COVID-19 disparities force a public health reckoning
Marjorie Childress, Shaun Griswold and Aliya Uteuova
New Mexico In Depth
The coronavirus feels the way it looks in widely circulated images, said Cleo Otero: like a thorn.
“That’s how it felt inside my body, especially my lungs. It was painful. Like it was scratching the inside of your body. I could really literally feel the virus inside my body.”
Otero’s first clue she was sick came at the laundromat in Albuquerque where she usually buys a bag of spicy chips as she waits on her clothes. On that Friday in July, she couldn’t taste the chips, and she couldn’t smell them either. A headache came on, the kind with intense pressure behind the eyes. At first she thought it was due to her diabetes because she hadn’t been consistent lately with her medication. By Saturday, she was laid out on the couch in the one-bedroom apartment she shares with her partner and 7-year old son. By Sunday, she had a fever, her throat and
COVID disparities force a public health reckoning - New Mexico In Depth
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City s $2 5 million relief fund depleted in eight hours » Albuquerque Journal
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Copyright © 2020 Albuquerque Journal
Demand for pandemic relief has far exceeded the capacity of a city of Albuquerque program established to help residents ineligible for other assistance, with applications exhausting funding in less than a day.
Officials said Monday that the nearly $2.5 million Community Impact Fund that opened for applications Dec. 7 “went in eight hours.” All told, 3,233 people applied the first day they could. The city was able to fund grants for 1,213 households.
“That just really underscores the very, very deep need in our community of people who have been left out of other forms of assistance,” Michelle Melendez, the city’s director of equity and inclusion, said in a media briefing Monday.