COVID

Essential clinician commentary on COVID-19 coronavirus from the KevinMD community.

Prevention is the key to saving lives: What the pandemic taught us

Policy
November 3, 2024

An excerpt from Prevention First: Policymaking for a Healthier America.

Little did I know that when Prevention First was first published in December 2019, a novel virus with pandemic potential had begun to stealthily spread in China. The subsequent global COVID-19 pandemic resulted in nearly 7 million deaths, exacerbated long-standing health challenges, and led to life expectancy declines around the globe.

With over 1.1 million American lives lost during the COVID-19 …

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Trust me, I’m an expert: the pandemic parade of pompous professionals

Physician
September 20, 2024

In a world where experts are our go-to for solving everything, the COVID-19 pandemic exposed just how fallible these specialists can be. Despite impressive titles and years of experience, many experts were just as clueless as the rest of us, often with unwarranted confidence. A recent study delves into the uncomfortable truth: the more knowledge you think you have, the less aware you might be of your actual ignorance.

We rely …

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Pandemic lessons: How better staffing and communication can save health care

Policy
August 31, 2024

An excerpt from Healing Healthcare: Evidence-Based Strategies to Mend Our Broken System.

The greatest challenge facing our professional workforce today is creating a healthy work environment in which nurses care for patients. A significant characteristic of a healthy work environment is appropriate staffing. Nurse staffing is a multifaceted issue, and it is extremely difficult to objectively advocate for change. Different members of the health care team have different concepts of …

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Health care communication in a post-COVID world: What’s changed and what’s not since the pandemic

Conditions
August 31, 2024

An excerpt from The Mumbo Jumbo Fix: A Survival Guide for Effective Doctor-Patient-Nurse Communication.

If you’re like me, you mark life’s timeline by three milestones—before COVID, during COVID, and after COVID. While most of us no longer wear masks or maintain social distance, the world has undeniably changed in ways that impact health care communication among its three essential participants: doctors, patients, and nurses.

Telemedicine, the …

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Long COVID and your brain: the effect of virus and vaccines

Conditions
May 12, 2024

A bunch of symptoms, which may persist many months or even years after an acute COVID infection has cleared, have been described in the medical literature with increasing frequency since the onset of the pandemic. This constellation of findings has been dubbed “long COVID.” Long COVID’s effects on the brain, in particular, have certainly been in the news, and it’s also been popping up in the medical literature. So, what’s …

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Navigating COVID: a journey from academic intensity to healing

Conditions
April 25, 2024

Springtime. Blooming trees. Green grass. Cool winds. Sunny skies. COVID.

That is where my mind wanders every year since 2020, when the season turns. I flash back to the drive between the hospital and my home. Every evening after fighting a losing battle at an academic institution hell-bent on ignoring and downplaying the horror that was about to breach our borders. I was a fighter then — maybe more in that …

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A potential discovery of highly fatal SARS coronavirus?

Conditions
March 23, 2024

Has a highly fatal SARS coronavirus already been discovered? Maybe yes, but just its report is highly concerning. On January 4, 2024, a letter to the editor was uploaded to a preprint server which gave too few details but described a 100 percent fatal virus in genetically modified mice. The modifications made these mice similar to humans by adding a human ACE2 receptor to their cells, including in …

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Critical care physician battles long COVID with hope and grit

Conditions
March 8, 2024

I recognize your anguish. Long COVID is new, and I will do my best to support you through this new and confusing illness. This is all I wanted to hear in my countless doctor’s visits. Some came close. The rest were baffled, given how healthy I was prior to a “mild COVID” infection.

I felt patronized by my own colleagues for trying experimental therapy. When activities of daily living are a …

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Beyond medical vs. N95: strategic masking for COVID protection

Conditions
February 28, 2024

Do masks prevent COVID-19 infections? You might be thinking that it is a bit late to ponder these questions. But better late than never! As shown in the following graph provided by the CDC, COVID is here to stay with us, at least for the time being. Even though nothing compared to the 140,000 hospitalizations per week during the early 2022 wave, there were still about 40,000 weekly hospitalizations a …

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How one family’s hero ended a pandemic [PODCAST]

Podcast
January 25, 2024
YouTube video

Subscribe to The Podcast by KevinMD. Catch up on old episodes!

