‘The Mystery of Death’

The story of Shalondra Rollins, the first person to die of COVID-19 in Hinds County, may tell us everything about why black Mississippians are hit so much harder by the pandemic

By Anna Wolfe | April 23, 2020

After her daughter fell suddenly ill, Cassandra Rollins raced towards the northwest Jackson apartment the morning of April 7th and found herself following the ambulance responding to the scene. It was traveling so slowly that Cassandra laid on her horn.

Three days earlier, her eldest child, 38-year-old Shalondra Rollins, received positive test results for COVID-19, a respiratory disease caused by the novel coronavirus. She had just started complaining that she “felt winded” that morning before collapsing in the shower.

“The ambulance was driving like it was a normal day, someone coming home from work,” Cassandra said. “It was no sense of urgency.”

Shalondra’s eyes widened when the EMTs told the family no one could accompany her to Baptist Medical Center as they loaded her into the vehicle. She said she would call them on her cellphone as soon as she arrived. They pulled away without turning on the siren or the red and white lights. Less than an hour later, Cassandra received a call from the hospital chaplain, who told her Shalondra’s heart had stopped while she waited for the hospital to find her a room.

Shalondra was part of the working class; she had diabetes and lacked health insurance at times in her adulthood, factors that made her more susceptible to COVID-19.

But the family said she always managed her health well, rarely got sick and while she worked in low-wage jobs, she was moving towards a rewarding career in education — doing all the right things to improve her life.

And yet, she was the first person to die from COVID-19 in Hinds County, just as the state and nation was learning how the black community has been hardest hit by the disease. Despite African Americans representing less than 40 percent of Mississippi’s population, they represented 53 percent of COVID-19 cases and 63 percent of the related deaths through April 22.

Research shows that African Americans have less access to health care, but as the Rollins family say they’ve experienced, they also receive lower quality care when they do use the medical system, one of myriad factors leading to the community’s poorer health outcomes and younger deaths.

“This is the norm for us,” said Shalondra’s younger sister Sherrie Rollins, who spent several years struggling with the undiagnosed endometriosis despite constant doctor’s visits over the issue.

In Mississippi, black people are also nearly three times more likely to live in poverty and to be unemployed than white people. When people of both races live in poverty, African Americans are more likely to live in segregated areas with highly concentrated poverty, in neighborhoods where geography alone dictates that opportunities are scant.

African Americans are more likely to face COVID-19 exposure because they are over-represented in hourly jobs and essential positions that offer no option to work from home, plus they more often live in close proximity to others, in housing complexes and multi-family units.

These economic factors, plus the institutionalized and individual racism that perpetuates them, contribute to chronic stress that can wreak havoc on a person’s health.

“There are two hundred black people who die everyday in this country who wouldn’t die if there were no white-black differences in mortality,” David Williams, a professor of public health for Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health who also teaches African American studies and sociology at the university, said on a recent teleconference.

Shalondra, an assistant public school teacher, first went to her primary care doctor, Dr. Timothy Quinn, in mid-March, after the pandemic had reached Mississippi, complaining of aches and chills. Dr. Quinn, who had just been tapped to sit on the city’s COVID-19 task force, diagnosed her with the flu and prescribed a Z-Pak of antibiotics, family members said.

Dr. Quinn said at that stage of the pandemic, providers struggled to acquire coronavirus tests and had limited testing to patients with specific symptoms. “It was not a lack of desire. It was a lack of accessibility,” Quinn told Mississippi Today.

Shalondra’s best friend, whom she had recently visited, also became ill and was tested for COVID-19. It took nearly two weeks for the friend to get her positive result back, at which point Shalondra got tested at an urgent care center.

The Mississippi State Health Department publishes the number of people it has tested and the much larger number tested at private labs — more than 54,000 by April 22 — but has not offered much demographic data to show who’s getting tested and where.

Shalondra’s family wonders how her outcomes may have been different if she had been tested for the virus earlier. Or if her friend had gotten her test results back sooner. Or if the urgent care clinic would have given her better instructions, possibly hospitalized her, after she eventually tested positive. Or if she had received more thorough care on the day she died.

That morning, Shalondra’s fiance, Kendrick Rogers, found her on the bathroom floor, gasping for air. Her youngest daughter, Makalin, who has asthma, put the mask from her own breathing machine over her mother’s face while they waited for what felt like an eternity, but was just under 12 minutes, for the ambulance to arrive.

