(NEW YORK) — A cold blast continued through Tuesday morning in the Northeast and eastern Great Lakes as the late season arctic air mass moved through the region with the wind chill hovering in the teens and singles digits. This airmass was so unseasonably cold for this time of the year that on Monday there were dozens of record cold high temperatures from New York City to Boston.
The arctic air mass sparked very intense lake effect snow squalls reducing visibility to less than a quarter of a mile with gusty winds and whiteout conditions. Some areas in western Pennsylvania and New York got 10 to 12 inches of snow from the lake effect snow.
Tuesday morning could potentially be the last cold morning for the Northeast, as a major warm up is expected with temperatures rebounding into the 60’s and near 70 by Thursday for most.
A new storm coming out of the West with severe weather outbreak is to be expected within the next several days across the South and into the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states. This storm already brought heavy rain and minor flooding to southern California with heavy snow to the mountains.
Severe weather begins in the Plains Tuesday night from Dallas to Oklahoma City, Kansas City, Missouri, and Des Moines, Iowa. Damaging winds will be the biggest threat for these cities but a few tornadoes cannot be ruled out.
Wednesday afternoon, the second highest risk for severe weather has been issued across the South including Alexandria, Louisiana; Jackson, Mississippi; and Memphis, Tennessee, with a possibility of strong tornadoes and damaging winds in excess of 75 mph.
Severe weather on Thursday moves into the I-95 corridor from Washington, D.C., to Philadelphia and just south of New York City, where damaging winds are expected, but an isolated tornado cannot be ruled out.
(SAN FRANCISCO) — A Princess Cruises ship arrived in California Sunday with multiple passengers and crew members aboard who tested positive for COVID-19.
The company’s ship, the Ruby Princess, docked in San Francisco after a 15-day Panama Canal cruise.
The cruise sailed from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, to Cartagena, Columbia; Puerto Amador and Puntarenas, Panama; and Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, before arriving in San Francisco, a spokesperson for Princess Cruises told ABC News.
Everybody aboard the ship was fully vaccinated and had to provide proof of a negative COVID test before boarding.
The spokesperson would not disclose how many guests and staff tested positive but said all the cases were either mild or asymptomatic.
“As with all Princess itineraries, this cruise is operated as a vaccinated cruise, as defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Guests and crew vaccination rates were at 100%,” a statement read. “During the cruise we identified some positive COVID-19 cases amongst our guests and crew members. They were all asymptomatic or only mildly symptomatic and were isolated and quarantined while monitored and cared for by our shipboard Medical team.”
The cruise line said guests who tested positive and did not complete the isolation period by the time the ship docked would “either return home via private transportation or were provided with accommodations ashore to hotels coordinated in advance for isolation and quarantine.”
Later on Sunday, the ship departed on its following voyage, a 15-day cruise to Hawaii, the spokesperson said.
The outbreak comes just two weeks after the CDC lowered the COVID-19 Travel Health Notice for cruise ships from Level 3, meaning “high” health risk, to Level 2, or “moderate” health risk.
During the height of the omicron wave, the CDC classified cruise ships as Level 4, the highest level and meaning “very high” health risk.
On the CDC’s Cruise Ship Status Dashboard, it states the federal health agency has started an investigation of the Ruby Princess due to the number of reported cases and that the ship “remains under observation.”
The dashboard did not state how many cases were reported on the shop and the CDC did not return ABC News’ request for comment.
However, the ship was color-coded orange on the CDC dashboard, meaning at least 0.3% of total passengers and/or crew tested positive for the virus.
The San Francisco Health Department and the Port of San Francisco also did not respond to requests for comment.
This is the second time since the beginning of 2022 that the Ruby Princess has docked in San Francisco with COVD-infected passengers aboard.
In early January, the ship arrived in The Golden City from a 10-day Mexico cruise with 12 cases of COVID-19 among passengers.
The cases were found after a quarter of the passengers were randomly tested for the virus.
The cruise industry was badly hit when the COVID-19 pandemic first struck. Destinations closed ports to ships and passengers were not able to leave once for several days after ships docked.
Two of Princess Cruises’ ships experienced some of the first known outbreaks. In February 2020, the Diamond Princess reported an outbreak as it docked in Yokohama, Japan.
A few weeks later, in March 2020, passengers tested positive on the Grand Princess ship as it traveled between California, Mexico and Hawaii.
(ATLANTA) — The highly contagious omicron subvariant BA.2 is now the dominant COVID-19 strain in the United States, according to data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday.
