Laurels & lances: Giving, feeding, showing
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Laurel: To the right prescription. Match Day is something medical students look forward to from their first day of class. It’s the day they find out the hospitals where they will do their residency years. It’s a celebratory day, with students getting their assignments all together. At Pitt, it’s a real party, held at the Petersen Events Center. At least, it usually is.
But in the coronavirus shutdown, that can’t happen. So what happened to the money medical students raised for their big bash?
It turned into way to help the community. The $11,000 is going to the Birmingham Free Clinic for health care, North Side chef Claudy Pierre’s efforts to feed single moms and kids, and 412 Food Rescue’s nutritional recovery work.
These important causes met their match in the students’ generosity.
Laurel: To feeding the soul. When everyone is stuck inside, they need something to entertain and entice. For some people, it might be the strange Netflix saga that is “Tiger King.” But for others, it’s a 97-year-old Latrobe woman doing live baking on Facebook.
Lucy Pollock’s kitchen lessons are going viral. They started with Easter buns and followed up with nut rolls. If you haven’t caught her yet, try Sunday at 1 p.m. when she will be back on Facebook Live making Italian wedding ring cookies.
Pollock’s page has garnered almost 9,000 followers.
It isn’t that there aren’t other chefs and celebrities out there doing demos and offering culinary advice. That’s nice, but it’s not what everyone needs right now. For some people, they need that feeling of family, like they are in the kitchen with their own grandma. And that’s what Pollock has on the menu.
Laurel: To the information we need. Allegheny County isn’t just informing residents about how many positive cases of coronavirus have been identified. It is also providing a map.
No, it isn’t showing the addresses of the infected. It’s a color-coded representation that shows which municipalities are hot spots. It’s a smart idea, because it can give an easy, obvious cue of where the danger is greatest and where staying inside is most critical.
Lance: To the information we don’t have. So why can’t the state of Pennsylvania do the same? While the state does updates of the overall numbers, and does breakdown the numbers by county, it doesn’t provide them by municipality.
In Allegheny County and Philadelphia, that’s not such a big deal because there is a county health department. Most of the state’s 67 counties don’t have that office to do the local work. The state should provide it.