“Can you imagine a 12-year-old in there trying to give her a breathing treatment and resuscitate her,” Cassandra said. “That’s where my anger is at.”

When state officials began releasing the racial breakdown of COVID-19 cases and deaths showing the devastating impact on the black community, they attributed the trend to higher rates of underlying chronic illnesses among that population.

“This is not news. We’ve seen this before,” state epidemiologist Paul Byers said at a press conference on April 7th, just hours after Shalondra died.

The state’s COVID-19 data showed that black folks with heart disease represented the most deaths, followed closely by black people with diabetes and high blood pressure.

Shalondra, like her mother and 16 percent of black adults in Mississippi, had Type 2 diabetes, diagnosed just five years ago. But she was managing it well, her family said. She didn’t avoid the doctor and after a recent check up, Cassandra said, “she called me and told me, ‘Mama, my numbers were good.’”

“She wasn’t an unable body. We would play around the house, wrestle a little bit,” Rogers said, recollecting that she could hold him down so he couldn’t move. “She was very strong. She was very healthy.”

Diabetes makes people more susceptible to the virus and black folks in Mississippi are about 20 percent more likely to have the disease than white folks. Still, in Mississippi there are more diabetic white people than diabetic black people, and yet, among people with diabetes who have died from the virus, 80 percent were black.

The medical community’s approach to tackling racial heath disparities has been to find new ways to increase access to care, such as by allowing doctors to conduct visits with rural patients over video chat. But they acknowledge these are imperfect solutions to a problem sustained in part by economic barriers in the black community.  

“Eating healthy is really expensive and eating unhealthy is really cheap,” said Dr. Javed Butler, University of Mississippi Medical Center professor and chairman of the department of medicine. “I don’t think we as a society have figured that out. You know, you can have a $1 burger, but you cannot have a $1 healthy meal.”

The emphasis on diet-related diseases brings into sharp focus the black community’s long-stereotyped relationship to food, in which socioeconomics, geography and stress play as big a role as what individual people decide to eat each day.

While Rogers said food was a source of comfort in the cash-strapped Rollins household, meal decisions were made consciously, limiting the plate to one starch, for example.

Federal legislation in response to COVID-19 increased benefits through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program so that recipients in Mississippi got almost double the assistance in March that they received in February.

Calvin Head, a black farmer in the Tchula area, found recently while delivering fresh fruits and vegetables to homes in his community, one of the poorest in the nation, that despite the emergency assistance, people are still experiencing hunger.

“One lady said, ‘I’m going to be honest with you, I had to trade my stamps in to pay my rent,’” Head said. “I’m not saying it’s right but what do you do? Your income is limited.”   

Head, who runs a farming co-op in the Mileston community of Holmes County, has facilitated programs over the years to involve high schoolers in growing crops and provide locally grown food to residents. It’s one way locals are trying to disrupt the area’s faulty food system, which includes the many acres of nutrient-rich soil owned by white farmers and used to grow corn and soy, food for livestock, not local residents.

“We’re trying to find ways to make the food safer,” said Tchula mom Lucannie Commings, who helps the co-op distribute produce to a town that is 99 percent black.

At the town’s only grocery store, a glorified gas station, Commings recently purchased a package of taco shells, which, she discovered when she arrived home, expired in 2018.

Publicly-funded interventions for black families with chronic diseases greatly emphasize behavior, such as programs that teach parents how to grocery shop and prepare healthy meals.

“Targeting the low-income communities and changing their behavior is going to be where we make inroads and help us combat obesity in our state,” said Arnell Wilson, the state director of SNAP-Ed, the educational program within SNAP, formerly known as food stamps.

But this focus, researchers find, ignores the structural reasons families can’t access the food that keeps them healthy — whether because they can’t afford it or because it doesn’t physically exist in their neighborhoods.

“Having to live in a racist society results in disparities in health including diabetes, obesity and hypertension,” said Kilolo Kijakazi, an Urban Institute fellow. “This is not just folks making poor choices. It is folks having to navigate a racist society that creates these sort of health challenges.”

