Democratizing Healthcare
One thing that will be recorded in the history of the unfolding coronavirus story is how people are using social media – for better or worse – to answer questions that never seemed important. Warning: the internet has scammers and idiots. Think carefully. Do not listen to people if you don’t know where they get their information.
Here are two examples, from good sources.
[Read more…]Summary: This post contains advice from the CDC (Centers for Disease Control & Prevention), the most credible source I know, for people who can’t yet get the care we’d normally get from our healthcare system. Most predictions say there will be a lot of us in that situation soon if the system gets overwhelmed, and it’s always best to become informed before a crisis hits and you’re stressed.
A friend in the industry wrote this morning:
[Read more…]“I just talked to my daughter and she has fever and coughing and is very weak and nauseated and she can’t find anybody to test her. The labs said she has to have an order first. Her boyfriend works at [a chain store] and they had him working until recently. He came down with the symptoms first. I told her to call around to doctors until she can find one that’ll write an order for her.”
I get sick to my stomach every time I watch the daily 5 pm presentations from Washington, because as learned as these people may be, nothing they predict is showing up later in reality.
[Read more…]Taking a break from virus news … OMG, yesterday long-time friend Silja Chouquet in Basel shared this TEDx Talk with me: Martin Inderbitzin. 19 minutes.
I’m declaring him my newfound Swiss cousin. Now I have to go find him. (I already went to the website he started … I’ll leave that to you, if you want.) … ah, @MarBitz on Twitter. And he started My Survival Story.
New viruses can be controlled, with fast strong actions. The two previous coronavirus threats were SARS in 2003 and MERS in 2012. They deservedly got a huge amount of attention but we (humanity) stopped them; SARS killed only 1000 in the whole world and MERS killed 862.
[Read more…]This is an emergency.
If you haven’t been keeping up, here is a good concise summary of the virus situation – a 17 minute summary of the situation from Capt. Samuel Philbrick, an Air Force flight surgeon (doctor) in Anchorage. It covers the statistics of how this is going to overwhelm hospitals where it gets out of control. (Email readers, click the headline to come online.)
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