Paul Bass Photo
The anti-violence group Ice The Beef spreads the message in city neighborhoods.
New Haven will work to help ensure the latest round of pandemic relief gets to the small businesses that need it most.
Mayor Justin Elicker described those efforts Thursday afternoon during his administration’s daily Zoom press briefing.
He spoke as Congress prepared to pass a fourth round of emergency financial relief for people harmed by the Covid-19 pandemic, including small business owners. The first rounds of small-business money ended up going disproportionately to larger business. In New Haven, as in communities around the country, minority-owned small businesses in particular lost the “race” for the money.
At their daily morning “command call” Thursday, administration officials discussed ways to help small business owners do better in the race this time around, Elicker reported.
“We will do our part to help,” he said. His economic development administration is “reaching out to community groups and neighborhood groups to make sure that people understand how to apply for the funding.” He said he’d be open as well to tapping volunteers in the city-community VITA program, who help lower-income people with tax preparation, to also help small business owners get their paperwork in order and obtain new stimulus dollars.
In other Covid-19 updates:
• New Haven has had 1,313 reported confirmed cases, with 43 fatalities.
• After speaking with funeral home owners, Elicker appealed to families who have lost loved ones during the pandemic to understand that they may need to wait until later to hold intimate burial services — in order to protect everyone’s safety. Elicker said he has been calling New Haven relatives of people who have succumbed to Covid-19.
• Yale is conducting a clinical trial here on a drug to treat severe Covid-19 cases, patients who have Covid-related pneumonia but are not yet on respirators. From the university’s press release:
“Yale researchers will begin a clinical trial at Yale New Haven Hospital to test the effectiveness of a drug called ibudilast (MN-166) for treating acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), a life-threatening lung condition developed by some of the most seriously ill COVID-19 patients. The researchers are part of Yale’s Advanced Therapies Group, which was formed in response to the pandemic and is identifying and advancing possible treatments for the disease.
“The drug — which has been approved for years in Japan and Korea for the treatment of asthma — has shown promising results for reducing inflammation associated with ARDS in mouse models. The researchers have partnered with the California company MediciNova to launch the trial. MediciNova had been developing ibudilast as a treatment for multiple sclerosis and neuroinflammation before shifting its attention to COVID-19.”
• The state Department of Health released new breakdowns of Covid-19 cases across the country.
“NH” in the charts refers to “non-Hispanic.” (“Categories are mutually exclusive. Cases answering ‘yes’ to more than one race category are counted as ‘other.’ Counts may not add up to total case counts as data on race and ethnicity may be missing.”)