Cassandra, the youngest of 11, gave birth to her first child Shalondra by cesarean section when she was 17. The baby girl was past due. “She didn’t want to come out,” Cassandra said, and even as an adult, “she was so attached to me.”

By the time she was 27, Cassandra was raising her two daughters, plus two nieces after her older sister’s murder. They lived in public housing in south Jackson, while the single mom worked at retailers and various state agencies.

“I come from a family where when I graduated, no one had graduated from college,” Cassandra said. “My mother was a poor woman, a maid. You didn’t have nobody to tell you about that.”

Shalondra, who helped take care of her younger siblings, similarly stayed in the workforce after graduating from Callaway High School in 2000. “She started working at 16 and she always kept a job,” Cassandra said.

For nearly two decades Shalondra held low-wage fast food and retail cashier jobs until, after the birth of her two daughters in 2005 and 2007, she found her passion working at child care centers. She returned to Hinds Community College, earned her associates degree in early childhood education in 2018 and got a job as an assistant special education teacher at Spann Elementary School in Jackson.

“She was gifted at her craft,” said Avis Lloyd, the parent of one of Shalondra’s students with disabilities. “Her kids have consistently talked about her while they’ve been out of school.”

Shalondra’s career move and the additional education — for which she had to take on student loan debt — didn’t offer her the economic mobility often promised. In Mississippi, assistant teachers can make as little as $13,000 — after a $500 increase from the Legislature in 2019 — and earn about $20,000 a year on average, both below the poverty line for a single mother of two.

Shalondra was still reliant on a patchwork of public assistance but through the public schools job, she received state health insurance, benefits she often didn’t have previously.

“We were struggling but we always made the ends meet. She always made sure the house was taken care of,” said her fiancé Rogers, an army veteran who was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. “There were some periods where I couldn’t find stable work … She was always the one to say, ‘It’s going to be alright. We’re going to get through this. It’s going to be better days.’”

That seemed likely. Along with getting married and buying a house with her to-be husband, Shalondra planned to go back for her bachelor’s degree with Spann’s assistance so that she could become a fulltime teacher.

In Mississippi, the average black household with children pulls $32,300 in annual income, less than half the income of the average white family. Black folks in the state are nearly three times more likely to be unemployed. Over 22 million Americans filed for unemployment in a month of COVID-19, more than 130,000 of which were in Mississippi. Even in better economic times, the number of people looking for work in Mississippi outnumbered the jobs available — a problem Congress could address through a federal jobs guarantee similar to the Work Progress Administration created during the Great Depression.

Income inequality is one reason for the even more startling racial wealth disparities nationally: For every dollar of wealth held by white families in America, black families have about 10 cents. Centuries of institutionalized discrimination, starting with slavery, Jim Crow, and more recent policies like redlining — in which banks strategically refused loans to black communities — has ensured these trends endure.

Without these reserves, black families are less able to withstand medical emergencies or economic recessions.

The federal Earned Income Tax Credit helps fill gaps for some low-incomes families, but 80 percent of the nation’s such tax subsidies, a crucial aid in the accumulation of wealth, benefit the top 20 percent of income earners. More than half of states have enacted their own credits for working families but Mississippi has not.

Black Mississippians are also 23 percent more likely than white Mississippians to lack health insurance, as they more often work for employers who do not offer the benefit. The working poor in Mississippi could receive coverage through expanding Medicaid, which would disproportionately help black residents, but state leaders have refused, leaving several billion federal dollars on the table over the last decade.

Advocates for the working class in Mississippi have had little success lobbying for wage increases or Medicaid expansion but continue to push intermediate solutions, such as helping low-income mothers break into higher paying careers.

Through coordinated child care and other work supports, the Biloxi-based Women In Construction workforce training program offers primarily black mothers a way to break into the better-paying advanced manufacturing jobs historically dominated by men. The students often say securing a job with health benefits is one of their main motivators for joining the class, said Program Director Ruth Mazara.

“It usually turns out that once you have that opportunity, you’re more likely to find a regular doctor and go to regular check ups and visits,” Mazara said, “rather than just trying to survive everyday and that being a lower priority.”

While higher education and greater wealth attainment has shown to improve a population’s health, racial health disparities do not disappear when you examine the outcomes of only the most educated and wealthy people in our society.

“There’s something else about race that matters profoundly,” Williams, the Harvard professor, said.

