As a photojournalist, my job is to get face-to-face with people to capture their images. During the pandemic, as public places are closed and people are sheltered at home, it's difficult to tell visual stories.

I'm not allowed into some places.  When I am, I can't get close to anyone.

In recent weeks, I started photographing some of the people who are still doing essential work — medical staffers, journalists, volunteers — wherever I could. I do my job in a mask and gloves, getting close to people while maintaining appropriate distance. 

I was lucky enough to spend time in several workplaces. At Feeding Chittenden, I photographed volunteers as they prepared meals for vulnerable people who are being quarantined at home and in hotels.

I toured a COVID-19 patient overflow site at the University of Vermont's Patrick Gymnasium. The basketball courts where I normally photograph games had been turned into a makeshift hospital with wall-to-wall beds and a negative-pressure room constructed to contain the spatter of bodily fluids during procedures such as intubations. To date, patients have not been treated there.

I walked a route through empty streets in Burlington's Old North End with a U.S. Postal Service carrier whom Eva Sollberger interviewed for this week's Stuck in Vermont episode on essential workers.

Here's a look at some of those people. How is COVID-19 affecting your life? I'd like to capture your story in photos. Contact [email protected] or @jamesbuck on Twitter

Gov. Phil Scott on Wednesday announced plans to accelerate the state's health surveillance efforts with a goal of slowing coronavirus outbreaks.

The new testing and contact tracing strategy should allow the state to better track and prevent the spread of the disease so that more Vermonters can get back to work, the governor said. 

"If you think of this whole pandemic as a forest fire, testing will allow us to spot those embers early, and contact tracing allows us to surround it in order to contain it," Scott said at a press conference.

Residents of two nursing homes account for more than 60 percent of coronavirus cases in Vermont's largest city, an analysis of newly available state data shows.

The Vermont Department of Health on Monday released town-by-town COVID-19 case tallies, after previously providing only county-level data. The new figures, while incomplete, offer a more precise view of the virus' spread throughout the state.

Another week brought another turn of the proverbial "spigot" from Gov. Phil Scott, who announced Friday that he was further loosening  some business restrictions amid continued signs that Vermont's coronavirus outbreak has plateaued.

"Because we have one of the strongest stay-home orders in the country, with more restrictions than most, we can open up the spigot a bit more to catch up and get more in line with our neighbor states," Scott said at a press conference. “But with these small steps, we have to make sure that we're being responsible. This comes down to each and every one of us.”

Certain outdoor businesses, which were allowed to return to work on Monday with crews of two or less, can now have five people working at a time outside or within unoccupied structures. Manufacturing and distribution operations can also open with a maximum of five employees — as long as they can work in spaces large enough to stay at least six feet apart, Scott said.

The Vermont Department of Health has begun reporting race data for COVID-19 cases, in addition to gender and age breakdowns.

As part of Friday's daily update, the department added race and ethnicity metrics to its data dashboard. The state has reported 779 total positive cases, up nine from Thursday out of 609 new tests.

Of the total cases for which the state identified a person's race, 682, or 95 percent, were white.
Extensive reporting nationwide has found that the coronavirus has had an outsized impacted on communities of color. But that reporting has been stymied by the various procedures different state, county and municipal health departments use to document cases, and many are not reporting any race data at all.

In Vermont, Health Commissioner Mark Levine recently told VTDigger.org that he didn't realize until early April that the state wasn't consistently collecting race and ethnicity data.

At the end of March, the department was missing race and ethnicity data for 73 percent of the patients who had tested positive for COVID-19, according to a Friday press release from the Department of Health.

State epidemiologists worked with Vermont Information Technology Leaders, a nonprofit that coordinates electronic medical records across health care organizations and providers in the state, to cross-reference confirmed cases with race data to fill in the blanks on hundreds of patients.

The Department of Health said in the release that it was "able to partner with VITL through a state directive issued in response to the State of Emergency."

The state is now reporting race data for the majority of cases identified to date, though it's still missing data for 8 percent of the total, or 61 cases. Five of those are for cases reported within the past week.

The state had been releasing age and sex information about positive COVID-19 cases for several weeks now. The age range with the most identified cases so far, with more than 20 percent, is 50 to 59 years old. That age group is also one of the most populous in the state.Adjusting those numbers by population in each age range tells a different story about the rates at which different groups are being diagnosed with COVID-19.

For every 100,000 people over the age of 80 in Vermont, 285 have been diagnosed with COVID-19. By contrast, 178 in every 100,000 people between the ages of 50 and 59 have the coronavirus.
There aren't actually 100,000 people over the age of 80 in Vermont — there are only 26,291, according to 2018 population estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. But adjusting the comparison to 100,000 people results in a number that isn't a tiny decimal.

The state's case count is likely an underrepresentation of total infections. Though Vermont has dramatically upped its capacity for testing in recent weeks, the state was only testing those with severe symptoms or known contact with a COVID-19 patient for most of March.

Early evidence from other countries suggests that some 80 percent of cases are relatively mild. The CDC is now trying to estimate how many of those mild cases have gone undetected.

Building-wide coronavirus testing at a hospital-owned nursing home in Bennington has turned up a pair of employee cases, with many results still pending.

The testing follows an earlier resident case at the Centers for Living and Rehabilitation, a 150-bed facility tied to Southwestern Vermont Medical Center, that was not publicly announced. That patient tested positive during the first week of April after being transferred to the emergency department for COVID-19-like symptoms, SVMC chief medical officer Trey Dobson said.

State prosecutors say a Williston businessman exploited a Vermont hospital by charging “unconscionable” prices for desperately needed surgical masks.

Shelley Palmer, owner of Big Brother Security Programs, sold thousands of basic surgical masks to Central Vermont Medical Center last month as the hospital was trying to respond to the coronavirus outbreak.

Such masks are worth around 10 cents each, but Palmer charged the nonprofit hospital $2.50 per mask, reaping an “exploitative gain” of at least $80,000, the Vermont Attorney General’s Office said.

The Community Health Centers of Burlington has launched a mobile coronavirus testing service for the area's homeless population.

CHCB providers can now roll up to homeless camps or other shared living areas using a small cargo van that's on loan from affordable housing developer Champlain Housing Trust. The service began late last week.

"We've got our N95s, our visors. There's booties and goggles in there, and that's our kit," CHCB nurse Anna Lisa Reynolds said on Monday as she peered into the nondescript white van parked at the center's facility in Burlington's South End.

"It's a pretty simple process," Reynolds said. "The fact that you can get to people is a game-changer."

Vermont officials said Monday that the number of new coronavirus cases appears to be leveling off thanks to continued social distancing measures.

"We seem to be approaching, if you will, a plateau," Health Commissioner Mark Levine said during a gubernatorial briefing, explaining that Vermont's number of new daily cases continues to fall. "We'll see if that is a sustained phenomenon, or just a trend over several days."

Three days ago, Vermont officials released new modeling data that offered the most encouraging look yet at the state's ability to weather the crisis. The rate at which cases are doubling — a key stat used to determine the extent of the outbreak — has slowed to more than a week.

That trend has continued, with the Vermont Health Department reporting 71 cases and three new deaths in the last three days.

With most coronavirus testing now complete, roughly 15 percent of inmates and staff at the Northwest State Correctional Facility are known to have the infection.

A total of 32 inmates out of nearly 200 who were confined at the St. Albans prison have tested positive for COVID-19, the Vermont Department of Corrections announced Saturday. Another 16 employees have also contracted the virus, with nine employee tests still pending.

The outbreak is nearly as large, in terms of case volume, as those at two Burlington nursing homes, where more than 50 residents and staff at each have been diagnosed.