As of March 26, BA.2 is projected to account for nearly 55% of new COVID-19 cases in the U.S., estimates show. The predominance of BA.2 comes as some parts of the country begin to see an uptick in new COVID-19 infections.
In particular, in recent weeks, the Northeast has seen an increase in its reported infection rate. In the New York-New Jersey region, where BA.2 is estimated to account for more than 70% of new cases, infections are up by nearly 47% in the last two weeks.
Similarly, wastewater surveillance indicates upticks in the New England area, where BA.2 is also projected to account for more than 70% of new cases.
The signs of a resurgence come after dozens of states have moved to shutter public testing sites. With more at-home COVID-19 tests now available, most Americans are not reporting their results to officials, and thus, experts said infection totals are likely significantly undercounted.
The presence of BA.2 has not only been growing domestically, but also globally. Last week, the World Health Organization reported that worldwide, BA.2 accounted for 86% of sequences from the last four weeks.
“Omicron is sweeping the globe,” WHO technical director Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove reported last week. “Whether or not we will see BA.2 sweep the world — we’re seeing that happen right now. This is not a theoretical. Omicron is a highly transmissible variant of concern. BA.2 is more transmissible than BA.1, and what we are starting to see in some regions of the world, and in some countries, [is] an uptick in cases again.”
Scientists believe BA.2 is more transmissible than the original omicron strain, BA.1, though at this time, it is not believed to cause more severe disease.
Initial estimates show that BA.2’s transmissibility may range between 30% and 80%, and preliminary research suggests that if you were recently infected with the original omicron strain, BA.1, it is rare to get reinfected with BA.2.
Although the increase is partially due to BA.2’s increased transmissibility, Van Kerkhove added that the decision by many countries to lift public health and mitigation measures has also played a role in the upsurge.
“We certainly, will be seeing increase in cases,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, said during an appearance on BBC’s Sunday Morning, this week, further warning that it may be necessary to adopt some mitigation and masking measures should the nation see a resurgence in hospitalizations.
“We need to be prepared for the possibility that would have another variant that would come along,” Fauci said. “If things change, and we do get a variant that does give us an uptick in cases of hospitalization, we should be prepared and flexible enough to pivot towards going back at least temporarily to a more rigid type of restrictions such as requiring masks indoors.”
ABC News’ Sony Salzman and Eric Strauss contributed to this report.
(NORTH BAY VILLAGE, Fla.) — Joao “Julia” da Silva, a 23-year-old trans woman, has been missing since Thursday, March 24, when she was last seen by family members leaving her residence in North Bay Village, Florida.
Authorities say da Silva frequents the Miami, Miami Beach, and Wilton Manors LGBTQ communities. She was last seen in newly uncovered video surveillance at a gas station on Monday night in the South Miami area near Homestead.
“With this video footage, what concerns us is that she did appear disoriented,” said Paul Battaglia, the LGBT liaison officer at the North Bay Village Police Department. “She also did appear alone, which is unusual for her.”
She was wearing a black tank top, skirt, and pearl necklace with curly hair when she was last seen.
Transgender people are over four times more likely than cisgender people to be victims of violence, according to a study by the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law.
The department says they are taking the heightened risks against this population into account.
“We understand the statistics. They’re are at a higher probability for violence, self-harm,” Battaglia said. “So we did ask those pertinent questions at the initial intake. She does not suffer from any previous mental health history, no depression, no self-harm, because that’s very important to us.”
The investigation is ongoing. If anyone has information on Da Silva’s whereabouts, the North Bay Village Police Department urges them to reach out.
“That’s all we want, to make sure she is okay,” her best friend, Tatiana, told ABC-affiliate WPLG. They also reported that da Silva’s mother is flying in from Japan to help in the search.
(BLOOMINGTON, Minn.) — Americans returning from trips overseas are often greeted by border officers with a “welcome home.” But Abdirahman Aden Kariye, a Muslim American imam living in Bloomington, Minnesota, says there have been no such greetings for him.
Kariye, a son of refugees who came to the U.S. from Somalia, told ABC News that his airport experiences are defined by a deep sense of anxiety. He claims he is often “singled out” and taken into private rooms for hours-long interrogations by U.S. border officers.
“I’ve been stopped many times, almost 90 percent of the time,” Kariye said, recounting his experience traveling domestically and internationally.
But over the past few years, he alleges these additional screenings upon his return from international trips were coupled with a barrage of questions scrutinizing his religious beliefs and practices.