Evidence points to the damaging effects of lifelong racial discrimination on the body to explain disparities that exist in America even when you account for other social determinants of health, such as poverty and opportunity. Beyond bias in the medical system, African Americans experience stress at higher rates and greater clusters of stressors (“When they have one, they have another,” Williams said). Chronic stress is linked to higher blood pressure, weight gain, cognitive issues like memory loss and heightens the risk that pregnant women will birth their children too early.

Cassandra cited grief among her life’s greatest stressors. Her family has endured the separate murders of her two older sisters, the death of her mother to cancer, and her son, Tyler, died by suicide in 2019 while serving in the military.

After Shalondra’s death, Cassandra took in her two teenage daughters and she’s already preparing for hardships to come.

“I’m never going to be able to fill that void of their mother not being here,” she said.

On the afternoon of Shalondra’s visitation, close family members wore face masks and gloves as they gathered, consciously distanced from each other, in the parking lot of the Jackson Memorial Funeral Home. It had been less than a year since they met to mourn the loss of Shalondra’s younger brother.

Cassandra clasped her blue rubber-covered hand around her eldest sister’s as she walked her inside the funeral home, where no more than ten at a time could enter.

On a screen behind the white casket, against a hazy pink background after a slideshow of family photos, an Oscar Wilde quote appeared: “The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death.”

The funeral home had chosen the inscription. While it may be true for others, Cassandra said there’s nothing puzzling about the love she has for her children.

“I did everything humanly possible while they were here as a poor mother raising her children,” Cassandra said.

Her daughter’s death, on the other hand, still doesn’t make sense.

Clarification: An earlier version of this article should have said the State Health Department publishes the number of people it has tested and the much larger number tested at private labs. 

The post Shalondra Rollins was taking care of her health and climbing out of poverty. Why did she die of COVID-19? appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Pixabay

Some educators say that having the Praxis exam as the main path to a licence fails both would-be teachers and students.

After serving in the military and graduating from Delta State University, Rolander Harbin, 46, has been teaching health and physical education for more than two decades in Mississippi Delta schools. While teaching, Harbin lacked proper certification. He spent over 10 years taking and retaking sections of the Praxis licensure exams, easily missing the mark by two to three points on a given area, he said.

“It never made me happy when I knew I had to take the test.” Harbin said. “I can teach. I can do lesson plans. I can do everything that’s required of me to do, but I wasn’t able to pass the test.”

Frustrated and overworked as a long-term substitute, he lost his job last year to a certified teacher, he said. He’s currently working in the aviation department at Delta State, hoping to get back into K-12 schools.

Harbin’s story isn’t uncommon. Other teachers across the state struggle to pass Praxis exams to become certified in Mississippi classrooms, especially in the Delta, where in some districts as much as a third of the teachers are not certified.

Eric J. Shelton, Mississippi Today/Reporter for America

Adrienne Hudson, speaking here to fellow educators during RISE Teacher’s Night Out in Clarksdale Wednesday, December 20, 2018, said suspending the test for licensure is a game changer when it comes to the teacher shortage.

This test, which served as a hurdle for many, will no longer be a barrier for candidates for the foreseeable future due to the coronavirus.

Ahead of Gov. Tate Reeves’ announcement to close school buildings for the remainder of the semester to help slow the spread, the Mississippi Department of Education preemptively took measures to ensure teachers and teacher candidates will be legally able to teach in classrooms next school year. In late March, the Mississippi State Board of Education suspended multiple requirements for teacher candidates surrounding licensure. For the time being, the Praxis is no longer necessary to obtain a license.

“As with any assessment, there are some people who just don’t test well and so I think this will provide an opportunity for some potential teacher candidates who have not been able to obtain a license in the past,” said Kelly Riley, executive director of Mississippi Professional Educators.

To become a certified teacher in Mississippi, one needs to obtain a license from the state Department of Education. Depending on the route, earning a license can require hours of student teaching time and the passage of a series of difficult exams, usually consisting of four to five different tests.

The Praxis Core, created by Educational Testing Services, is a national certification exam used to measure would-be teachers’ content knowledge in subjects like reading, math, and writing. The Praxis Core combined exam costs $150; an individual section, or re-take on one section is $90. Non-core subject area tests average around $120 for a two-hour test. For many teacher candidates, the exam is costly, time consuming, and has been a disproportionate roadblock to licensure for black and Hispanic people, Mississippi Today previously reported.

