Mitigation is my life. Or so I’m told by the experts who repeat the word over and over again at press conferences. Puzzled members of the TV audience are turning to online dictionaries when they hear words they don’t understand. When New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said the coronavirus “apex is higher than we thought,” Merriam Webster lookups of apex (highest point) spiked 4,000 percent. The same thing happened when Dr. Anthony Falci said on March 15 that Americans would have to “hunker down significantly.” Hunker down (stay in the same place) lookups soared. The words trip off the lips of politicians and epidemiologists as if everyone in the viewing audience understands the medical lingo. I decided to put together a COVID-19 glossary. Here it is ...

In 1918 until spring 1919, the “Spanish flu” circled the globe. It is estimated that 500 million worldwide were infected, which was about a third of the world’s population at the time. An estimated 50 million worldwide died from the virus or from complications of it. The 1918 pandemic killed approximately 3 percent of the world’s population, including a staggering 675,000 in the United States.

In the two weeks since it established funds to help local businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Canadian/Hemphill County Economic Development Council has already delivered $31,000 in emergency business grants to qualifying local businesses that provide jobs to Canadian residents. The EDC approved funding last month to assist businesses struggling to survive the financial impact of the COVID-19 shutdown, and the oil and gas bust. The funding falls into two categories:

HCH announced its second positive COVID-19 test Wednesday afternoon, but noted that it was for a non-resident of Hemphill County. That report brought to two the number of individuals who have received positive test results from the HCH lab, to date.