Emergency Preparedness and Response:
January 27, 2021

COVID Vaccine Update

For the third week in a row the Orange County Health Department has not received any first dose allotment of COVID-19 vaccines from the NCDHHS. The lack of first dose allotment will not affect or delay the second vaccines for community members who have already received their first shot. Anyone who has received their first vaccine from the Orange County Health Department will be contacted to make an appointment for their second dose by phone or email in a timely manner.

“As of January 24, 2021, all first doses of vaccine have been exhausted and it is not clear when we will be receiving more vaccine from the state.” said Orange County Health Director, Quintana Stewart. “Until the vaccine supply is significantly increased it will be weeks or perhaps months until we can complete vaccinations for Phases One and Two. We understand this must be frustrating for our community members to hear and we want let you know that we share in your frustration.”

The Health Department is currently scheduling health care workers, long-term care residents and staff and older adults ages 65 and up for appointments (Phase One and Two). There are 1.6 million people over the age of 65 in North Carolina. In Orange County there are approximately 22,000 people who are 65 years of age or older. Other vaccine providers You can get your vaccine from Orange County or other health care providers. To expedite the vaccination phases, please only book once with one provider. Appointments are required to better manage crowds and to track available supply of vaccine and you will need to get your first and second doses from the same provider. Once you receive a first dose, do not book another appointment with a different provider.

For appointments with other providers:

• UNC Health - Visit the Get Vaccinated page or call 984-215-5485 between 8 a.m. and 5p.m. Monday-Friday.
• Piedmont Health Services - Visit the COVID-19 Testing and Vaccination page or call919-545-3452.
• COMING SOON! Hillsborough Pharmacy - Visit their Home Page or call 919-245-1212.
• Duke Health - Visit the COVID-19 Vaccines Update page to join the waiting list. If you are a Duke MyChart user, you can check Duke MyChart regularly to view appointment availability.
• Cone Health - Visit the COVID-19 Vaccine Information page to join the waiting list.
• Durham Veterans Affairs Health Care System - Call 919-286-0411 and dial 0 for the operator to schedule an appointment if you are a veteran at high risk or a veteran frontline essential worker. The VA will reach out to more veterans as additional supplies become available. See the system’s website for more information. See the COVID-19 Vaccine for High Risk Veterans to see the listing of veterans eligible now for vaccination through the VA.

Please make an appointment with one provider and do not double book.

Simplified Registration
The Orange County Health Department registration process has been simplified in order to streamline the process. For people in Phase One and Two, you may either sign up by filling out this form or by calling 919-913-8088. The call center is open seven days a week from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Call center staff are available to help register in Spanish and other languages.

Once you have either completed the vaccine interest survey or have registered by phone, you are on the waitlist and there is no need to call back to check your status. You will be contacted by Orange County staff to schedule your appointment when a slot becomes available, but it may be weeks or months. People who are not currently in Phase One and Two should wait until they are eligible to register. If you have left a message, there is no need to call back. A staff member will be in touch with you as soon as they can.

What to Do While You’re Waiting for a COVID-19 Vaccine
Vaccines are one important tool to fight COVID-19, but in order to end this pandemic it is still important to adhere to the following safety measures:
- Wear a mask.
- Stay 6 feet apart from others whenever possible.
- Wash your hands.
- Stay home if you are sick.

“Vaccines give us great hope that we can return to a more normal existence in 2021, but we are currently living through the most difficult and deadly part of the pandemic. Please keep your guard up against this virus until we can all be vaccinated,” said Orange County Health Director, Quintana Stewart.

More information about COVID-19 vaccines in Orange County, NC may be found at www.orangecountync.gov/getyourshot

Commonly Asked Vaccine Appointment Questions

Are you on the Vaccine Waitlist?

When you sign up with Orange County, you will get this message:
Thank you for registering with the Orange County Health Department to receive the COVID-19 vaccine. You are REGISTERED. You will be contacted by Orange County staff to schedule your appointment when a slot becomes available. It may be weeks or months, depending on the available supply of vaccine. Please be patient. It is not necessary to call and check on the status of your appointment. We will contact you when it is time to schedule your appointment.

Please disregard this email, if you've already scheduled your 1st dose vaccination or have received your vaccine elsewhere. Thank you for your patience. We hope to be contacting you very soon.

Learn more about COVID-19 in Orange County, please visit https://www.orangecountync.gov/Coronavirus

Orange County Health Department is not the only place to get a COVID-19 vaccine. See a list of other providers above.

