Federal Program’s Quick Response Helps U.S. Manufacturers Supply Critical PPE and Other Domestic Products
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Today, the Center for Urban and Regional Studies (CURS) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill announced a new report, Gearing Up: MEP Center Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic, documenting the wide range of support theManufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP), a program under U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology, is delivering to U.S. manufacturers responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. The report details how, despite the pandemic’s profound impacts on manufacturing, MEP Centers are helping manufacturers safely operate and meet the nation’s critical needs for personal protective equipment (PPE).
The state Department of Health and Human Services and a health project at NC Central University are working together to get information about COVID-19 vaccines to historically marginalized communities.
“We’ll be making sure the outreach DHHS wants reaches the underserved communities in the counties where we are working,” said Deepak Kumar, director of the Julius L. Chambers Biomedical Biotechnology Research Institute and the founder of the Advanced Center for COVID-19 Related Disparities at NCCU.
ACCORD had been working in nine counties, but has a grant allowing it to expand, Kumar said.
ACCORD has been coordinating coronavirus testing, conducting in-person surveys and hosting virtual town halls on COVID-19 in rural counties.
The COVID-19 pandemic and recession have profoundly affected the lives of North Carolinians. Our economic future and daily life suddenly changed in March 2020, marking the start of a period of deep uncertainty.
The Carolina Tracker project is a website offering day-to-day information on how North Carolinians’ lives have changed since the onset of the pandemic. Produced by faculty, staff and students in the department of city and regional planning in UNC-Chapel Hill’s College of Arts & Sciences, the Carolina Tracker presents easy-to-use, publicly-available data for policymakers and North Carolinians to use.
Datasets available at the Carolina Tracker site include:
Layoffs, labor force participation, and unemployment insurance