Step 2: Why "Lower The Load"
Step 2
Why “Lower The Load”?
Health Disparities are Devastating
The COVID-19 pandemic has been life-changing for us all. The fight has been especially challenging for healthcare providers like me (Dr. Wuse) who take care of COVID patients with severe symptoms. My people ( nurses, patient care technicians, respiratory therapists, physical and occupational therapists and physicians) were charged with finding an impossible balance between two dueling emotions: we were simultaneously terrified by the possibility of endangering our loved ones (and ourselves) and overwhelmed by a sense of compassionate duty toward our patients.
At Byte Wellness, when we heard about the disproportionately high numbers of COVID cases and deaths in Black and Latinx communities across the US, we were even more devastated. These gaps in health outcomes (also called health disparities) are one more reminder of the disparities in root causes that Byte Wellness and BOC have dedicated themselves to closing. Click here for more on why we started “Lower The Load”.
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We partnered with the Chicago-area non-profit Black Oaks Center and Dr. Jifunza Wright on the “Lower the COVID-19 Load” Campaign in order to squash those disparities. We started this challenge in the Spring of 2020.
Back then, we didn’t have a COVID-19 vaccine, and were just barely beginning to trial medications that would later be used to reduce the death and illness of hospitalized COVID-19 patients. We wanted our community to know, even then, that we weren’t helpless! There were all these daily habits we could adopt to support our immune systems.
Along with masking and social-distancing, building up our immune systems was our best shot at lowering the risk of developing severe COVID-19. Now that we have FDA-approved COVID-19 vaccines for children and adults, immune health is still an important part of minimizing risk.
We are not helpless
As humans, our agency is one of our greatest assets. What we do with our bodies and for our bodies can help or hurt our chances of surviving this pandemic. The “Lower the COVID-19 Load” Campaign is collecting evidence-based self-care strategies (including plant-based eating) that can support our immune systems, making our bodies less likely to contract COVID-19 and more likely to fight it successfully if we do contract it. Byte Wellness has donated our digital platform, in partnership with the Black Oaks Center, to communicate these game-changing strategies.
Read How to “Lower the Load”
Read a message from Dr. Jifunza Wright, holistic medicine and food systems pioneer, to get her take on how we can use food to make our immune systems as healthy as possible and give ourselves the best chance of preventing COVID-19 infection.