COVID-19 Vaccine Appointment Scheduling Guide:

DO:
• Call 919-913-8088 to schedule an appointment. This is the only phone number available for appointment scheduling for the Orange County Health Department. Our scheduling line will be available seven days a week from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
• Call back later, if you don’t reach us.  Due to high volume and staffing we can’t return calls.
• Please be patient! We understand your frustrations with the COVID vaccination process. We feel the same frustration due to the limited doses of the vaccine and we are training additional staff as quickly as possible to answer calls and emails.
PLEASE:
• Wait until it is your turn! Even though you may be anxious, please DON’T call to schedule (or fill out the vaccine interest survey) before you are eligible. We are currently scheduling Group 1 and Group 2 (adults 65 or older) only.
• Don’t call 919-913-8088 for general inquiries. In order to make appointments as quickly as possible, we will use 919-913-8088 for VACCINE SCHEDULING ONLY. For general information:

                        • Visit our website at www.orangecountync.gov/getyourshot
                        • Email covid19vaccine@orangecountync.gov
                          • Call our general COVID hotline at 919-245-6111.

Myth: Ivermectin, normally used to kill heart worm in pets, will kill COVID

Fact: Ivermectin tablets are approved for use in people for the treatment of some parasitic worms (intestinal strongyloidiasis and onchocerciasis) and ivermectin topical formulations are approved for human use by prescription-only for the treatment of external parasites such as headlice and skin conditions such as rosacea. Ivermectin is FDA-approved for use in animals for prevention of heartworm disease in some small animal species, and for treatment of certain internal and external parasites in various animal species.

FDA is concerned about the health of consumers who may self-medicate by taking ivermectin products intended for animals, thinking they can be a substitute for ivermectin intended for humans. People should never take animal drugs, as the FDA has only evaluated their safety and effectiveness in the particular animal species for which they are labeled. These animal drugs can cause serious harm in people. People should not take any form of ivermectin unless it has been prescribed to them by a licensed health care provider and is obtained through a legitimate source.

SPANISH: https://www.fda.gov/animal-veterinary/product-safety-information/carta-de-la-fda-las-partes-interesadas-no-use-ivermectina-destinada-animales-como-tratamiento-para

ENGLISH: https://www.fda.gov/animal-veterinary/product-safety-information/fda-letter-stakeholders-do-not-use-ivermectin-intended-animals-treatment-covid-19-humans

COVID-19 Safe Business Contest

Read the press release.

The Orange County Health Department would like to recognize local businesses that have been vigilant in ensuring that their staff and customers feel safe, secure and well-served during the COVID-19 pandemic. Recognition for these businesses will happen through a contest where Orange County residents can vote.
Voting
The contest will be split into three categories, including:

Best business who were very careful to keep their customers safe from COVID-19
Best business who took great care in keeping their employees safe from COVID-19
MVP: The overall best business who took on the daunting challenge of a global
pandemic and knocked it out of the park Voting is open until Sunday, February 28th.

Contest Winners

Each winner will receive a trophy and $1000 in advertising support in the form of advertising on Chapel Hill Transit buses.

The Health Department encourages the Orange County community to vote to show appreciation for these wonderful businesses. This contest is open to all businesses- not just food businesses. This includes child care centers, schools, tattoo artists, pools, veterinarians, accountants, dry cleaners, any businesses in Orange County.
For more information, please visit http://orangecountync.gov/EnvironmentalHealth

COVID-19 Testing Events

For the most up-to-date information on testing please visit: orangecountync.gov/testing.

Daily testing will continue Monday through Saturday from 9 am to 6 pm in Chapel Hill at the R7 parking lot at 725 MLK Blvd., Chapel Hill, NC 27514.
Pre-registration is encouraged: https://lhi.care/covidtesting

Daily testing will continue Monday through Friday from 9 am to 5 pm in Hillsborough at the Whitted Human Services Building at 300 W. Tryon St. Hillsborough, NC 27278.
Pre-registration is encouraged: https://unityphm.com/campaigns/starmed.

You may find other Orange County testing sites, not associated with the Orange County Health Department, at this link:
https://www.orangecountync.gov/DocumentCenter/View/11576/Coronavirus-Testing-Chart-PDF

For other testing location in North Carolina, use this link:
https://covid19.ncdhhs.gov/about-covid-19/testing/find-my-testing-place

Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith will run the Biden administration’s task force on health equity. “The Biden-Harris team has been really clear on saying that our response and recovery needs to be equitable,” she said.

Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith Takes Aim at Racial Gaps in Health Care

By Roni Caryn Rabin
Jan. 8, 2021
The New York Times

Growing up in the United States Virgin Islands, Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith saw firsthand what can happen in a community with limited access to health care. Her father, Moleto “Bishop” Smith Sr., was only in his 40s when he suffered a debilitating stroke that left him partly paralyzed and with slurred speech.

The cause was high blood pressure, which could have been treated but had never been diagnosed. Without prompt access to advanced treatments, “the stroke was allowed to run its course,” Dr. Nunez-Smith, 45, recalled in a recent interview. Her father never fully recovered.

