She is not the average community health educator. She is as wide as the deep end of an in-ground swimming pool, a little taller than a one-story building and she knows everything about COVID-19. Her name is CATE and she may be headed to an underserved Pennsylvania community near you soon. CATE stands for Community-Accessible Testing & Education. It’s the first-in-the-nation COVID-19 Mobile Response Unit, which was unveiled outside PEMA headquarters in Harrisburg on Tuesday. The...

Pennsylvania human service officials say they are on target to complete mandatory COVID-19 testing of more than 47,000 residents and staff statewide by next week. As of this week, 1,160, or 85%, of the nearly 2,000 personal care, assisted living and private group homes have completed baseline universal testing ahead of Monday's deadline, said Teresa Miller, secretary of the Department of Human Services, which oversees those facilities. The completion of the baseline testing is one of the...

The Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industries anticipates “very soon” it will share a timeline for when it will begin paying out the new $300 a week in additional COVID-19-related federal unemployment benefits. The department is awaiting final program guidance from the federal government on what it will take to implement the new Lost Wages Assistance program, a spokeswoman said this week. States must also create new systems or processes to distribute the payments since the LWA program...

Gerald Burke approached his grandfather five months ago for advice about enlisting in the U.S. Army. It was a conversation that surprised no one in his family. Burke, whose family calls him “J”, grew up listening to his grandfather’s stories about his military service in Vietnam and attending veteran events with him, the same way his mom did when she was younger. So when Burke took the United States Armed Forces oath of enlistment on Saturday morning, formally committing himself to military...

Gerald Burke approached his grandfather five months ago for advice about enlisting in the U.S. Army. It was a conversation that surprised no one in his family. Burke, whose family calls him “J”, grew up listening to his grandfather’s stories about his military service in Vietnam and attending veteran events with him, the same way his mom did when she was a kld. So when Burke took the United States Armed Forces oath of enlistment on Saturday morning, formally committing himself to military...