“Those experiences made me feel that I had to make myself less visible as a Muslim,” Kariye said, claiming that the questioning brought on so much anxiety that while traveling he stopped praying at the airport, stopped carrying religious texts written in Arabic and even stopped wearing his kufi, a brimless cap that some Muslim men wear around the world.
“I feel like I don’t have the freedom to be a Muslim in America,” he added.
Some of the questions asked by U.S. border officers, according to Kariye, included what type of Muslim he is, whether he’s Sunni or Shia, how many times a day he prays, what mosque he attends, his views on a particular Muslim scholar, whether he listens to music, whether he studies Islam and where he studied Islam.
“When you ask these types of questions about my personal beliefs … you’re telling me that you have a suspicion about Muslims, that they are, you know, inherently a threat to national security,” Kariye said.
The American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal lawsuit on Thursday on behalf of Kariye and two other Muslim Americans who allegedly experienced similar religious questioning at the border.
The lawsuit was filed against the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. border officials in the United States District Court for the Central District of California on behalf of Kariye, Mohamad Mouslli and Hameem Shah, who allege that they were subjected on multiple occasions to detailed questions about their religion by border officers.
Shah is a U.S. citizen who lives in Plano, Texas and works in financial services, while Mouslli works in commercial real estate and lives in Gilbert, Arizona, with his wife and three children, according to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit contends that the questions violated the plaintiff’s constitutional rights by violating their First Amendment right to freedom of religion, as well as the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), a law passed by Congress in 1993.
“Because this questioning imposes substantial pressure on the plaintiffs to hide their religious expression when they’re traveling – to alter it at the airport, and because it serves no legitimate law enforcement purpose, it violates the [RFRA], and it also violates the Constitution,” Ashley Gorski, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project, told ABC News.
ABC News reached out to DHS and CBP but requests for comment were not returned.
Kariye said that he was questioned about his religious beliefs and practices during at least five separate incidents at various airports upon returning to the U.S. from trips and vacations overseas between Sept. 12, 2017, to Jan. 1, 2022.
“By asking intrusive questions about Islamic religious beliefs, practices, and associations, the U.S. government is conveying disapproval of Islam,” Gorski said. “It is conveying a stigmatizing message; it’s saying that it views adherence to these religious beliefs and practices as inherently suspicious.”
According to the lawsuit, Kariye has been experiencing “travel issues consistent with placement on a U.S. government watchlist” since 2013.
When traveling for vacation or to visit family overseas, Kariye said that he frequently can’t print his boarding pass at the self-service kiosk until an airline employee makes a call to obtain clearance from a supervisor or government agency – a process that has taken up to two hours, the lawsuit alleges. And upon receiving his boarding pass, the travel document is marked “SSSS,” which stands for “Secondary Security Screening Selection.”
Kariye said that he doesn’t know why he might have been placed on this list.
Gorski said that Mouslli, one of the two other plaintiffs in the lawsuit, has also had similar travel issues and while “the government doesn’t confirm or deny someone’s placement on a watch list,” both men had “a series of repeated experiences that are consistent with placement on the watch list.”
Kariye said that some of those experiences in a post-9/11 America have made him feel that, as a Muslim, he is seen as “less American.” He said that he hopes by speaking out he can empower others who have had similar experiences.
“The important thing is that we want to change the condition of our Muslim community here in America. We are American, we are here to live here and be part of this American experience,” Kariye said.
“For me, I see this as part of my service as an imam – to be a voice for those who don’t have one and advocate for justice.”
ABC News’ Luke Barr and Quinn Owen contributed to this report.
(SAFFORD, Ariz.) — As the search for a missing 12-year-old Arizona girl entered its second week, the child’s mother spoke out, saying, “I’m scared to death.”
Betty Taylor was reported missing by her family eight days ago after she told her father was going for a walk and never returned to her home in Safford, Arizona, according to the Graham County Sheriff’s Office.
Over the weekend, community volunteers fanned out across the Graham County town, passing out missing person flyers to raise awareness about the child’s disappearance.
Police have also used helicopters, search dogs and drones to look for the girl, and officers on horseback and all-terrain vehicles have combed the desert area around the small town at the foot of the Pinaleno Mountains in southeast Arizona, about 130 miles from Tucson.
“I’m scared to death about what she’s going through. I don’t know if she’s out there on her own. I don’t know if she has a safe place to be. I don’t know if she’s eating,” the girl’s anguished mother, Bonnie Jones, told ABC affiliate station KNXV in Phoenix.
