I'm feeling a bit frantic today (even more than usual) as it's two days before school opens again, and wastewater indications show we're really in the thick of it in my part of the world:
I was going to post Chris Cuomo's video talking about his struggle with Long Covid with Dr. William Li. It's great that people with a huge following are speaking openly about what's happening to them, and Dr. Li provides some clear explanation of what's happening in the body. I get excited when people talk about this openly and with intelligence. BUT, the only prevention tactic they offered is to try to stay healthy to avoid getting sick by eating well. Here's the thing, you can't avoid a virus by just being healthy. If you're exposed, you'll get it. Elite athletes are getting it, and getting hit worse because of their expanded capillaries.
There are no good viruses to get. No virus will help you. Some people have been confusing viruses with bacteria, which do have good and bad varieties. Let your kid get dirty, but keep them safe from pathogens!
To prevent getting a virus, you need to physically stop it from getting into your body. N95s are able to directly prevent access to your face holes. Glasses or goggles also help to keep it out of your eyes. Nasal sprays can also help block the virus from getting past your nose (but also wear an N95). Less directly, you can clean the air to dilute any virus that might be in there, and that can significantly reduce your chances of inhaling a virus, but you still need an N95 in case you end up sitting beside someone who's exhaling Covid despite looking and feeling perfectly healthy. So absolutely clean the air with CR boxes and far UV and windows opened a crack, but also put a filter on yer face!!
Here's an uplifting 2 minute video from Themme Fatale that explains that before we can get to step one of acting on this, we have to get to step zero, which is admitting there is a problem. I'm not going to try to embed it because that's always glitchy with Tiktoks, but here's a piece of it if you don't want to click the link.
"Did the new normal you imagined involve all of us repeatedly infecting each other with a highly contagious vascular illness that has been linked to long-term damage that is cumulative with each infection and increasing the chances of a host of other serious illnesses like diabetes, strokes, heart failure, heart disease, immune system damage that is now being compared to HIV, and a lot of us are catching it two, three times a year. Did your new normal involve the removal of all the supports, but none of the infection?? . . . Yes, I know it's the government's fault, but that doesn't absolve us of all of our personal responsibility. There are things that we can do that DO make a difference."
If you're not sure it's a big deal to actually act on this right now, here's three minutes of Dr. Kashif Pirzada talking about the burnout among health care workers. He also wrote,
"Recently I arrived to my evening shift; I saw 18 ambulances outside, with patients waiting to be offloaded into a department with few free beds. Our 'Infinity Hallway' is full again with stretchers lined up as far as the eye can see. I get inside, all of our acute resuscitation beds are occupied, our ICU is full, and another ambulance crew is taking a patient to another hospital's ICU. We get an alert from EMS that a person in their 40s has collapsed, is unresponsive, and is five minutes away. Just from that description, this person likely needs a ventilator and an urgent CT scan, but we had no beds. Immediately we try to find a spot, checking just which other really sick patient we can shuffle somewhere else. Do we move the 50 year old on high flow oxygen for Covid? Or the heart attack patient waiting for the cath lab to free up, and it goes on. The strain of constantly weighing these lives, trying to eke out space from nothing, weighs heavily on all of us. One exhausted nurse, who helped intubated 5 patients earlier in the day muttered under their breath that they're going to quit after this. I hope she's not serious, she's one of our best. We somehow manage to find space, the crew doing the patient transfer came early, and we used that bed. But what if 2-3 more came at the same time? Most busy ERs look like pandemonium to an outsider, but there's method to the madness that usually can process a huge number and variety of patients, treat them and occasionally accomplish miracles. But all of this is impossible if you completely burn out the highly trained staff on the ground.
I do believe there is a permanent increase in the workload due to the ongoing effects of Covid-19. In a way, it's made my job easier; nearly all of my referrals to the admitting service this week were variations of '70+ man/woman with a flu-like illness who can't walk/eat/drink and is somewhat short of breath and/or confused.' Not to mention strokes and heart attacks, which could also be caused by Covid-19. It's not unusual to hear a story of "flu-like illness" and then some kind of collapse a week later from heart issues or a thrombotic stroke. We haven't addressed this with any meaningful capacity increases. We have a whole new disease that still hasn't established a seasonal pattern, and we are too afraid to tell people how to reduce its impact."
I'm not too afraid to tell people how to reduce its impact, but it sure draws a lot of fire from haters! It's a hard thing to get thrown at you when denial is so cozy comfy. But it's so stupid easy to prevent all this!
Reduce the impact to yourself and to the community by wearing a well-fitting N95. Don't wait for public health to finally get in gear; we are on our own! This is a huge experiment in the power of the people to do the right thing. Be on the right side of history and protect yourself and others.
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