Power to the Patient!
Update a week later: US confirmed cases is now 312,237;
the number of cases has doubled in SIX days, not 2-3! Good!
SLOW THE SPREAD!
Keep doing the right things!
If this post gets too repetitive or long-winded, just stop reading. Sorry, but everyone needs to understand that what scientists have been saying is true, and it’s happening as predicted, so don’t panic, and do keep doing the right things – as recommended by the scientists.
This post is for information hogs. If you’ve had enough already about the virus, you’re not like me :-) and you won’t want this post, so move along. :-) Still with us? Good.
Yale cardiologist and friend Harlan Krumholz @HMKYale has been live-tweeting notes from a webinar Wednesday morning (US time) from Wuhan, China. Most of us won’t know all the lingo but you can google; most of us will recognize most of what’s going on. (If you’re not a regular on Twitter, just be aware that you can ignore most of what shows up in blue.)
First I’ll paste in a tweet from the end that summarizes a lot of information, particularly the image (click to view):
[Read more…]Zubin Damania MD is a social media / video god – his ZDoggMD site is terrific. He’s snarky and smart. But this time he meets his match: he sat down – live, not edited – and did a 30 minute “ask me anything” with his 12 year old daughter, whose school just got closed for the virus. She. Has. Questions. And I bet a lot are questions you’ve had.
[Read more…]
I’m burning my way through this book, which was just released last week. It’s a compilation of first-person essays and advice from twenty Long COVID patients and experts. Curated by long-hauler Fiona Lowenstein, The Long COVID Survival Guide strikes me as street-level gut-punch practical. I don’t think any of us – patient, family, clinician or government – can feel we understand this condition without reading these essays.
I was hooked when I discovered, in the first patient story, that hives can be a result of Long COVID … which explains the weird, unexplained hives my wife had 4-6 weeks after COVID. Nothing like some front-line patient reality!
That’s a strong example of a big shift that’s happening in medicine: shifting away from expecting doctors to know everything important, and toward doctors actively partnering with the sick people. And by “partnering” I don’t mean asking patients’ opinions: I mean actually sharing the work, acknowledging the value of patients’ work, and sharing decision making – not just on individual cases but on development of remedies and priorities for research.
[Read more…]I’ve started compiling all my virus posts into a /covid19 page.
Four months ago in Winter’s coming. Time to talk about ventilation for coronavirus defense, I talked about ventilation (fresh air) and about HEPA filters for cleaning indoor air. Here’s an update, focusing particularly on the latest bee in my bonnet: CO₂ detectors.
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