Betty was last seen on March 20 when she left her home at about 11 a.m., telling her father, Justin Taylor, she was going for a walk, according to a statement from the Graham County Sheriff’s Office. When she failed to return home by 6 p.m. that day, the family went searching for her before reporting her missing at 8 p.m. that night, according to the statement.
The girl is described as 5 feet, 5 inches tall and 135 pounds with hazel eyes and shoulder-length brown hair with red highlights. She left her home wearing a black sweatshirt with white letters on the front, a neon-colored baseball cap, blue jeans and turquoise and pink Vans tennis shoes.
She was also carrying a purple JanSport backpack, according to the sheriff’s office.
Sheriff’s officials asked that anyone with information about the girl’s whereabouts immediately call 911 or contact investigators at (929) 428-3141.
(TALLAHASSEE, Fla.) — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has signed the Parental Rights in Education bill, dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill by critics.
The bill bans classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity in kindergarten through third grade and states that any instruction on those topics cannot occur “in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards,” according to the legislation, HB 1557.
“We will make sure that parents can send their kids to school to get an education, not an indoctrination,” DeSantis said before signing the bill Monday.
The legislation states that the Florida Department of Education would have to update its standards in accordance with the requirements.
Under this bill, parents can also decline any mental, emotional and physical health services available to their children at school, and schools will be required to notify parents of their child’s use of school health services unless there is reason to believe “that disclosure would subject the student to abuse, abandonment or neglect.”
Parents could sue their school district if they believe there is a violation of any of these requirements or restrictions.
The bill is expected to go into effect July 1.
“I think the last couple years have really revealed to parents that they are being ignored increasingly across our country when it comes to their kids education. We have seen curriculum embedded for very, very young children, classroom materials about sexuality and woke gender ideology. We’ve seen libraries that have clearly inappropriate pornographic materials for very young kids,” DeSantis claimed at the signing.
The bill has stirred debate and controversy nationwide.
Critics say that this ban is aimed at ridding classrooms of LGBTQ content and discussion.
They say it will harm LGBTQ youth by shunning representation and inclusion in classrooms, putting the mental health and safety of this group at risk.
“Let us be clear: Should its vague language be interpreted in any way that causes harm to a single child, teacher or family, we will lead legal action against the State of Florida to challenge this bigoted legislation,” local LGBTQ advocacy group Equality Florida said in a statement.
They also said erasing the presence of the LGBTQ community from lessons implies students should be ashamed or should suppress their gender identity or sexual orientation.
Legislators against the bill argued that students are aware of gender identity and sexual orientation at a young age and said schools should be allowed to offer spaces to discuss these topics.
The Biden administration has denounced the legislation and met with LGBTQ youth and their families in the state.
“Laws around the country, including in Florida, have targeted and sought to bully some of our most vulnerable students and families and create division in our schools,” Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said in a statement.
He added: “My message to you is that this administration won’t stand for bullying or discrimination of any kind, and we will use our authorities to protect, support and provide opportunities for LGBTQI+ students and all students.”
Supporters of the bill say that these discussions and decisions should be left to the parents.
“What we’re preventing is a school district deciding they’re going to create a curriculum to insert themselves,” Rep. Joe Harding, the sponsor of the bill, told ABC News on the podcast “Start Here.”
He added, “Families are families. Let the families be families. The school district doesn’t need to insert themselves at that point when children are still learning how to read and do basic math.”
“This bill is not intended to hurt students,” added Florida state Sen. Kelli Stargel in debate on the legislation. “This bill is not intended to out gay children. This bill is intended to strengthen the family.”
More than six in 10 Americans oppose legislation that would prohibit classroom lessons about sexual orientation or gender identity in elementary school, a recent ABC News/Ipsos poll found.
(AUSTIN, Texas) — As wildfires continue to blaze through central Texas, one particular fire named Das Goat Fire has prompted Gov. Greg Abbott to declare a state of disaster, saying these wildfires pose an imminent threat of widespread or severe damage.
The Das Goat Fire resulted from a vehicle fire on Friday in Medina County and has now spread across the county and burned over 1,000 acres so far.
In a recent press conference, the governor said 19 state agencies and over 200 firefighters were currently responding to the disaster.
“The State of Texas continues to collaborate with local officials on the ground and respond to fire activity to keep Texans safe,” Abbott said.
Three homes have been lost and 37 others have been threatened, according to the governor.
Due to the high winds, dry heat and drought conditions, many areas throughout Texas will remain under a high to extreme elevated fire risk.
