Another “novel” feature of COVID-19 is coming to our attention: some individuals are more capable than others of sharing their viral load and infecting others. What’s up with that? Let's take a look.
Disease
The most general advice physicians give to patients is this: watch your weight, exercise, drink if you must (but only in moderation) and don’t smoke. Turns out, given the current value put on a quality year of life, that advice is worth almost a million bucks. Here's why.
Stop me if you heard this one: Fourteen dermatologists walk into a bar... (Actually, it was 8, and 6 other scientists, walked into a February meeting in Germany.) At least 13 (maybe 14) walked out with a coronavirus infection. How did they manage this? Plus a hilarious Oliver North quote, a woefully amateurish food review, and some awful puns. Feel free to add your own.
Every morning we're greeted by another set of indicators telling us how bad or good the COVID-19 pandemic is trending. There are lots of numbers to consider, but which are actually useful?
As a result, we're now paying the price for perverse, wasteful research spending.
Dr. Michael Osterholm, ACSH advisor and infectious disease epidemiologist, has co-authored a report on the coronavirus, drawing upon lessons learned from previous influenza pandemics. He and his co-authors predict one of three scenarios for how the COVID-19 pandemic will play out.
As more and better data are collected, it's becoming increasingly apparent that many of COVID-19’s deaths -- if not the majority -- are to be found in nursing homes. That should be no surprise. After all, this is where we house the increasingly frail elderly. The politics of blame and shame have begun to focus on those facilities. But before piling on, what are we really talking about?
As we move towards social mingling, the official mantra is the three T’s, testing, track, and tracing. There are two bottlenecks, first having enough reliable tests; second, having the labor force, human or technological, to do the tracking. While the process of track and trace remains under development, testing is increasing and is frequently now a daily metric by government officials.
COVID-19 is bad enough, so the last thing we need is to add other dangerous infectious diseases in the mix. Yet, that is precisely what will happen if the trend of lower vaccination rates continues. Here's the take of Dr. Jeff Singer (pictured) on the secondary public health crisis now in the works.
Media headlines are almost exclusively about the coronavirus death toll and the debate over whether it's too early to begin lifting lockdown restrictions. However, there are several other observations about COVID-19 that are important, but are getting very little attention.
Open carry means that you may legally carry a loaded weapon visibly on your person. The top photo is over fifty years old, depicting the "Black Panthers"; the bottom picture from last week depicting citizens protesting continued stay-in-place orders.
Once again, from the frontline of COVID-19's war on the elderly, a follow-up diary covering recent thoughts of two of our seniors. They are heroes in their own way.