Lastest from Eastern Shore Community College President Dr. Jim Shaeffer

YES! Your Eastern Shore Strong

It has been an extraordinary several days and we’ve found ourselves having to make extraordinary decisions.  This has been true for your Eastern Shore Community College.   

Our initial response to the COVID 19 crisis was extending our spring break for an extra week, that is until March 20.  During that week we spent time planning and preparing for our next steps in responding to the crisis. 

We moved most of our courses to remote delivery and started those classes on March 23.  At that time, we made the decision that we could best respond to the coronavirus by having faculty and staff work at a distance.  All faculty and staff were asked to begin teleworking as of 1:00 p.m. on March 24. 

I am very happy to report that students are taking classes, faculty are providing learning opportunities for their students and the services of ESCC are very much available by phone, email, or on the web.

They say you learn a lot about people during times for crisis and let me tell you that I’ve learned that our faculty, staff, and students are nothing but resilient.  Students are finding new and different ways of accessing strong Internet signals.  

Our faculty have fully embraced remote teaching and learning and are finding new ways of teaching.  And our staff are keeping ESCC open for business utilizing multiple ways of communicating with students and others. 

I want to be clear, ESCC is open for business with our highest priorities of keeping our students and employees safe, assisting students to finish this semester, and advising and enrolling students for summer and Fall 2020.

What is most impressive about our students, staff, and faculty is how they’ve responded with their own YES!  That is Your Eastern Shore.  To a person they have adopted a YES! culture of hospitality, which is more than offering good customer service.  It is going the extra mile to better understand the needs of our students and our community and responding in a thoughtful and welcoming way.

ESCC employees continue to demonstrate a YES! culture of service.  With all that has happened the last several days, ESCC employees joined the Eastern Shore Foodbank in distributing food in the ESCC parking lot. 

In addition, many employees and their family members  – while keeping their social distance from each other and the residents – provided some needed cheer by painting on the outside windows of Heritage Hall to the delight of those inside,

This sense of service is also apparent in how they serve their colleagues, by being there for each other, offering encouragement and support.  It hasn’t been easy.  And with the future still uncertain, we are sure to have challenges ahead of us.  But we are persevering in our spirit of YES!

I have no doubt that what I see in my staff is a reflection of all of the Eastern Shore.  Those on the Eastern Shore are a group of individuals who are resilient and have immense capacity for serving others.

I want you to know that your Eastern Shore Community College is open for business and will continue serve the Eastern Shore during this crisis.  There is no doubt in my mind that we will come out of this experience a better college, even more in tune to the needs of the Eastern Shore.

We are, as one staff member said, YES! Your Eastern Shore Strong.

Updated release from Charles Kolakowski Northampton County Administrator

The Northampton County Board of Supervisors urges our citizens to follow Governor Northam’s Statewide Closure of Certain Non-Essential Businesses as issued on March 23 rd closing all restaurants, dining establishments, food courts, farmers markets, breweries, microbreweries, distilleries, wineries, and tasting rooms. They may continue to provide take-out and delivery services.

Violations of these closings are a criminal offense and subject to prosecution. There are 13 business categories considered essential that will be allowed to remain open such as grocery stores, pharmacies, gas stations, and banks.

The complete list can be found on the Virginia Department of Health web site. Any brick and mortar business that is not included in one of the 13 allowed business categories listed and cannot adhere to the 10 patron limit and social distancing guidelines must close.

Moreover, all public and private in person gatherings of 10 or more individuals are prohibited by the Governor’s executive order. The executive order can be read in its entirety by following this link:
https://www.governor.virginia.gov/media/governorvirginiagov/executive-actions/EO-53 Temporary-Restrictions-Due-To-Novel-Coronavirus-(COVID-19).pdf

Northampton County will be closely following the State guidelines and we encourage you to do the same. The situation may change daily.

Everyone, please stay home. We encourage all visitors to reschedule visits to the Eastern Shore.

Everyone must do their part to flatten the curve. Please be considerate of small towns and counties on Virginia’s Eastern Shore that do not have the medical staff or capacity for visitors during this pandemic. Stay home. If your primary residence is not on the Eastern Shore, we urge you not to
visit at this time.

We know that everyone loves Northampton County, Cape Charles, Exmore, Nassawadox, Eastville, and Cheriton and the Eastern Shore this time of year; however, we would like to urge our friends from out of the area to please remain home to help keep our small community safe and do their part in preventing the spread of the virus. Isolation is key. Thank you and stay healthy.

This announcement is from Nancy Stern, CEO of Eastern Shore Rural Health.

This public announcement comes to inform you that on the night of Friday, March 27, 2020, Eastern Shore Rural Health became aware of a positive COVID-19 result for an employee of the Onley Community Health Center.  Eastern Shore Rural Health has been working closely with the Accomack County Health Department to conduct an investigation into close contacts of the positive case.  All those identified as close contacts will be contacted directly by the Health Department.

COVID-19 can cause mild to more severe respiratory illness. Experiences worldwide indicate that children are in the lowest risk group for severe disease.  Symptoms can be extremely mild in some cases and in other cases can include fever, cough, and difficulty breathing. In a small proportion of patients, COVID-19 can cause complications, including death, particularly among those who are older or who have chronic medical conditions.

COVID-19 spreads primarily through respiratory droplets produced when an infected person coughs or sneezes.  Please know that Eastern Shore Rural Health, in partnership with the Eastern Shore Health District, will be available to answer any questions that you may have. The Eastern Shore Health District COVID-19 call center can be contacted at 757-787-5880 between the hours of 8:15 AM –5 PM Monday through Friday. We thank you for your time and your attention to this communication.

