Retired basketball player Charles Barkley spoke about the impact of the pandemic on the Black community on CNN’s “The Color of Covid” this weekend.
“Unless we get better healthcare which is part of the system, unless we learn to work out better and take better care of our bodies, we are always going to be at a disadvantage,” Barkley said.
“There are some people who don’t have the information that we have, there are some people who have sat down in ghettos, and they don’t get the information…They live in food ghettos so I don’t want to be hard on everyone and I don’t want to blame people,” Barkley added.
In less than a month, Mount Neboh Baptist Church in Harlem, New York has mourned the passing of nine members due to coronavirus.
Since the pandemic hit, the church has heeded social distancing mandates and held services for via Zoom and Facebook Live. The church has more than 1,200 members and averages as many as 600 visitors each week.
“It was as if every other day I was getting a call that another parishioner had passed,” Rev. Johnnie Green stated. “We see gang activity from time to time. I’ve had to preside over the funerals of kids who were literally killed outside the doors of the church. But we’ve never seen anything like this.”
New York state is now at the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak in the U.S. The majority of the cases are recorded in New York City. Black and brown people account for the majority of coronavirus deaths, as seen in cities around the country.
After defying stay-at-home orders and encouraging parishioners to attend church, Bishop Gerald Glenn died from the coronavirus on the Saturday before Easter. Now his wife, two daughters and son-in-law are sick.
In a Facebook Live video on Friday, the bishop’s wife, Marcietia Glenn, thanked members of New Deliverance Evangelistic Church in Virginia for their prayers and support and said she and her family were getting better.
The Pandemic
Starting today, Walmart will require all of its employees wear face masks to prevent the transmission of the coronavirus. They will also be required to pass daily health screenings and temperature checks before starting their shifts. Shoppers will be encouraged to wear protective coverings.
According to researchers at Harvard, America needs to test half a million people a day before it can safely reopen the country and remain open. Currently, about 150,000 tests per day are completed. Roughly 20% of those have been positive. The World Health Organization recommends a positive rate of 3% to 12% before reopening an economy.
Despite concerns by his lawyers that he is vulnerable to contracting coronavirus, Bill Cosby won’t be leaving prison any time soon. Because he’s a sex offender, “inmate Cosby is not eligible for a reprieve by the governor,” Pennsylvania Department of Corrections spokeswoman Susan McNaughton said in a report. Cosby is serving a three- to 10-year sentence in a state prison in Collegeville, Pennsylvania.
States
In protest to partial lockdown orders, hundreds gathered in streets and outside several states’ capitol buildings on Saturday, a day after Trump called for demonstrators to “LIBERATE” states on Twitter. Many of the protesters, lacking face coverings and not practicing social distancing, called shelter-in-place orders tyranny.
Nearly sixty percent of Americans say they are more worried about stopping the virus’ spread while 32 percent are more concerned with the economic damage, a new NBC News/WSJ poll shows.
Over the weekend, beaches in Florida and South Carolina were reopened to the public as some states begin to loosen shelter-in-place restrictions. The reopening came on the same day that Florida Governor Ron DeSanis reported the state’s highest number of coronavirus infections. Mayors of Jacksonville Beach and Neptune Beach said their beaches would reopen exclusively for exercise.
