PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — About one out of every four households in Rhode Island struggled over the summer to put food on the table during the coronavirus pandemic, according to a report released Monday.
Despite federal assistance, 25% of households in the state were worried about having adequate food, up from 9.1% last year and the highest level of food insecurity in Rhode Island in 20 years, according to the Rhode Island Community Food Bank’s annual Status Report on Hunger.
“That’s shocking,” CEO Andrew Schiff said.
The food insecurity caused by the pandemic has hit families of color particularly hard.
“The current health emergency is also deepening longstanding racial and ethnic disparities,” according to the report.
It went on: “Where 21% of white households lack adequate food, 36% of Black households and 40% of Latinx households are food insecure.”
The United Way of Rhode Island received nearly 60,000 calls for food assistance between March and August, a 77% increase from the same period in 2019.
The figures are based on a random sample of 2,100 households surveyed in July and August as part of the RI Life Index, an initiative of Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island and the Brown University School of Public Health.
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SCHOOL DISTRICT GOES REMOTE
West Warwick schools are moving to fully remote learning for three weeks after Thanksgiving because of a rise in positive coronavirus cases in the community and in the number of students and staff required to quarantine.
The district will move to distance learning for all grades from Nov. 30 through Dec. 22, Superintendent Karen Tarasevich said in a written statement.
“We are hopeful that after a short period of distance learning, the number of positive cases will lower, fewer people will need to quarantine, and we can resume the three models of instruction delivery we experience now,” the superintendent wrote.
The town has a high school, a middle school and four elementary schools.
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STATE SURPASSES 1,300 DEATHS
The number of people who have died from the coronavirus in Rhode Island has surpassed 1,300, the state Department of Health said Monday.
With 15 deaths over the past three days, the death toll has climbed to 1,309, the agency reported.
The state also reported 2,454 new confirmed cases over Friday, Saturday and Sunday. The agency does not update on weekends.
The 7-day rolling average of daily new cases in Rhode Island has now risen over the past two weeks from almost 551 on Nov. 8 to more than 651 on Sunday, according to The COVID Tracking Project.
The latest average positivity rate in Rhode Island is 6.86%. State health departments are calculating positivity rate differently across the country, but for Rhode Island the AP calculates the rate by dividing new cases by test encounters using data from The COVID Tracking Project.
There were 285 patients in Rhode Island hospitals with the disease as of Saturday, the latest date for which the information was available. Thirty were in intensive care.
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