By Afi Scruggs and Rachel Dissell

Two days before Carmen Bailey fell ill with COVID-19 in late April, she told her daughter not to take her to the hospital if she ever got the disease. 

As her symptoms progressed over a week — first a mild headache, then congestion — the 52-year-old was too tired to work. And it got harder to care for the three children – ages 4, 5 and 8 — who live with her. 

Still, she refused to seek treatment. 

“Oh no, I’m not doing that. Ain’t nobody putting me on no ventilator,” Bailey said later, recalling the conversation with her daughter that followed a news report they watched about the virus. 

As Bailey, a graphic designer who specializes in funeral service brochures, got sicker, her daughter had to tap on her back to help her cough up mucus from her lungs. A nurse from her doctor’s office urged her to go to an emergency room. 

Statement of The Neighborhood and Community Media Association of Greater Cleveland

Neighborhood & Community Media Association (NCMA-CLE) was shocked and deeply saddened to learn of the passing of Mike Psenicka, owner of our member outlet, The Neighborhood News.

As the third generation of Psenicka family ownership of The Neighborhood News, Psenicka changed the shape of the newspaper and brought color to its pages; as a founding member of NCMA-CLE, he changed our shape and brought color to our organization.

This article provided to The Tremonster by Eye on Ohio, the nonprofit, nonpartisan Ohio Center for Journalism in partnership with the nonprofit newsroom, The Fuller Project. Please join Eye on Ohio’s  free mailing list or the mailing list for the Fuller Project as this helps us provide more public service reporting.

By Rachel Dissell

CHESAPEAKE, Ohio — The children at Stephanie Geneseo’s home-based child care center dart around in astronaut helmets while they battle green googly-eyed COVID alien germs, using play to learn about hand washing in a pandemic that shows no signs of letting up.

“I want to make it fun so that it didn’t seem like something bad or weird to them,” Geneseo says. “We’ve done everything we can to make it as normal to their day as it could be,” she said in July after she reopened All Nestled Inn, her center in Chesapeake, Ohio. 

The return to caring for children after a 10-week coronavirus shutdown was anything but normal for the 51-year-old, known as Mrs. Steffy to the families she serves. 

Keeping her young charges healthy weighs on Geneseo as she works 18-hour days, watching children from early morning to midnight, to keep the business she spent 22 years building afloat. 

By RENEE FOX

Warren Tribune Chronicle

When people make decisions in their everyday lives, they seldom analyze their choices by running through a checklist of who they are – age, race, income, level of education or where they live.

But that checklist is important, especially now, in an unusually tense presidential election as Ohioans try to understand how others think and as politicians and campaigns try to manipulate minds.

A recent Ohio poll conducted by the Your Voice Ohio media collaborative and the Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at The University of Akron suggests that there is a great deal of agreement on the issues most important to improving life – COVID-19, the economy, health care, racial equity, income inequality. But those differences in demography – gender, age, education, religion and more – play a role in how those issues are prioritized.