For those who may have been displaced or evacuated due to the fire, there is shelter currently at Loma Alta Middle School and more shelters will soon be announced.
(SALEM, Ore.) — A 24-year-old man was under arrest after police alleged he killed four people when his car left a roadway and slammed into a homeless encampment in Salem, Oregon.
Enrique Rodriguez was being held without bail on Monday in Salem on multiple counts of felony manslaughter, according to online jail records.
The episode unfolded at about 2 a.m. Sunday when Rodriguez’s sports car careened off a road, jumped a sidewalk and crashed into several tents, according to the Salem Police Department.
Two people were pronounced dead at the scene in northeast Salem and two others died after being taken to Salem Health Hospital, police said. Three other people, all believed to have been living in the homeless camp, were hospitalized with injuries.
The cause of the crash remains under investigation. Police said in a statement that investigators “believe alcohol may have been a contributing factor.”
A preliminary investigation by the Salem Police Traffic Team indicates Rodriguez was driving a two-door sports coupe northbound when the vehicle left the roadway and crashed into the encampment, pinning two people under the car.
The names of those killed and injured were not immediately released.
Rodriguez was the sole occupant of the car and was also taken to a hospital with injuries, police said.
He was later booked into the Marion County Jail on four counts of first-degree manslaughter and charges of second-degree assault, third-degree assault and six counts of reckless endangerment.
Police said the exact number of people at the encampment at the time of the incident was unclear and referred questions to the Marion County District Attorney’s Office.
The homeless camp was on the property of the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) and just feet from a railroad track, according to ABC affiliate station KATU-TV in Portland.
A KATU news crew reported on the same homeless camp about a week ago after neighboring business owners expressed frustrations over the city’s handling of the homeless problem.
Paul Chinn/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images
(NEW YORK) — As many Americans resume some sense of normalcy in daily life, a large sector of the population hit hard by the pandemic requires more assistance than ever and nonprofit groups are working tirelessly to deliver essential help for the increasing number of seniors in need.
Hundreds of thousands of older adults across the country struggled with hunger and isolation before COVID-19, and Meals on Wheels said it has doubled down its efforts to meet growing demand even as compounding issues of inflation, food costs and gas prices rock its channels of support and funds.
The Older Americans Act (OAA) Nutrition Programs, which celebrated 50 years this month, provides grants to states to help support nutrition services for people over the age of 60 throughout the country. Meals on Wheels President and CEO Ellie Hollander called it “foundational financial federal support” for its more than 5,000 community programs, but told Good Morning America why especially in the wake of the pandemic and up against new hurdles, it’s not enough.
“What people may not know is that Meals on Wheels is a public-private partnership, so the federal government provides approximately 40% of the seed funding — but we need individuals, we need corporations and foundations to step up to the plate to help fill that gap,” Hollander said. “Quite frankly, the funding has never been adequate to meet the growing demand, the increase in the senior population, not to mention inflation and, most recently, the cost of food and gasoline. Being that we do deliver the price of gas really does impact our operations.”
Hollander noted that Congress stepped up in the short term and delivered emergency funding to ensure seniors were not left behind during the pandemic, but said “the last amount of funding we got was a year ago in March 2021.”
“Congress finally passed the appropriations bills for 2022 and we were expecting, given the huge surge in need and more meals being served to more seniors, that both the House and Senate would approve a large increase in spending,” she explained. “However, Congress only approved a 1.5% increase — which is completely inadequate and we’re very concerned about a services cliff nationwide.”
As of 2022, eight out of 10 of the organization’s more than 5,000 local programs serve more home-delivered meals than they did prior to March 2020, Meals on Wheels reported in a recent fact sheet.
“The pandemic, I think, really created a lot of hardships for seniors and threw a whole new pipeline of older adults into homebound status,” Hollander said. “Our programs at the local level have been stepping up building capacity on a regular basis, not really knowing where the funding is coming from, but wanting to be sure that no senior is left behind.”
Logistics amid pandemic, inflation, rising fuel costs and disruptions in food supply
Holly Hagler’s program in Orange County served 10,000 people a year prior to the pandemic — 90% of whom live below the senior poverty level — with a million home delivered meals and hot lunches for group settings in senior centers annually.