In a post to the organization’s site on Wednesday, the National Restaurant Association said that as many as 3% of restaurant owners have already permanently closed in response to the pandemic while 44% have temporarily closed. In the next 30 days, a full 11% of restaurants will close permanently. According to a survey of 4,00 restaurant owners and operators, the data showed the following:

• Nationwide, sales were down 47% during the period from March 1 to March 22
• 54% of restaurant operators have switched to off-premises service only
• Seven in 10 operators have had to lay off employees and reduce the number of hours worked
• Roughly half of them anticipate more layoffs and hourly reductions over the next 30 days
• More than six in 10 said they’ve had to reduce their operating hours

Hudson Riehle, the Association’s senior vice president of research, said the data shows we are in “uncharted territory.”

“Association research found that 54% of operators made the switch to all off-premises services; 44% have had to temporarily close down. This is uncharted territory,” said Riehle. “The industry has never experienced anything like this before.”

Those living in Washington DC on the morning of September 11, 2001, had a rapid education of local and national responses to emergencies. NRF and NIMS became part of the daily vernacular. They quickly learned who did what, and when they could do it. The Pentagon lies within Arlington County’s jurisdiction. It was the responsibility of the Arington County Fire Department, who were first to the scene, to lead the response to a plane crash and building collapse.

The National Response Framework “NRF” (and its implementation program, NIMS) is managed by FEMA as part of the Department of Homeland Security. Since Democrats keep asking “WHY ISN’T TRUMP DOING MORE?!”, here’s why.

“NRF” = National Response Framework “NIMS” = National Incident Management System “Nitwit” = 90% of the people commenting on Trump’s response to Covid-19.

The NRF is a general framework of guidelines and concepts for how the United States should leverage its maze of overlapping agencies, protocols, and legal jurisdictions. NIMS is the implementation of architecture.

NRF/NIMS is designed to be “all-hazard” – general enough to cover most crises, scalable enough to expand from local to state, regional, or national levels. Given that the US is still a union of sovereign states, the first level of authority is local.

NIMS has five levels of activation: 5 = single incident,managed by 1-2 people 4 = full resources of local jurisdiction 3 = state-level response, multi-agency 2 = regional response, multi-state 1 = national response, full federal involvement This is called tiered response.

The idea is that because most crises begin local (i.e. terror attack or natural disaster), local resources are the tip of the response spear. Where an event encompasses multiple locales (tornado, for example), municipal/county governments share resources to respond.

When a crisis exceeds local resources, a request is made by the Incident Commander to involve the state. The governor, as chief executive, may declare a state of emergency. This activates Level 3, often followed by 2 and 1 – but in that order.

As each level of activation “switches on”, new agencies arrive on-site and personnel re-sort by crisis management role/specialty (see chart below). The idea is to maintain continuity of operations, account for all stakeholders, and create a unified approach.

This flow of authorizations is what the nitwits miss in their rush to criticize the President.

Unless we want a constitutional/human-rights crisis on our hands (like FDR’s handling of Japanese-Americans in WWII), the feds cannot intervene at scale lacking a governor’s request.

NRF/NIMS is characteristically useful for single-incident disasters or crises.

Compare the incident management professionalism of FEMA and others during Katrina in 2005 (terrible) versus Sandy (improved) in 2012. On a smaller scale, consider the emergency response efforts post-Joplin tornado in 2011.

The US is good at this kind of one-off crisis and is getting better each time, from the National Guard deploying under state orders to FEMA and the US military. Further, the US is known for civilians’ self-drafting into effective disaster relief, like the famed “Cajun Navy”.

Sustained, long-dwelling crises are different stories. That same maze of agencies and protocols that works effectively under shorter time constraints begins to fall apart under decentralized conditions.

The more specialized the response required, the fewer bodies can be thrown at the problem. It’s one thing to have an average man or woman sort through debris, hand out water and supplies, or put on bandaids. It’s another to monitor and treat a viral outbreak.

NRF/NIMS places an enormous burden of individual accountability on each person, from the Incident Commander all the way down to the water-bottle-person. But as the stakes of even a single error grow, the risk of inaction or uncertainty does too.

In addition to the human capital chokepoint, specialized infrastructure is a major limiting factor. The US’s medical sector is simply not built to handle a multi-regional viral outbreak all at once. Nor is NIMS necessarily built to manage this level of coordination.

We’ve seen this before–the 2009 outbreak of H1N1 (swine flu), which infected a reported 59 million Americans, killing more than 12,000. It took President Obama six months to declare the swine flu pandemic to be a public health emergency. Compared to Obama in 2009, the current administration declared a public health emergency for COVID-19 only two weeks after the first reports emerged. But, specific containment and treatment measures still start at the state and local levels.

FEMA and the other agencies under the executive branch cannot just take over the process. The protocols and processes exist for a reason.

And here we are. A nation panicked by a virus it doesn’t understand, nor remembers the much-worse (to date) outbreak of swine flu from just eleven years ago, being egged on by incompetents that thrive when they bash Trump.

But this nonsense about how Trump should be doing more is based on ignorance of our particular laws and emergency management protocols in the US. Trump can either go full authoritarian or follow the process and manage what he can.

This is Cape Charles Christian School’s 3rd Grader, Isabella Bono-Evans, utilizing her fraction skills for functional learning in her first time making a secret family recipe! This is how we are doing “school” at home in addition to the wonderful work packets that her teacher, Mrs. Leslie Savage, has provided! 

Chincoteague has given notice to all lodging providers to close up shop from March 29 until April 27. The order applies to all “hotels, motels, cottages, bed and breakfasts, rental homes, Airbnb’s, and campgrounds.”

The order also states that residents should be prepared to provide ID, although “Access is not restricted at this time but such restriction may become necessary.”