As more Mass. first responders test positive for COVID-19, police and fire departments lean on each other to maintain services

A tension fabric structures manufacturing company in Maine has repurposed their facility and transformed their local workforce to create grade-one medical masks for the local hospital during the Covid-19 pandemic. Because the company uses only U.S.-made materials, they have been able to avoid supply chain interruptions and now plans to continue making masks as part of their standard business model even after the pandemic passes.

Communities and medical professionals are working together to create their own mutual aid supply chain as shortages of personal protective equipment plague U.S. hospitals during the coronavirus pandemic. This "temporary but necessary" solution has helped disperse nearly 200,000 masks and thousands of gloves, gowns, goggles, and face shields to hospitals throughout the country by using using community members as the quality control and delivery team for equipment provided by local suppliers.

To address a shortage of personal protective equipment during the coronavirus pandemic, community members have begun to take on the task of producing face masks for medical professionals. From sewing masks to creating face shields with a 3D printer at a local library, communities are organizing and organizations are partnering to, at least temporarily, solve the problem.

The CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service Program trains individuals how to perform contact tracing in order to help slow the spread of infectious diseases. Success from this strategy has been reported in South Korea regarding the coronavirus, and now the U.S. officers are deploying to find out more about "how contagious it is, how it spreads, the severity of the illness, what groups are most likely to be affected."

In the town of Dufur, Oregon, local residents have been acting as firefighters to protect their fields and homes, using farming equipment to bury dry vegetation and tanks of water to put out the flames. While this has been the norm for years – because of the length of time it takes professional firefighters to arrive – the recent increase in wildfires is calling into question the safety of this informal fire fighting and figuring out how to work together with professionals.

Disaster preparedness in the form of close inter-agency coordination and communication helped Cuyahoga County, Ohio, protect its unhoused population from COVID-19 to a greater extent than Lane County, Oregon. Although Cuyahoga (Cleveland) is larger, with more resources, its effective responses still offer a model to Lane County (Eugene), where a scattered approach and homeless-camp sweeps proved counterproductive. In Cleveland, hotels were quickly enlisted to house people, reducing crowding in shelters by half and street homelessness by 30%. Its largest men's shelter ended up with a low infection rate.

During the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic, volunteers across Belarus worked together to collect and deliver personal protective equipment to frontline workers, despite the Belarusian government denying the spread of the coronavirus. Using social media to organize, the volunteers "served as a kind of SWAT team able to bypass the bureaucracy to obtain the necessary equipment."

Kittitas County is leading the way in Washington state in efforts to distribute the coronavirus vaccine thanks to having a strong disaster management system in place. The county is accustomed to responding to disasters, such as wildfires, and tapped the deputy fire chief of Kittitas Valley Fire and Rescue to lead the incident response team. He explains, "The infrastructure that we have with everybody communicating, everybody willing to be flexible and play whatever role's necessary and an understanding of (incident command system) and emergency operation centers gives us the framework to do it."

In an effort to help get accurate information to the communities who are being disproportionately impacted by the coronavirus pandemic, a program called Live Chair Health has started to train barbers "on chronic issues that disproportionately affect Black communities" and teach them "how to have conversations with their clients about the diseases." Aside from providing COVID-19 information, the initiative has helped patrons access primary care and address other medical issues such as high blood pressure.

Although the pandemic has brought on its own unique challenges, childcare centers in New Mexico have developed safe and effective techniques to keep children and workers safe. At the UNM Children's campus, children are limited to small groups, which reduces the risk of transmission if anyone tests positive. Other centers have implemented multiple screening levels during a child's arrival, before joining their groups. “Masks are not a political issue for 3 and 4-year-olds. Nor are they a threat to their freedom or anything else," said Kathrine Freeman, director of Santa Fe’s United Way Early Learning Center.