COVID

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 …

Critical care physician battles long COVID with hope and grit

Sonali Mantoo, MD

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 …

Beyond medical vs. N95: strategic masking for COVID protection

P. Dileep Kumar, MD, MBA

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 …

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

The Podcast by KevinMD

Podcast

January 25, 2024

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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 …

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

Susan Levenstein, MD

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 …

Bridging the health care divide: All our actions matter

Matthew Lewis, PhD, MTS, Alexander Mansour, MPH, and Sarah Smithson, MD, MPH

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 …

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

Carolyn Boscia, MD

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 …

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

The Podcast by KevinMD

Podcast

December 13, 2023

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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 …

Navigating COVID: Why it still matters

Anu Osinusi, MD, MPH & The Podcast by KevinMD

Podcast

November 28, 2023

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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Navigating COVID: Why it still matters

Dependent on the mask my great-grandfather invented

Shan Liu, MD, SD

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 …

Prayer in the COVID ICU [PODCAST]

The Podcast by KevinMD

Podcast

November 18, 2023

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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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Prayer in the COVID ICU [PODCAST]

The Djokovic saga: Vaccination policies revisited

Dinesh Arab, MD

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 …

When mandates fail to protect, science can help

Ken Blaker

Conditions

October 21, 2023

On October 28, 1918, a San Francisco horseshoer named James Wisser urged a street corner crowd to throw away their masks in defiance of a local mask mandate issued a few days before. He was shot twice after resisting a local health inspector’s attempt to force compliance. At that time, most of the medical community believed that cotton gauze masks were useful in slowing infection rates, but dissenting …

Heroes of pandemic control [PODCAST]

The Podcast by KevinMD

Podcast

October 20, 2023

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

Join Nicholas A. Daniels, an internal medicine physician and the author of Outbreaks and Pandemics: The Life of a Disease Detective. In this episode, we delve deep into the crucial role disease detectives play in solving and …

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Heroes of pandemic control [PODCAST]

COVID vaccines and weight loss medications: a tale of 2 needles

Ryan McCarthy, MD

Conditions

October 12, 2023

I am perplexed by two different needles which, when viewed together, illustrate the irrational themes which dominate our shared humanity. They inform me that, despite being a doctor for more than twenty years, I honestly feel dumber each day about human behavior. If, unlike me, you have somehow figured out more along the way, good for you.

The first needle which vexes me was the one stuck in my arm on …

Battling COVID chaos and recruiting doctors

Samuel Shem, MD, PhD

Physician

August 23, 2023

An excerpt from Our Hospital.

Kush Kare Hospital in Columbia, New York, was the flagship of Kush Kare Private Equity Inc., a for-profit chain of hospitals across America. A for-profit that was listed on a lot of lucrative trading routes. Clearly its workings were murky—maybe not equity at all. A clever …

A heartbreaking COVID-19 case: the importance of trust in medical care

Robert Raschke, MD

Conditions

August 20, 2023

An excerpt from One Hundred Prayers: God’s answer to prayer in a COVID ICU.

(August 30, 2021) Susan was 44 years old and previously healthy; an ardent anti-masker. When she caught delta COVID, she took ivermectin, zinc and vitamin C. She arrived at our ER about a week later, requiring immediate …

A memorable day during COVID: Staying true to my calling

Lee Scheinbart, MD

Physician

August 16, 2023

COVID reminded me of why I became a doctor. Below is an unpublished account (in short story form) of my most memorable day during the height of COVID. It is a reminder that we can remain true to our intrinsic motivators rather than victims of extrinsic factors. And most of us still have the opportunity to choose every day which forces rule our day: intrinsic or extrinsic.

On a Tuesday morning …

How dementia and COVID-19 robbed the baby doll of love

Robert Killeen, MD

Conditions

August 1, 2023

When I started visiting patients in nursing homes, a good many of them had some degree of dementia. In its earliest form, a person with dementia could recall what they were doing when they found out about 9/11, or when Kennedy was shot, or when Pearl Harbor was bombed in the Second World War. However, they couldn’t recall their most recent …

It’s time to stop stigmatizing long COVID patients with mental health conditions

James C. Jackson, PsyD

Conditions

July 19, 2023

Mental health conditions are common among individuals with long COVID due to various factors. These include the direct effects of COVID-19 on the body, such as neuroinflammation, as well as the circumstances often associated with the condition, such as job loss, reduced income, disconnection, isolation, chronic pain, immobility, and the persistent feeling of being unwell. Alongside cognitive impairment and fatigue, mental health issues form what I call the “unholy trinity” …

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