“He was a champion and a fighter,” she said. “But my memories are of a father who had to live life with this daily reminder of how we had failed in terms of our health care. I don’t want another little girl out there to have her father suffer a stroke that is debilitating and life-altering in that way.”

Now, tapped by President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. to lead a new federal task force, Dr. Nunez-Smith, an associate professor of internal medicine, public health and management at Yale University, will address a terrible reality of American medicine: persistent racial and ethnic disparities in access and care, the sort that contributed to her father’s disability.

Dr. Nunez-Smith has an expansive vision for the job, with plans to target medical resources and relief funds to vulnerable communities but also to tackle the underlying social and economic inequalities that put them at risk.

Her goals are ambitious, experts noted.

“For so long, we’ve been setting our sights on the more achievable goals and attempted to say, ‘We probably can’t have totally equitable care, so let’s at least make sure minority patients get insurance, or at least make sure there’s a health clinic in their community,’” said Dr. Utibe R. Essien, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine who studies racial disparities in cardiovascular disease. “This is a great opportunity to stretch and reach for what’s been imagined for decades, if not centuries,” he said.

Racial health disparities represent a vast, structural challenge in this country, made all the more stark by the raging pandemic. Black, Latino and Native Americans are infected with the coronavirus and hospitalized with Covid-19 at higher rates than white Americans, and they have died of the illness at nearly three times the rate, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“Making sure communities hardest hit by the pandemic have access to safe, effective vaccines remains a priority,” Dr. Nunez-Smith said. But “what’s needed to ensure equity in the recovery is not limited to health and health care. We have to have conversations about housing stability and food security and educational equity, and pathways to economic opportunities and promise.”

Many factors have contributed to higher rates of infection and severe disease in minority communities. Black, Latino and Native Americans are more likely to live in crowded households than white people, and less likely to be able to work from home. Minority Americans have higher rates of underlying health problems that increase their risk for severe Covid-19, and they often have limited access to medical care. Asian-Americans have been infected at a lower rate than white Americans, yet have had a slightly higher rate of both hospitalizations and deaths.

While almost every American now knows someone who has been affected by Covid-19, in communities of color at least one third of people have lost someone close to them. “Think about the individual toll that takes,” Dr. Nunez-Smith said. “These are people’s parents, friends and loved ones. We cannot overstate the disproportionate impact.”

Dr. Nunez-Smith currently serves as one of three co-chairs on an advisory board advising the Biden transition team on management of the pandemic. Colleagues describe her as a brilliant scientist with a gift for building consensus, a sharp contrast to the politically driven administration officials who guided the response during the Trump era.

“She is a national gem,” said Dr. Harlan Krumholz, a professor of medicine at Yale School of Medicine. “This is a person who spends her days thinking about how we can make health care more equitable, and what interventions can address these disparities.”

At Yale, Dr. Nunez-Smith wears many hats — practicing internist, scientist, teacher, mentor and the director of several research centers. She directs Yale’s Equity Research and Innovation Center, which she founded, as well as a research collaborative funded by the National Institutes of Health to study chronic disease in Puerto Rico, Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, and the United States Virgin Islands.

But she also is involved in community organizations like the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven and Connecticut Voices for Children. “She’s not sitting in her ivory tower,” said Christina Ciociola, senior vice president for grant-making and strategy at the foundation. "She is out on the front lines," Ms. Cicociola said. "She sees patients, and she's seen friends and colleagues suffer with this illness. She's lost people to the pandemic."

Dr. Nunez-Smith’s early interest in medicine was encouraged by her mother, a retired nursing professor, who instilled her commitment to community or, as she puts it, “the village.” Her grandmother played a pivotal role in her life, as did her godfather, a surgeon who still practices in St. Thomas.

Her mother filled the home with medical books. “She said I could read anything I could reach,” Dr. Nunez-Smith recalled. “I started early on learning medicine and nursing texts, and became fascinated with the human body and biology.”

Over time, she came to understand the importance of health policy and its repercussions in places like the U.S. territories, where lower federal payments for services affect access to care and high quality medical care is limited. (A recent study she co-wrote found that older women in the U.S. territories with breast cancer waited longer for surgery and radiation, and were less likely to get state-of-the-art care, than their counterparts in other regions of the United States.)

After graduating from high school at age 16, Dr. Nunez-Smith attended Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, majoring in biological anthropology and psychology, and went on to earn a medical degree at Jefferson Medical College, now called the Sidney Kimmel Medical College.

She completed a residency and internship at Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and then a fellowship at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars Program, where she also received a master’s degree in health sciences.

Some of her research has been informed by her own experiences as a Black female physician, she said. She still encounters hospital patients who assume she has come into the room to collect their meal tray or empty their trash, even though she introduces herself as a doctor and has a stethoscope hanging around her neck.