The state board suspended several policies regarding teacher licensure. Teacher candidates applying to educator prep programs before Dec. 31, 2021, are exempt from the testing requirement, which means they do not have to take the Praxis Core or score a 21 or higher on the ACT to gain entry. They just need a bachelor’s degree in the area they intend to teach and be licensed in, or have a bachelor’s degree in any area with at least 18 hours of coursework in the area they intend to be licensed in.

Those applying for a license are also exempt from testing requirements, as testing centers are closed and test dates have been postponed. Licensed teachers who were set to renew their licenses by June of this year now have a one-year extension because many of the conferences and professional development opportunities for educators to earn the units necessary to renew their licenses have been cancelled.

Additionally, student teachers need to complete 12 weeks of full-day student teaching in order to receive a license. With schools closed for the rest of the semester that is no longer feasible, so the board issued a one year extension and allowed time spent doing virtual learning to count towards those hours.

Before the coronavirus forced the state Legislature to suspend the 2020 session, a bill was making its way through the legislative process that also would have eased the requirements on obtaining a license. Currently, without any waivers a teacher must earn either a 21 or higher on the ACT or a passing score on the Praxis, “and” a minimum 3.0 GPA on coursework before they are admitted to a prep program. The bill would have changed the law’s language to “or,” meaning a candidate could achieve any one of those requirements alone.

The Legislature will have to meet again before the new fiscal year begins in July to set a budget for the state, but some non-fiscal bills that were alive when the session adjourned may not be taken up again, meaning they may have to wait until next year.

“This is probably going to open up some doors for the Mississippi Department of Education, as well as legislators, to start looking at other options for potential educators,” said Erica Jones, president of the Mississippi Association of Educators. “I have always felt that the test alone should not be the sole indicator of whether people are qualified to be in the classroom.”

But some education experts think Mississippi is taking the licensure waivers too far.

Michigan State University

Kate Walsh of the National Council on Teacher Quality said “it is frustrating to see states show not very much regard for their licensing structures.”

“The idea that in the Spring of 2020 tests are unavailable to take and [MDE] therefore exempts teachers from ever having to take them seems to me to be not in the best interest of kids. These are tests that assess whether a teacher can read, write on an eighth grade level and knows the content they’re teaching,” said Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality.

Walsh said that Mississippi appears to be an outlier in its response to changing licensing requirements in light of the coronavirus. Most states are distributing one-year emergency licenses until testing can resume; this is what Walsh recommends as best practice.

“For years states kind of abused [emergency] licenses to use them to cover a hole or use it for things that wouldn’t be classified as an emergency. Here we are in a legitimate emergency, so use that license for this purpose,” Walsh said. “I can’t understand why Mississippi would simply say, ‘You get five years [to teach].’”

She added that doing away with tests completely suggests that MDE doesn’t see the certification exams as meaningful.

“It is frustrating to see states show not very much regard for their licensing structures,” Walsh said. “If that’s the case, maybe they should be thinking about doing something else. But this doesn’t add up.”

Regardless, the licensing change is helping teachers who would otherwise be considered qualified but can’t pass the Praxis become fully certified.

Larry Stokes’ reign as a seven-year long-term sub in Clarksdale schools came to end in 2017 when he finally became a certified teacher. This was not his dream — he has a bachelor’s degree in health and physical education, and a masters degree in technology in teaching. But the need for math teachers in his district was critical, and he felt he could be more useful in that subject.

Stokes failed the former Praxis Pre-Professional Skills Test (PPST) and Praxis Core over fifteen times until last summer, when he got a three-year special, nonrenewable license to teach math.

“I feel I have no business teaching math although my students show growth and proficiency, yet and still, that is not my field of study. If we were to get the right people who went to college for that area, these students will show more success,” he said.

Though he was happy to hear of the no-testing requirement for prospective educators, he thinks the test should be rid of for good. Stokes said he witnessed excellent teachers quit the profession who became cashiers and restaurant workers. They were discouraged by testing in content areas unfamiliar to their study.

“They got so discouraged to the point they will not try again,” he added. “You’re failing the teacher with your policies and failing the students. We are keeping these great teachers out of the classroom due to a test.”

