BUILD SKILLS HELP OTHERS EARN MONEY

Tip #3: Speak with Your Insurance Provider

When speaking with a customer advocate, describe the care you’d like to receive and ask about available options. They can explain the services that are reimbursed and offer a list of therapists that are covered innetwork, helping you understand your choices and keep costs down.

Don’t wait to seek mental or behavioral support for yourself or those around you – resources are available.

Black women are more likely to be breadwinners- that’s not a bad thing...continued from page 4 anything, it makes sense.

Skipper’s research focuses on African American marriages. He regularly interviews couples with enduring unions and works to find out how they built their relationship and how they cope with common stressors.

“If you look around pretty much any college campus, a large percentage of African American students there are women,” he said.

In addition to this, Black men are disproportionately represented in the criminal justice system. This has longterm effects on Black men’s mental health and income.

Dianne M. Stewart, professor of religion and African American studies at Emory University, agrees. Stewart is the author of “Black Women, Black Love: America’s War on African American Marriage.”

“The numbers are not matching up for Black women to have partners within their social and economic range,” she said.

Skipper and Stewart also pointed to the transatlantic slave trade and centuries of institutional discrimination as reasons for these arrangements in marriages.

“Black women making more money and being in spaces that historically they may not have been able to be in, that helps strengthen the Black family and closes the racial wealth gap,” Skipper said.

Being the breadwinner only matters if you make it matter

In Skipper’s perspective, despite the financial role women play, marriage can be financially beneficial for the Black community. It’s a tool for getting out of poverty, he said, more than education or changing neighborhoods.

A study on reasons for divorce named financial problems as one of the top contributors to marital issues and divorce. And patriarchal structures within unions can contribute to this as well if a couple embraces the ideals that come with it, Stewart said.

“If this is what they’re embracing, they will notice the dissonance between the ideal and what can be pragmatically worked out,” Stewart said. “I would think this has to cause some sort of conflict, difficulty, or stress.”

One thing Skipper noticed in his research on Black marriages is their varying financial situations. He found that what matters for married couples is how money is managed in a relationship, not how much each person makes.

“I don’t think there really should be an issue here,” Skipper said. “Let’s remove those stereotypical role expectations and really view this as a partnership.”

Are We Out of the Woods With COVID?...continued

Vanderbilt University Medical Center still wears a mask in crowded places, as does Wachter.

“Many of our population have experienced COVID. Many people have been vaccinated, and of course many people have experienced both, and so our level of protection is very high, and these Omicron variants seem to be spreading, producing milder disease,” Schaffner says.

“The therapies, the testing, the treatments that we’ve gotten used to all work about as well as they have for the last 18 months. In some ways the biggest changes are political and sociological. It’s clear that any rules and restrictions are pretty much gone,” Wachter says.

Americans have largely stopped wearing masks or hung them on their car mirrors just in case they may need them.

Schaffner says we need to keep our guard up. Older and immunocompromised people, as well as the unvaccinated, are the COVID patients who end up in the hospital. Vulnerable people need to get vaccinated, boosted, and wear masks.

“It turns out that the quality of the mask and the fit is important,” says Schaffner. The N-95 mask fits securely around your nose and chin. In the early days of the pandemic they were hard to find and controversy about wearing masks created a lot of confusion. Masks are no longer mandated except in hospitals and other places where the risk of infection remains high and it remains high for certain people.

“The other early mantra – that it’s really about protecting others and not you – it’s also wrong. It is about protecting others, but it certainly protects you, too.

It’s probabilistic. It lowers the chance of getting infected,” Schaffner says.

“If we’re not masking… I would say condoms prevent babies, masks prevent infectious disease. You’ll hear a lot of arguments about wearing both of them. But that doesn’t mean they don’t work,” says Dr. Ben Neuman, Chief Virologist of the Global Health Research Complex at Texas A&M University.

Arcturus variant likely not a game changer Neuman said the Arcturus variant is different enough from the current vaccine strains that it has the potential to evade them because “it’s about as different from Omicron as Omicron was different from Delta and so just like we saw the Omicron wave come through, there is at least the potential for that.”

Wachter doesn’t think the new variant will be a game-changer though. For one thing, enough people have immunity now so the possibility of a super-spreader event is unlikely.

“The vaccine and the booster still work reasonably well in about the same way that we have thought for the last 18 months or so.” Paxil still works reasonably well, your home test still works reasonably well, Wachter says.

“The risk of getting very sick is probably not any different now than it will be in 3 years… so we all have to come up with strategies that allow us to live our lives as fully as we can while mitigating the risks in a way that’s practical and sustainable. And that’s different than two years ago, when we were all trying to get through it,” he says. Wachter and Schaffner told reporters that they get boosted regularly. They are waiting for new vaccines that will be available in a few months for flu, COVID-19, and Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV).

Long COVID Dr. Robert Wachter, Professor and Chair, Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, discusses what medical professionals and researchers have learned about long covid and what they’re still working to understand.

For people who get re-infected, the danger of long COVID increases, especially for women. Wachter’s wife, a former reporter who now writes books, has long COVID and she is learning to live with it.

“A year ago she was not disabled in any way in terms of getting through her days. Certainly, many people have it worse than she does,” Wachter says. “But most days at about one or two in the afternoon, she will text me and say I’m hitting a wall. I need to take a nap. She never had to do that before.”

A little bit of brain fog is making her “a little less good than she was” but it’s a consolation to know what’s causing it, he says.