster care in Colorado and North Carolina and was taken to therapists and put on medications at a young age. “A lot of people who really weren’t experienced were trying to diagnose me,” she told a town hall on the youth mental health crisis in Winston-Salem last week.
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COVID-19
COVID-19
COVID deaths at federal facility in Butner, NC highlighted Jimmy Dee Stout was serving time on drug charges when he got grim news early last year. Doctors told Stout, now 62, the sharp pain and congestion in his chest were caused by stage 4 lung cancer, a terminal condition. “I’m holding on, but I would like to die at home,” he told the courts in a request last September for compassionate release after serving about half of his nearly 15-year sentence.
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About 300,000 people in North Carolina are on track to lose their government health insurance by the middle of next year. That estimate comes from the state Department for Health and Human Services, which is preparing plans to have Medicaid recipients’ family, health, and income information checked to make sure they are eligible for the insurance plan.
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It’s already known that hundreds of thousands of Americans would still be alive if every eligible person had gotten vaccinated against COVID-19. Now new research strongly suggests that many more of those “excess deaths” in Ohio and Florida were among people with Republican voter registrations. It’s perhaps unsurprising that Republicans were more reluctant to get vaccinated against the novel coronavirus, which has so far killed more than 1 million in the United States and more than 6.5 million worldwide.
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The U.S is now two and a half years into the COVID-19 pandemic and while we have thankfully made tremendous progress since the hell of those dark and chaotic early days, many of the most disturbing events from that period haven’t receded all that far in the rear-view mirror. It seems like just yesterday that hospitals and morgues were overflowing, even as then-President Donald Trump was promising that the crisis would magically “disappear” by Easter of 2020, and he was issuing a seemingly endless series of scientifically invalid observations and statements.
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WASHINGTON — COVID-19 boosters shots are on track to become as frequent as the annual flu shot, though high-risk people may need more than one dose per year, Biden administration officials said Tuesday. “For a large majority of Americans, we are moving to a point where a single annual COVID shot should provide a high degree of protection against serious illness all year,” White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator Ashish Jha said during a briefing.
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The latest poll results from the the Axios/Ipsos Coronavirus Index show that Americans are exhausted with COVID-19 and its variants, with a majority saying they don’t believe they will ever be rid of the virus in their lifetimes. The results, released last week, are the latest indication that while the current BA-5 variant continues to spike infection levels and spur new waves of hospitalizations...
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WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden has tested positive for COVID-19 and is experiencing mild symptoms, the White House announced Thursday morning. Biden, 79, is fully vaccinated against the virus and has twice received booster doses, according to the statement. He is taking Paxlovid, an antiviral prescription medication that is meant to reduce the severity of symptoms and the duration of illness.
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Health concerns lead Democrats to be the biggest proxy voting users, but Republicans Cawthorn and McHenry top the NC delegation After two years of a temporary provision to allow remote voting in the U.S. House, the top 36 users of the proxy voting system are all Democrats, though Republicans have also taken advantage of it.
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Asylum-seekers in a Mexican shelter share their stories of hope and disappointment The inner courtyard of Casa del Migrante in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, looks like a day care center. Plastic toys are scattered from one end to the other. Tiny baby clothes hang on the chain link fence, drying in the sun.
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In a red brick house on the south side of El Paso, Texas, Susana Correa sits in front of a wall of five computer monitors, the biggest filled with lists of the names of hundreds of LGBTQ asylum-seekers waiting to cross from Juárez into El Paso. To her left, one monitor features a long string of WhatsApp conversations with asylum-seekers — more than 200 messages await for her response. Sharing the screen are recorded messages from her coworkers who are interviewing people waiting in Juárez, administering COVID tests and arranging for border crossings.
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Compromise bill funds local "earmarks" for the first time in several years WASHINGTON — Democrats and Republicans forged agreement early Wednesday on a spending package that will fund the government for the next eight months, as well as provide billions in emergency funding for COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine. The announcement means Congress should be able to avert a government shutdown
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"We've known for years what works in public education, but we've allowed our differences and our fears to stand in our way." State Board of Education Chairman Eric Davis told members the House Select Committee on an Education System for North Carolina’s Future last week that the state must rapidly increase the number of skilled professional psychologists, social workers and school counselors to help students after two years of pandemic stresses.
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