In studies of attitudes toward the health care system among Black patients, she has found that distrust is rampant. A survey of 604 Black Americans, carried out in May jointly by Dr. Nunez-Smith’s Equity and Research Innovation Center and the N.A.A.C.P., found that more than half believed Black people were less likely than white people to get access to coronavirus tests when testing was scarce, and that they were less likely to be admitted to the hospital when needed. More than half thought that hospitalized Black patients were less likely to “have everything done to save their lives.”

The survey also found that over one-third of Black respondents had lost a job or seen their hours reduced. Nearly one-third said they did not have enough money to buy groceries and had trouble paying rent. Economic pressures keep them going to work even when they fall ill, Dr. Nunez-Smith said.

“People are very worried about surprise bills for seeking care, and this is very different from other countries, where cost is not a consideration,” she said. “How do we make sure there are positive incentives for coming in and getting tested and getting care?”

All of these factors must shape the response to the pandemic, she said. Testing sites must be located in or near low-income communities, for example — they cannot be only drive-through sites used by people who have cars.

Hotel rooms should be provided to people who don’t have space at home to quarantine or isolate after an exposure or positive test. Workplaces must take the steps necessary to keep essential workers safe.

“One size won’t fit everyone — you can’t just say, ‘Everybody stay home and stay safe,’” she said. “There are people whose jobs require them to leave their homes, and if we don’t have a message to them, that’s our failure.”

Those hesitant to take a Covid vaccine must be reassured that the vaccines are safe and effective — and that they won’t get a surprise bill later. They need to be told in advance about the predictable side effects.

Scientists who study health equity acknowledged the task force’s goals will be difficult to accomplish, but welcomed the incoming administration’s ambitious focus.

“Yes, it will be hard and we will need to take iterative steps,” said Dr. Clyde W. Yancy, chief of cardiology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “But begin is exactly what we should do, and considering the link between poor health, poor education, poor housing and poverty, a case can be made to target economic development in the most vulnerable communities as an important first step.”

Like many Americans, Dr. Nunez-Smith is juggling work and community responsibilities while raising school-aged children amid a pandemic. She knows the pressures are bound to increase as she takes up difficult new responsibilities.

“Everyone needs a village,” she said. “I feel grateful to have a great supportive spouse, family members. I had a friend drop off several meals yesterday, and someone else is going shopping for us. It’s our village we’re trying to keep safe.”

31st Annual Pauli Murray Awards

“The Orange County Human Relations Commission is accepting nominations for the 31st Annual Pauli Murray Awards, which are presented annually to an Orange County youth, adult, and business that have served the community with distinction in the pursuit of equality, justice, and human rights for all citizens.
The Pauli Murray Awards are presented to those who embody the attributes and spirit of Pauli Murray by encouraging diversity in the workforce, promoting and participating in community activities related to social justice issues, or demonstrating positive roles in human relations.

Nomination forms are available online and the deadline is Friday, February 12, 2021 at 5:00 pm EST. Adult (over 18) and Youth (students in grades 6-12 or a college student 18 or younger) nominees must reside in Orange County. Business nominees must operate or conduct business within Orange County. For additional information, contact the Human Relations Commission at (919) 245-2487 or Human_Relations@orangecountync.gov.

North Carolina COVID-19 Cases

The North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services (NCDHHS) reports 733,010 COVID-19 cases, 8,915 deaths, and 3,305 hospitalizations as of January 27, 2021. 630,774 people have received their first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, and 97,374 have completed their series as of January 25, 2021.

There are currently 6,501 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 80 deaths in Orange County as of January 27, 2021. 15,860 people have received their first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, and 3,994 have completed their vaccine series, as of January 27, 2021.

For more information regarding live updates (NCDHHS updates the site every day around noon), please visit the NCDHHS website.

Orange County Health Department also has a COVID-19 dashboard webpage, with information on COVID-19 data in the county.

COVID-19 Community Resources

For more information on COVID-19 community resources in the county, please visit our webpage. Resources on specific topic areas, such as food access, education, housing, and others, are all accessible on our website, or at the links below.

Contact Information

For general questions (not urgent) about 2019 Novel Coronavirus, contact NCDHHS at: ncresponse@dhhs.nc.gov or 1-866-462-3821 to address general questions about coronavirus from the public.

If you are an individual or a medical practice with questions about COVID-19, call the Orange County Health Department at (919) 245-6111. During business hours (8:30a.m. to 5 p.m.)

Contact Kristin Prelipp, the Orange County Health Department’s Public Information Officer at: kprelipp@orangecountync.gov or 919-245-2462

Orange County Health Department:
Web: www.orangecountync.gov/coronavirus
Phone: 919-245-2400
Email: covid19@orangecountync.gov
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