As the coronavirus advances, Meals On Wheels programs serve ‘invisible’ elderly
Meals on Wheels is taking steps to continue serving Triangle-area seniors even while limiting physical contact to protect clients and staff from the new coronavirus that causes COVID-19.
The elderly individuals who Meals on Wheels serves are at high risk of severe illness from COVID-19, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.
To protect clients and volunteers, each of the three Triangle-area Meals on Wheels chapters is delivering meals in bulk for the foreseeable future, providing a mix of frozen and shelf-stable food that varies depending on the county.
Furthermore, volunteers delivering meals have been instructed to take additional steps to prevent germs from spreading and to limit contact with meal recipients.
Meals on Wheels Durham has provided two weeks of meals to its roughly 560 clients. Thursday, volunteers delivered seven meals to recipients, with an additional three delivered Friday in addition to weekend meals through April 6 for the roughly 70 clients slated to receive them.
“Any of our current clients will still receive the same amount of meals,” said Antoinetta Mosley, the Durham organization’s communications director.
The boxes of seven meals delivered Thursday included seven different shelf-stable meals. On Friday, two frozen meals and a canned meal were delivered, along with bread and fruit.
“We’ve never ordered this many shelf-stable meals,” Mosley said, noting that a shelf-stable meal could be something like canned chicken salad and crackers with a juice box.
The more than 5,000 meals delivered by the Durham chapter of Meals on Wheels this week is the most in its 45-year history, the organization announced on Facebook.
Meals on Wheels shifts gears
Meals on Wheels Wake County stopped delivering hot meals Friday. From March 23 forward, the agency plans to try delivering five frozen meals a week to each of its 1,400 clients, according to its website.
The first day of bulk frozen meal delivery in Wake County will be March 31. Between Friday and March 31, meal delivery service in Wake County will be suspended to allow the organization to shift to the more long-term approach.
“That’s a logistical issue. We’re just retooling, rebooting and it requires that little bit of time,” said Alan Winstead, Meals on Wheels of Wake County’s executive director.
Winstead said Meals on Wheels was working with other agencies to provide meals to the neediest clients while their service is shut down.
The Wake County meals will all be flash-frozen versions of the same meals the program delivers on a daily basis.
On March 31, volunteers will meet at pick-up sites to get and then deliver no more than eight boxes of frozen meals. Meals on Wheels is still looking for volunteers for those deliveries. Typically, Winstead said, the organization uses about 150 volunteers, but with the bulk deliveries it is planning to use 200.
It is increasingly difficult and more expensive, all three programs said, to identify and purchase shelf-stable food, an impact of bulk purchases nationwide that started on the West Coast after coronavirus outbreaks in California and Washington State.
Rachel Bearman, the executive director of the Meals on Wheels Chapel Hill-Carrboro, said the group spent more than $15,000 ramping up its services, in part due to the shipping costs associated with bulk deliveries and purchasing more-expensive shelf-stable meals. The program’s Thursday delivery included five frozen meals, five shelf-stable meals and a bag of pantry items such as soup.
“To cover two weeks of delivery and prep cost us over twice as much money as we would have spent in that time frame,” Bearman said, adding that the program has ordered additional shelf-stable meals but anticipates a three- to four-week wait.
Each of the three programs expects to deliver meals in one-week increments moving forward, with the next deliveries beginning March 31 for Wake County and April 6 in Durham County. For Orange County, the next delivery will cover the week of April 6, but could begin the prior week.
When food is delivered in Orange County, volunteers are given a set of guidelines, Bearman said. To start, the volunteer opens up the bags, then they use hand sanitizer before picking up the food and going to the door. There, the recipient swings the door open and the volunteer tries to shimmy inside without touching anything. Once inside, the volunteer drops the food off.
“Each delivery has been slightly different,” Bearman said.
In Wake County, Winstead said the bulk food service will effectively be “curbside pickup.”
Durham Meals on Wheels recipients have been told to wash their hands before and after each delivery, Mosley said. Volunteers, meanwhile, are instructed to use hand sanitizer before bringing goods in and after dropping them off, not staying to have the typical check-in conversation with a client.
“Most of them just want this to be over so they can get back to talking to their driver,” Mosley said, noting that spirits are mostly good among the program’s clients.
Helping homebound seniors
The organizations’ service extends beyond meal service to check-ins and conversations with seniors who are often homebound otherwise. In order to make sure clients are doing all right, several organizations are making daily calls to people they would otherwise see in person.
Bearman, the executive director of Chapel Hill-Carrboro Meals on Wheels, said, “Sadly, many of our recipients are already isolated and lonely, so I think it’s a challenge that someone isn’t going to show up to your door regularly. For many recipients, that’s the reason to get out of bed in the morning and get dressed or put on makeup.”
To continue connecting with its clients, the Orange County group has coordinated a volunteer brigade where 15 people will call recipients each week day to make sure they’re healthy and have enough food.
In Durham, the provider is turning to the same volunteers who regularly make deliveries to stay in touch with the people they see regularly.
Mosley said, “A lot of the volunteers will call the clients on their regular routes, so it’s someone who they’re familiar with who will be calling and checking in.”
Wake County’s program will shift some staff who would typically work in areas that are part of the daily meal service to make routine calls to the participants no longer receiving a daily visit, Winstead said.
Winstead also encouraged those not involved with the Meals On Wheels program to consider how they can help the senior citizens in their lives, particularly those who live by themselves.
“They’re at home alone so much and so often, they in some ways become invisible,” Winstead said. “Our people don’t go to very many places individually and they go to virtually nowhere collectively.”
Ways that Winstead suggested to help include picking up the phone to ask an elderly neighbor or relative if they need anything or offering to pick up some items on your next trip to the grocery store.
“It doesn’t have to be an organized thing,” Winstead said.
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This story was originally published March 20, 2020 at 3:00 PM.