25 volunteers! That’s great! Please be sure to pass on my thanks to everyone! Without volunteer’s such as yourselves, I would be hard pressed to put a timeline on when the pruning could have or would have been completed. And thanks for consolidating all the brush piles, too!

Our City guys were busy this morning picking up the brush.

Mike Gies
Parks and Forestry Superintendent
City of Mequon

Throughout the pandemic, members are discovering ways to connect, cope, and care for each other and people in the communities they serve.

by Joseph Derr

Social distancing, self-quarantines, and lockdowns, all of which have been necessary to reduce the spread of COVID-19, help keep us safe but also isolate us, creating feelings of loneliness and anxiety.

Rotary clubs are rising to the challenge to mitigate these negative effects, both in their clubs and beyond. Along the way, members are discovering new ways to serve.

The science of connection

Physical isolation, compounded by the stress of the health crisis and its disruption to daily life, is having a psychological impact. The Lancet, a leading medical journal, published a review of previous studies that found a high incidence of irritability, depression, and emotional exhaustion among people in quarantine. Another recent study that focused on China in early 2020 found that anxiety increased during quarantines, especially among the elderly, who are more likely to live alone.

Why do we suffer psychologically when we’re isolated physically? For Sylvia Whitlock, a semi-retired marriage and family therapist and member of the Rotary Club of Claremont, California, USA, the answer is simple: “Isolation is a stress-producing state, as one of our human needs is for connections.”

Contact tracing has been a cornerstone of public health for much of the past century, even before the novel coronavirus.

By Diana Schoberg, Illustrations by Gwen Keraval in The Rotarian Magazine - October 2020

In 20 July 2014, a Liberian-American man collapsed in an airport in Lagos, Nigeria, a city of more than 10 million people. Three days later, he was diagnosed with Ebola, the country’s first case. The arrival of the Ebola virus in one of the world’s largest cities was a scenario that, as one U.S. official noted at the time, generated worries of an “apocalyptic urban outbreak.” 

But what could have been a ghastly epidemic was averted; only 19 additional people in Nigeria contracted the disease, and seven died. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the country free of Ebola on 20 October, three months after that first case was diagnosed.

To achieve that, the work of the Rotary-supported polio eradication program — the strong partnerships that had been built between the Nigerian government and other organizations, as well as the infrastructure that had been put in place — proved to be key. The Nigerian health ministry swiftly declared Ebola an emergency and created a command center, modeled after those used by the polio program, to coordinate its response. A team of 40 doctors trained in epidemiology who assisted in the country’s polio eradication campaign were reassigned to tackle Ebola. Technical experts from the polio program trained health workers on contact tracing, case management, and more.  

From that first patient, called the “index case,” health workers generated a list of nearly 900 contacts, diligently tracked down by a team of 150 contact tracers who conducted 18,500 face-to-face visits to check for symptoms of Ebola. Only one contact was lost to follow-up. Shoe-leather public health detective work had stopped the outbreak.