“We went from serving about 5,000 hot meals per week to serving 30,000 frozen meals, a week,” Hagler told GMA of the surge when the program converted to grab-and-go. “It’s a 600% increase so the cost of it all has just been huge. We were spending about $3 million annually on just the raw food costs and on packaging supplies for the food. And as a combination of both the increase in volume and inflation, we’re serving more than 5 million meals annually. For us, a 10% increase in food costs equals, an average impact of $400,000 or more a year. That equates to about 75,000 fewer meals that we can serve.”
“Older adults have been hit the hardest by COVID and now they are really getting hit extra hard,” she said, adding that “a lot of them can’t afford to come to the senior center everyday anymore to get a hot meal because they’re living on fixed income with health care costs, gasoline and food prices, and they’re concerned.”
She said her program’s fleet of trucks that hit the road daily have been slammed by the soaring gas prices in just the past few months.
“Our gasoline bill in January was $9,500 and now we’re expecting it to be $12,500 this month, maybe pushing $13,000,” Hagler said. “For us that annual impact is 9,000 meals. So everything boils down to how many fewer meals can we serve because of these rising prices.”
San Antonio Meals on Wheels CEO Vinsen Faris, who has been involved with the organization since 1988, told GMA that “optimism was growing coming into the spring after the very, very tough two years we’ve had. However, with rising gas prices suddenly everything is getting turned on its head again.”
“When you have an organization like this that relies on so many volunteers — to deliver meals using their own vehicles and their own fuel to see those prices going up at the pumps — we started hearing from volunteers and they’re concerned,” he said. “I had a lady this week in a Prius of all things, when I was greeting her in the pickup line and she said ‘I just don’t know about these prices.’ So it’s been tough. Now with the fuel costs rising we’re going to see additional cost pressure on the food products themselves, plus our cost of fuel here just in the delivery of meals that we undertake.”
Another large hurdle currently facing Hagler’s program is that “people working from home that volunteered have returned to the office.”
“A lot of cities stepped up huge in our area and put their recreation staff in vehicles delivering the meals that we provide. But they’re opening back up and called back into regular jobs, so we’re really at a critical point here because of inflation and challenges with staffing — I’ve never seen turnover like this in my entire career of 35 plus years.”
Another critical challenge Faris has faced in San Antonio amid the pandemic “has been the wonkiness of the food supply chain.”
“That has impacted the food products that we could get in here to prepare because sometimes it was just, ‘surprise that’s not coming in’ and we’re not going to get it,” he said. “The biggest problem has been the cost increase. Since the start of the pandemic our actual meal cost of increased about 20%,” he said of their program that operates its own kitchen and is in the process of completing a new 44,000 square foot facility slated to open in October. “We’re producing 50,000 meals a week — so it’s really high volume but the cost has put a strain on it.”
Bigger than food deliveries
One silver lining Faris has found from all of this is the spotlight the pandemic has put on isolation and the need to look out for seniors.
“We’ve actually increased the number of clients that we were serving pre pandemic by almost 80% and it’s that public support that has allowed us to do that,” he said of the now 4,500 meals served daily compared to 2,500 before the pandemic. “We are just now getting back to pre-pandemic levels of volunteers … we have more meals delivered here in San Antonio, Texas, by individual volunteers than we have ever had in our 40 plus year history.”
“With older adults it’s not just income, it’s isolation, which is probably the single greatest risk factor they have because they’re not connected to resources. It is lack of capacity, whether it’s their mobility, declining cognitive capacity or just losing interest in cooking,” Hagler explained. “We really need people to stand up for seniors.”
Faris echoed a similar sentiment adding that “the more we can shine the light on our older adults who are having challenges — I believe that the public is going to respond and do the right thing.”
“We have to pay it back, these are the people who made it possible for all of us to be here today. They were our teachers in school, they were our firemen. Whoever they were, doing whatever in the community, they made it all possible for us, so we need to be taking care of them,” he said.
How Americans can take action
Hollander said there are three main ways to support The Meals on Wheels America organization.
First, donations to a local program. “A little goes a long way. This is when individuals can truly be heroes too,” she said.
Second, offer to volunteer. “It doesn’t mean that you need to be delivering meals, it can be skilled volunteering. Making phone calls or writing cards to let seniors know that someone’s thinking of them. That made a big difference during the pandemic.”
Third, advocate. “Particularly with federal funding not keeping pace with need and the gap growing further between those in need and not being served it’s very important for people to step up and advocate for more funding for this critically important 50-year proven program.”
Hollander, who has been in her role for more than nine years shared what she calls “the best fact that says it all: we can provide a senior with Meals on Wheels for an entire year for the same cost as being in the hospital for one day or a nursing home for 10.”