Join Shan Liu, an emergency physician and co-author of Masked Hero: How Wu-Lien Teh Invented the Mask and Ended an Epidemic. Discover the journey of Wu Lien-teh, Shan’s great-grandfather, who played a pivotal role in ending a …

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Pandemic aftermath: Navigating a new normal in health, education, and social dynamics

Policy
January 25, 2024

Psychological distress. In 2021, 40% of high school students felt sad and hopeless, 20% seriously considered suicide, and 10% attempted it, with suicides among young people hitting their highest rates ever, though they fell in 2022. Since the greatest increase was before 2017, we can’t really blame the pandemic. And some “innovative” approaches for combatting …

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Bridging the health care divide: All our actions matter

Physician
January 8, 2024

Much has been written on the social divides laid bare and amplified by the COVID-19 pandemic. Thankfully, the more divisive punditry and polemics have receded along with the COVID-19 mandates. And yet, as professionals in health care who have worked in direct patient care and in support of our clinician colleagues, we still see a broad gap separating the culture and worldviews of the people in health care and the …

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Time to retire quarantine: Why 5-day isolation guidelines are doing more harm than good

Conditions
December 22, 2023

I’m making morning rounds on the pediatric unit today: First up, 4-year-old twins with a severe asthma flare; next an infant with bronchiolitis on supplemental oxygen; then a dehydrated 3-year-old listless in bed. These children are all hospitalized with viral illness – but none of it is COVID-19. Meanwhile, their sniffling peers fill daycares and classrooms, and my daughter is among them. “Maybe it’s allergies,” I said to myself this …

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A cardiologist’s COVID-19 frontline journey [PODCAST]

Podcast
December 13, 2023
YouTube video

Subscribe to The Podcast by KevinMD. Catch up on old episodes!

We sit down with Marissa Lombardo, a cardiologist, to delve into her deeply moving experiences on the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City. Join us as Marissa shares her journey, from delivering heart-wrenching news …

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Navigating COVID: Why it still matters

Podcast
November 28, 2023
YouTube video

This article is sponsored by Gilead Sciences, Inc.

In this special sponsored episode from Gilead, I’m joined by Anu Osinusi, an infectious disease physician and Vice President of Clinical Research for Hepatitis, Respiratory, and Emerging Viruses at Gilead, to discuss navigating COVID-19 today. We look back on the early days of …

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Dependent on the mask my great-grandfather invented

Physician
November 25, 2023

Decades ago, I missed my college graduation ceremony with President Clinton as the commencement speaker because I had to be elsewhere. I was in Shanghai, celebrating the 80th anniversary of the Chinese Medical Association—an organization founded by my great-grandfather, Wu Lien-teh, who was the first Chinese person to be nominated for a Nobel Prize. My father, his grandson, had immigrated to the U.S. from Beijing, met my mother in Palo …

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Prayer in the COVID ICU [PODCAST]

Podcast
November 18, 2023
YouTube video

Subscribe to The Podcast by KevinMD. Catch up on old episodes!

We sit down with Robert Raschke, a critical care physician and the author of One Hundred Prayers: God’s Answer to Prayer in a COVID ICU. We explore the power of prayer in the midst of a health …

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The Djokovic saga: Vaccination policies revisited

Conditions
October 25, 2023

No matter your politics or judgment on the COVID-19 vaccine, we can agree that the visuals of the world’s number one tennis player being detained and treated like a criminal when he went to the Australian Open last year were unsettling, and the Australian government should have better handled his case. To recap, Mr. Djokovic flew to Australia in January 2022 on a vaccine exemption as he had a COVID-19 …

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