Suspending the testing requirements will be a “game changer in the world of teacher shortage,” as a way to level the playing field with teacher applicants, said Adrienne Hudson, executive director and founder of RISE.

“The major thing is it offers opportunities for people to show proficiency in knowledge of pedagogy (teaching) and things they need to know versus just content knowledge on the exam,” she said. “When you have opportunities to show proficiency in education in more than one way, you bring equity to the table.”

Hudson said she realizes those who aren’t in favor of this decision don’t understand the landscape of the education issues. For example, less students are showing interest in pursuing education, she added. The most recent Title II data showed about 2,600 students enrolled in Mississippi prep programs. However, in 2009, nearly 4,000 students enrolled.

“At the end of the day, I realize those individuals have never walked in (a) school where 60 percent of the staff were on temporary licenses,” she said. “If they understood, they would have empathy.”

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Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith and Mike Espy support more funding for the Payroll Protection Program.

Both Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith and Mike Espy, her Democratic opponent in this November’s general election, tout the virtues of the Payroll Protection Program that provides forgivable loans to allow small businesses (less than 500 employees) to meet their payroll during the current economic crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Both support expanding the program that was originally passed by Congress as part of a larger federal rescue package in late March.

“It is a no-brainer,” said Espy recently of replenishing the program that has run out of money.

Hyde-Smith had touted expanding the program, but has been critical of the congressional Democratic leadership for insisting that other items be included in the legislation.

The $484 billion bill passed Tuesday by the Senate includes an additional $310 billion for the Payroll Protection Program, plus funds for hospitals that have been hit hard in dealing with the pandemic and funds for coronavirus testing. The original small business loan program that ran out of money earlier this month contained $350 billion that was distributed to more than 1.6 million businesses nationwide.

The bill expanding the Payroll Protection Program, expected to pass in House on Thursday, will be the third providing funds to help fight the pandemic and to provide funds to citizens and companies to help alleviate the economic hardship caused by COVID-19. A fourth bill is expected to be taken up. Funds to offset lost revenue on both the state and local levels likely will be part of that package. Democrats tried unsuccessfully to include funds to offset lost state and local revenues in the current bill working its way through Congress.

“Aid for state and local government could be negotiated as part of future legislation,” said Justin Brasell, a spokesperson for Hyde-Smith.

“That will happen,” Espy said of funds to help state and local governments that will be hit by the loss of tax collections because of the economic slowdown.

A study by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, said, “Without substantially more aid, states — which are required to balance their budgets every year, even in recessions and depressions — will almost certainly lay off teachers and other workers and cut health care, education, and other key services, making the economic downturn more severe.”

President Trump has indicated via twitter he supports help for state governments in legislation that presumably will be taken up after Congress passes the current legislation.

Officials are hoping the Paycheck Protection Program will help thwart the current economic slowdown.

In Mississippi, during the previous round of funding 20,748 small businesses were awarded $2.48 billion in loans that if used to pay employee payroll for up to eight weeks and for other expenses such as rent, mortgage and utilities, will be forgiven.

In Mississippi, according to Bloomberg, 67 percent of eligible payrolls were funded through the loan program. The study indicated that so-called Red states or Republican states fared better under the program than did so-called Blue or Democratic states. For instance, in Nebraska loans were granted for 81 percent of the eligible payroll compared to 38 percent in California and 40 percent in New York, two solid blue states.

Mississippi ranked 33rd in terms of the cumulative amounts of its loans received and total number of businesses receiving the loans. California and Texas were the top two states in terms of receiving loans and the number of businesses receiving the loans.

While Espy said he supports the Payroll Protection Program, he said he hopes loopholes will be closed in legislation expanding the program so that some big companies, such as large restaurant chains, are not given the loans. He said there are other federal programs to help the larger companies.

While the program generally is popular, there have been complaints that some small businesses, particularly minority-owned or rural companies, are having a more difficult time obtaining the loans. He said that is why it is essential that so-called Community-based Financial Institutions that specialize in helping companies that might struggle to obtain traditional loans be allowed to participate in the program.

Under the program, the small businesses apply to lending institutions for loans. But if the loans are used to continue to pay their employees’ salaries, they are paid back through federal funds.

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