We will soon be approaching the moment when, despite all of our best efforts, we'll be one ventilator shy of what's needed. It's now time to share what critical-care physicians and nurses have known for some time, and what they're planning to do when that moment arrives.

There has never been a shortage of idiots on the planet, but sometimes it takes an earth-shattering event to help them reach their full potential. A little humor for dark times.

We want our diagnostic tests to accurately identify patients, and not falsely identify one as positive or negative for a condition. But there is no test available with that kind of accuracy.

PM2.5 designates a near-ubiquitous air-polluting particle that frequently appears in the scientific literature as well as popular press news items. But few of us really know what they are talking about, mainly because it is just one characteristic of a complex category.

In war, the first casualty is truth. Apparently, the same is true of pandemics. Some people are now pretending that they saw the novel coronavirus coming long before anybody else, including scientists and public health officials. In their revisionist history, they were beacons of clarity while others were "COVID deniers."

The United States has failed on so many fronts. There was a lack of intelligence during the early days of the epidemic in China. A lack of preparedness for testing that directly led to our current situation. A national stockpile of supplies exists just for events like COVID-19, but it is woefully undersupplied and, clearly, our plans for re-supply are completely inadequate. Let's review the history of our approach to pandemic preparedness and the current testing debacle. 

Those are the words of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, describing the "twist of fate" that finds us awaiting personal protective equipment, ventilators and pharmaceuticals manufactured -- yes -- in China.

It has been another tough week. And the constant drumbeat of media, print, televised, or heard is both drawing me in and pushing me away. So, this week, one article to draw us toward COVID-19, and the rest to provide a little respite. Remember, this is a marathon, not a sprint.

Children's Health Defense says governments and corporations are using the coronavirus (SARS-COV-2) to advance a "global immunization agenda." The anti-vaccine group claims that our leaders just needed the right pandemic as a pretext to goad us into getting vaccines. This is a clever story. It's also false.

Bad luck played a role in the COVID-19 pandemic, but China's criminally negligent and malevolent behavior has placed the world in a position in which bad things are likelier to occur. Therefore, China must bear the brunt of the blame, and our relationship with that country should not go back to normal.