Resources – COOPER GENERAL NEWS

U.S. President Joe Biden signs a proclamation on the anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), as (L-R) artist Tyree Brown, Sen. Pat Leahy (D-VT), former Rep. Tony Coelho (D-CA), House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD), U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) look on in the Rose Garden of the White House on July 26, 2021 in Washington, DC.

Anna Moneymaker | Getty Images

President Joe Biden on Monday announced that some Americans experiencing long-term effects of Covid may qualify for disability resources and protections from the federal government.

The announcement came as the president marked the 31st anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act in a speech at the White House Rose Garden with Vice President Kamala Harris. It also comes as the long-term symptoms of the virus, what some call “long Covid,” shapes up to be a major public health issue.

“We are bringing agencies together to make sure Americans with long Covid, who have a disability, have access to the rights and resources that are due under disability law,” Biden said during his remarks.

Under guidance issued by Health and Human Services and the Department of Justice, “long Covid” can qualify as a disability under federal civil rights laws if it “substantially limits one or more major life activities.”

This means individuals with “long Covid” symptoms that rise to a disability are entitled to resources and protection from discrimination under federal disability laws. An individual assessment is necessary to determine whether a person with “long Covid” qualifies for such protections and resources, according to the guidance.

“Long covid” describes a wide range of new or ongoing symptoms that can follow four or more weeks after a Covid infection, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This includes tiredness and fatigue, joint or muscle pain, loss of taste or smell and a fever, among other symptoms.

Some people can also experience damage to multiple organs including the heart, lungs, kidney, skin and brain, according to the CDC. But “long Covid” symptoms are not consistent and it is unknown how many people have the condition.

The Biden administration also released new guidance that addresses the needs of children with “long Covid” who may have disabilities. The guidance, issued under the Department of Education, outlines how schools and public agencies can provide services to children and students with “long Covid” that rises to a disability.

Other efforts to support Americans with “long Covid” include a new guidance issued by the HHS that outlines community-based resources for those with the condition, and a new website launched by the Labor Department that includes resources for workers with “long Covid,” such as information on employee benefits.

Most people who contract Covid recover within a few weeks, but reports of “long Covid” symptoms have been growing amongst Americans.

Research released by FAIR Health last month found that approximately 23% of nearly 2 million Covid patients have developed at least one “persistent or new” medical condition more than four weeks after their initial diagnosis.

Perhaps even worse, Ms. Cooper remarked early on that she’d never heard of Brian Lehrer, the beloved WNYC morning host whose gently probing, public-spirited interviews embody the station’s appeal, and that she didn’t “get” why he was popular. She has since come to the view that “Brian is the soul of the station and, in many ways, the city itself,” a WNYC spokeswoman, Jennifer Houlihan Roussel, said in an email.

In fact, Ms. Cooper’s mission was to jump-start the station’s lagging digital transformation, something she had done with unusual success in San Francisco and that requires a willingness to make enemies. She has ambitious plans to hire 15 to 20 more reporters — but first she had the near-impossible assignment of bringing together a group of traditional radio journalists, used to working for days and occasionally weeks on colorful local features, with the reporters at Gothamist, the scrappy local blog that WNYC bailed out in 2018. Ms. Cooper sought to professionalize Gothamist away from its bloggy and irreverent roots, telling reporters to be less openly hostile to the New York Police Department in their reporting, two reporters said. Ms. Roussel suggested that Ms. Cooper was trying to rein in Gothamist’s habit of adding “an element of editorializing to its coverage that can be interpreted as bias.”

And Ms. Cooper started pushing the radio journalists to pick up their pace and to file stories for the web. That seemed like a reasonable request, but it led to another stumble in early February, when an 18-year veteran of the radio side, Fred Mogul, filed a story with one paragraph printed in a different font. The editor realized it was Associated Press copy; Ms. Cooper promptly fired Mr. Mogul (who declined through his union to be interviewed) for plagiarism without a review of whether he’d ever done it before.

Ms. Cooper declined to speak to me about Mr. Mogul’s termination. But one thing I learned this week about public radio is that no matter what is happening, someone is always recording it. And that was true when Ms. Cooper called a virtual meeting Feb. 5 over Zoom to inform the full newsroom of her decision to fire Mr. Mogul. According to a copy of the recording provided to me by an attendee, Ms. Cooper told the staffers, “It’s totally OK to be sad.” But then several stunned radio reporters questioned the move, explaining that they regularly incorporated A.P. copy into stories on air and had imported the practice to WNYC’s little-read website, crediting The A.P. at the bottom of the story.

“Go through every single one of our articles and fire all of us, because that is exactly what we have all done,” one host, Rebeca Ibarra, told her.

On Feb. 10, more than 60 employees — including Mr. Lehrer — signed a letter asking Ms. Cooper to reconsider and calling the firing a “troubling precedent.”