Other Useful Updates and information
Senior Only Shopping Hours
Some grocery stores are offering senior only shopping hours. My office has received conflicting advice as to whether seniors should participate in this program. However, many communities are arranging volunteers to help seniors grocery shop. If you would like assistance, I would encourage you to reach out to your local HOA leadership and my office.
Disinfected Wipes Should Not be Flushed Down the Toilet
Over the weekend, CNN reported that disinfecting wipes may be helping people combat the spread of germs, but they make cause harm or blockage to sewer systems in they are flushed down the toilet. Please throw your used disinfected wipes in the trash instead of flushing them- even the "safe to flush" ones. You can read the entire
CNN article here
.
Keeping the Little Ones Busy
There are a lot of different websites popping up to help provide education resources during the COVID-19 pandemic. You can find one of my favorite
websites here
. Learn Everywhere is an ever-growing one-stop-shop. You can find educational curriculum by subject and grade level, advice about how to work from home while homeschooling, and more.
General COVID-19 Information from Inova
Visitation
Inova Health System will be suspending all in-person visitation as of Saturday, March 21, 2020 at 8 p.m. and encouraging video meetings between patients and loved ones. Understanding that a family member, caregiver or visitor may be crucial for clinical and patient care, exceptions to Inova's Visitation Guidance can be made in extenuating circumstances.
Telemedicine
With the philosophy of trying to limit risk of exposure and spread of COVID-19 and to help our clinicians with greater flexibility to safely treat our patients, Inova has adopted a system-wide initiative that will allow patients to receive a wider range of healthcare services without having to travel to an Inova healthcare facility.
Beginning Thursday, March 19, Inova will offer the option for appointments to be conducted via telemedicine (video or phone), with flexibility to meet in person if a clinician determines necessary.
A Message from Dominion Energy
A message from Dominion Power:
Serving our communities is Dominion Energy's top priority. We are a 24/7 business, and always will be - even in times of uncertainty such as hurricane-related outages and now COVID-19.
We wanted to highlight some updates with you:
We will not shut off your power for nonpayment.
People rely on us to meet critical needs, and they should not have to worry about losing service during this critical time. We have suspended all service disconnections as individuals, families, businesses and communities pull together to meet our collective needs. We know the communities we serve rely on us to provide an essential service. We remain committed to providing reliable energy service 24/7.
We are reconnecting residential customers whose services were shut off.
If a constituent's service was previously shut off for nonpayment, please contact us, and we will work with them to restore their service.
Beware of scams targeting your constituents.
Dominion Energy does not make calls requesting immediate payment or require customers to pay with prepaid cards of any kind. For more information, please click here.
We will continue responding to emergencies.
Our employees are still hard at work. If you lose service or have an emergency, you can report it to us online via our Outage Center page or by contacting us at any time. For updates and other important information, you also can follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
We are monitoring the situation carefully.
As circumstances surrounding the pandemic change, we are evaluating the measures we have put in place and carefully weighing further steps.
Additionally, to protect the communities we serve, we are asking our employees to take steps to prevent the spread of coronavirus by:
- limiting travel,
- working from home where possible,
- restricting visitors to company offices, and
- requiring employees to stay home for 14 days if they have recently visited a country subject to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention travel advisory.
- For employees who regularly interact with customers, we're encouraging alternate ways of doing business and remote communication, where possible.
We are all in this together.
At our company, we have a core value we call One Dominion Energy - our term for teamwork. That spirit of cooperation and mutual support extends to the communities where we operate. Therefore, we ask our local policy leaders to be mindful of any guidelines that may limit our ability to provide 24/7 electrical needs with "shelter in place" or "workforce reductions."
On the Lighter Side
