Vaccination Program Manager Zach Sevigny, RN, prepares a patient to receive a vaccination

NORTH CONWAY, NH – The COVID-19 pandemic has led many families to postpone regular activities. For many families keeping up with immunizations and health visits for their children was one of those activities.

Dr. Wenda Saunders, a pediatrician at Memorial Hospital’s Mt. Washington Rural Health Care is encouraging families to get caught up with immunizations. “There has been a world-wide drop off in childhood immunizations and regular well-child visits because of COVID-19,” she says. “It is important for keeping your child healthy and for the health of your child’s classmates, day care mates, and friends.”

The Hospital and the Rural Health Center reduced access to hospital services during the early stages of the pandemic, including postponing some check-ups and other visits not deemed critical. Saunders notes that as the hospital has begun increasing access for patients, clinicians are making well-child visits and immunizations a priority. “We’re calling parents whose child had a visit affected by the hospital’s temporary reduction in services. To help schedule everyone we’ve added evening and weekend appointments to make it easier for parents to bring in their children.”

The Centers for Disease Control lists fourteen diseases preventable through vaccinations. These include the familiar measles, mumps, pertussis (whooping cough), and meningitis. Also on the list is polio which, though uncommon in the United States, is still seen in Africa, Asia and other areas of the world. While younger children receive most vaccines, Saunders also recommends the vaccination for the human papillomavirus, or HPV, for both girls and boys. The HPV vaccine is given in two or three doses beginning as soon as age 11. “The HPV vaccine reduces the risk of multiple types of cancers later in life, including cervical in females and oral cancers in males and females.”

Mt Washington Rural Health Practice Manager Lucy Williams says promoting health and preventing disease is the practice’s core mission, and her team has been working for several weeks to reschedule postponed appointments. “Reducing in-office appointments during the early stages of COVID-19 was the right thing to do to ensure patient safety. When we were able to increase access to services, we placed a high priority on well-child visits and immunizations as well as patients who missed appointments for chronic conditions.”

Health care providers, Williams says, learned more about the virus and how it spreads and made necessary adjustments to operations to safely increase access to in-person services. “We have transitioned our efforts to focus on preventive healthcare and have placed a high priority on routine well-child visits and immunizations.”

Williams adds that Mount Washington Valley Rural Health also expanded access by adding evening and weekend hours, and is now open seven days a week for appointments. Appointments can be requested through MyChart or by calling the office 603-356-5472.

WASHINGTON — The United States Census Bureau is actively conducting Non-Response Follow Up operations across every city, town, and municipality in the state to ensure a complete and accurate count of everyone living in the United States. By law, the Census Bureau must provide the first results from the 2020 Census by December 31st. To provide complete and accurate results by that deadline, we are doing everything we can to collect a response from every household by September 30th. We are urging households to respond, maximizing staff and production hours, and ensuring data quality along the way.

Following Health & Safety Guidelines 

To ensure safety of all employees and residents, census takers are wearing masks and following social distancing guidelines. In most cases, census workers will make up to six attempts at each address to count possible residents—this is the same number of attempts we have been planning all along. Census takers will still visit homes during the originally planned hours—between 9 a.m. and 9 p.m., local time, including on weekends, to reach people when they are more likely at home. Census takers are also calling some households to help them respond to the census, providing one more way to count hard-to-reach communities and people who have not yet responded.

We continue to urge households to respond through our multilingual advertising campaign and through the efforts of nearly 400,000 partner organizations. We urge everyone to respond now or when a census taker comes to your door—and to encourage everyone you know to do the same. We are even mailing an additional paper census questionnaire to many households that have not responded yet in low-responding areas. 

Identifying Census Workers 

The Census Bureau is attempting to complete data collection as quickly and safely as possible, while ensuring a complete and accurate count as it strives to comply with law and statutory deadlines. Identifying a Census Bureau employee can be accomplished by checking their ID badge, which includes:

• Their name 
• Their photograph
• A Department of Commerce Watermark
• An expiration date

• Your Social Security number
• Your bank account or credit card numbers
• Anything on behalf of a political party
• Money or donations

The U.S. Constitution mandates a head count, every ten years, of all residents living in the United States and its territories. Census counts determine how many seats each state is allocated in the U.S. House of Representative as well as how over $675 billion in federal dollars in distributed annually. Individual responses are protected by federal law, never to be shared with any other department, court, or law enforcement agency. Responding to the 2020 Census is easy with four ways to respond: online, by phone, by paper, or with the help of a census taker.