Hill Neighbors Tackle Covid-19 Hotspot

The leaders of one of New Haven’s pandemic hotspots have a plan to cool the spread of the coronavirus in their neighborhood.

On Saturday, June 20, around 100 volunteers plan to deliver face masks to every household in the 06519 zip code of the Hill.

“We tried to work on the most expeditious as well as safest way to help,” said Hill neighbor Leslie Radcliffe.

Door-To-Door Delivery

Radcliffe outlined the plan during the Hill North Community Management Team’s meeting on Tuesday.

On the Saturday of the event, the volunteers will work in teams to drop off baggies of five to 10 disposable paper masks at every home on every street in the neighborhood’s four wards. Each bag will also contain a sheet of information in English and Spanish about Covid-19 symptoms and testing sites.

The volunteers will have masks, gloves and hand sanitizer and information about how to knock on doors and then stay a safe distance away.

The protocol will be a little different for the neighborhood’s large apartment buildings, since it is not safe to knock on the doors of individual apartments, Radcliffe said. Instead, neighbors can come collect their baggies at a table stationed outside each complex.

By the end of the day, the volunteers will have dropped off masks for the over 4,000 households in the neighborhood.

Radcliffe said that she and others who planned the effort decided that door-to-door distribution would be better than setting up one or two centrally-located tables. They learned that people often drive up to these distribution sites from outside of the neighborhood, Radcliffe said.

The management team decided to spend $3,000 of their Neighborhood Public Improvement Program (NPIP) grant on face masks from Mask for CT, an idea they floated at a previous meeting. Yale’s Office of New Haven Affairs has provided another $7,000 from the Yale Community For New Haven Fund to the effort.

And Sandra’s Next Generation is providing water bottles for the volunteers.

A Neighborhood On Fire

The importance of the mission became especially clear during the meeting when New Haven Health Director Maritza Bond walked the group through the latest Covid-19 statistics.

Attendees observed, and Bond confirmed, that the city’s Covid-19 cases are currently concentrated in the Hill and Fair Haven.

“The brightness of that yellow in the Hill made my stomach drop. When you brought up the coloring for 25 to 49 year olds, the hot spot was still the Hill,” Radcliffe said.

Management Team Chair Howard Boyd and Hill Alder Evelyn Rodriguez reflected that they see young people gathering in large groups in the neighborhood, without masks.

“People say, ​‘Don’t get diabetes,’ but they don’t say that you can lose a limb or be on dialysis. That’s how it is with Covid-19. A lot of people are dying and are on machines as we speak because of it,” Rodriguez said.

Boyd said that he often tries to tell young people to stand farther apart. They don’t necessarily want to listen.

“A lot don’t understand how serious this is,” Boyd said.

Bond said that the neighborhood’s mask initiative is a model for how to change that understanding.

“How do we engage youth on a level they can understand? They will accept information from a trusted source. All of you as community members are our trusted sources,” Bond said.

As the volunteers drop off the masks, they are building rapport with neighbors and can offer local statistics on the fact that the virus can impact them, Bond said. Bond promised to give the neighborhood a fact sheet with some of those neighborhood-level and age-focused statistics for their future use.

Radcliffe asked those present at the neighborhood meeting to send her and the management team more ideas on how to protect their neighbors.

“I’m excited that this is one of many efforts to come. Let it be the spark that started a good wildfire in the Hill,” Radcliffe said.