Date: April 24th, 2020
COVID-19, Coronavirus, social distancing, wash your hands, Hydrochloroquine, antibodies - are the probably the most googled words around the world in the last few weeks. World has metamorphosed and everything seems to take on a new meaning. We now barely hear about whats happening on the Gaza strip, Indo-Pak border, discontent between North and South Korea, etc, etc. Anything and everything is hovering around COVID. The Dow Jones and S&P 500 who had scaled higher then Himalayas, took a humble bow, in fact had to kneel down to COVID. The hype and persistent hangover of human beings overindulgences in several facets of life has came to a grinding halt. Covid has become synonymous with Tsunami – though much larger and more a Frankestein.
We are a Rotary club with 24 members in a small town in Michigan, called Fort Gratiot, offspring to Rotary Club of Port Huron (Thomas Edison was born here). We are a breakfast club, meeting on Friday mornings at a local assisted living. Came the Governors orders and all nursing and assisted livings were closed to visitors. I, the president scrambled to find a place to meet and found a place at our hospital. I was still finalizing the breakfast menu at the hospital – it too became closed to visitors. We coudnt hold meetings anywhere, anymore.
I practice Hospital medicine - next few days were totally engulfed in dealing with Covid patients and the paraphernalia around it. Local Hospitals didn't have enough PPE and I reached out to our club members- within 24 hrs I had N-95 masks delivered to me by fellow Rotarians (Hospitals were still 'doing their best' to acquire PPE), yes People of Action.
We hadn't met for some time and I felt helpless, just not knowing what to do. My mind was on most days somewhat foggy behind the N-95, caps, goggles, face shields, gowns, double gloves likes of somedays feeling like the haunted house walkthrough during Halloween – though more real and daunting now. Zoom came to our rescue and we are now afloat, already having met a few times - even our attendance has gone up. I call this the ZOOM-BA meetings. Yes, I do get a kick out of calling it that. Getting speakers from out of the country has suddenly become doable. Our first guest speaker was from Toronto. We also decided to pool our breakfast money and put it towards our local soup kitchen. It has worked well. Money is being collected. Some of us also volunteered this week at the soup kitchen, which involved preparing and distributing meals bags.
I also had been working to find a way to get our Rotary club name out to the community. Decided to advertise ourselves by marrying it to displaying the fact of steadily rising numbers of Michigans daily morbidity and mortality from Covid to the public. Numbers matters.
The digital board features, along with the name of our Club, different Rotarians pictures (changed in Rotation), with their names and designations (especially some of our well known faces and those holding key positions in town ). Felt to have a better impact on public. The advertising company (LAMAR) does also updates daily, the total number of Michigan Covid cases /deaths. We started on April 8/2020 with 20,346-Positive cases and 959- Deaths. As of today total Positive cases have jumped upto 35,291 with 2977 – Deaths.
Zoom catapulted our meetings and involvement. The digital billboard with its graphics, Rotarians pictures, daily updated statistics, Stay home/Stay safe/Stay alive message, definitely has projected our clubs name and image out there. On the service side, will also impact people by preventing them from stepping out of their homes unnecessarily. The Digital board is placed across from Walmart for 4 weeks.
Being a physician and coming across many patients in the hospital on a day to day basis -and even though donning my Rotary Pin on my white coat lapel - this Digital Billboard method will surely beam us further.
“All in all its just NOT just a brick in the wall”, it is more than that...!
Be Happy – Safely
Rajat Prakash MBBS,MD
President
Fort Gratiot Rotary Club
(District 6330) MI,USA
April 24 / 2020