“ This is a disease that’ s 100 % preventable.”
Prof. Cynthia Davis:
“ This is a disease that’ s 100 % preventable.”
Cynthia Davis is passionate about her work and has strived for the past 37 years to improve the overall quality of life of medically under-resourced and marginalized populations on a local, national and international basis. She is Assistant Professor in the College of Medicine and College of Science and Health at Charles R. Drew University.
Professor Cynthia Davis
She has worked for CDU for 37 years in the capacity of Program Director of numerous HIV / AIDS-related primary prevention community outreach and mobile HIV testing programs targeting at risk racial / ethnic minority populations on a local, regional and national basis. Professor Davis currently directs the Los Angeles County funded Social and Sexual Networking HIV Testing Project, and co-directs the University’ s new COM Street Medicine Project.
The University has been involved in COVID-19 related screening since April of 2020. The leadership of Dr. Sheila Young was very important. We were very successful in terms of doing community outreach in marketing about our walk up and drive-up screening site. Dr. Young trained a cohort of students who went out to the community who were bilingual, handing out flyers in English and Spanish, at the local mini malls in the area as well as they went door to door.
So by having the student volunteers go out into the community to make direct contact with community residents, I think really benefited us and when you look at the numbers, you can see, we had a significant number of people who saw who saw the screening services at that time.
In February of 2021 the University started working in partnership with both public and private sector entities to facilitate COVID-19 vaccinations in SPA 6 at Jesse Owens Park. Dr. Young came with her team, as well as individuals that we had hired through our street medicine program. And they helped with registration and getting people signed up to be vaccinated. We went from venue to venue over a four- or five-month period, starting at Jesse Owens Park, then going to
Magic Johnson Park, then Helen Keller Park, and then Gonzalez Park in Compton.
The major barriers were a lack of basic information on how COVID-19 is spread; misinformation on social media, as well as in the community regarding the origins of COVID-19, as well as the harmful effects that you might experience once you became vaccinated. Many, many rumors and false information was circulating back in April of 2020, which alarmed me as somebody who’ s worked in the field in HIV for over 35 years and recalling the fear, the stigma, the conspiracy theories that were circulating about HIV 35-something years ago. To experience an exacerbated version of the same thing when it came to COVID-19 here in 2020 was surprising.
To hear anecdotal stories of Black people who I feel were dying unnecessarily because they went to the hospital and were turned away. Maybe they weren’ t, quote unquote, sick and went back to their homes deteriorated and either died at home or died after calling the paramedics to come and take them back to the hospital. And I heard I heard case after case after case of that type of scenario happening in our community.
CDU College of Medicine | PG. 20