Category: Health

I spent some time recently with two Harvard undergraduates who are camped out in a Cambridge apartment. I’m the oldest person that they’ll have any contact with for the foreseeable future, yet these 20-year-olds behave as though they either worked or lived in a nursing home for 90-year-olds. Asked why they put so much effort into mask-wearing and deny themselves so many social opportunities that they would previous have jumped at, they say that they are personally afraid of getting coronavirus. They’re not obese or chronically ill, so their statistical risk of being felled by Covid-19 is low (see

from mass.gov, statistics that have now been removed), but they seem to perceive Covid-19 as the main risk to their lives and health. They won’t take off their masks, for example, even when outside in mostly-deserted Cambridge. After talking to and observing them, I concluded that, at least for young Americans, Covid-19 is now primarily a disease of the mind. Support for my theory: “We’ve Hit a Pandemic Wall” (NYT, August 5)?

New data show that Americans are suffering from record levels of mental distress.

Let’s start with the numbers. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, roughly one in 12 American adults reported symptoms of an anxiety disorder at this time last year; now it’s more than one in three. Last week, the Kaiser Family Foundation released a tracking poll showing that for the first time, a majority of American adults — 53 percent — believes that the pandemic is taking a toll on their mental health.

This number climbs to 68 percent if you look solely at African-Americans. The disproportionate toll the pandemic has taken on Black lives and livelihoods — made possible by centuries of structural disparities, compounded by the corrosive psychological effect of everyday racism — is appearing, starkly, in our mental health data.

Turns out the extra ten extra pounds around my middle have moved in and unpacked, though I’d initially hoped they were on a month-to-month lease.

The newspaper that has been cheerleading for Shutdown now is surprised that there are some negative consequences? How did the coastal elites not figure out that not everyone’s shutdown experience would be positive? A friend in the Boston suburbs, who was a work-from-home consultant long before the Age of Shutdown, was telling me that his 8th grader hadn’t minded being at home for three months with minimal instruction being provided by the lavishly funded public school. Therefore, he concluded, shutdown was not a big deal, and if the school shutdown lasted another year that was okay too. His son would do fine practicing on the grand piano, learning from Ph.D. Dad and super smart stay-at-home Mom, etc.

I pointed out that not every American child lived in a 6,000 square foot $2 million house with two biological parents who get along at least reasonably well. Would he acknowledge that an inner-city child crammed into a two-bedroom public housing unit with mom, a step-sibling, and mom’s latest boyfriend might have a less favorable view of school shutdown? (he did!)

(see also “Coronavirus impact: Chasm grows between whites, people of color, California poll finds; Spanish-speaking Latinx voters say COVID-19 has seriously hurt their ability to pay for food and rent” (Mercury News, August 6))

Some top-voted NYT reader comments:

This is like the Twin Towers imploding all over again – except this time, one story collapses each day, and there is no ground floor.

The pandemic in and of itself is stressful but then add the stress of Trump’s daily tweets. The thought that he might get re-elected makes the stress almost unbearable.

What I think has caused the national stress-out, Ms. Senior, is that America now knows that it’s on its own. We don’t have a president who actually understands and cares about us.

I stress over the corrupt Republican leadership, so unconcerned for 99.9% of Americans that they let a a spoiled child throw our health, education, and welfare out the window, …

A coworker yesterday confided that about 15 of her relatives are COVID positive after a big family graduation party 10 days ago. I couldn’t hide my disgust. She is a very highly paid executive. We work for a research university health system!!! My neighbors just had a 40-person party for their 9-year-old. And seemed miffed and befuddled that many of us on the block declined to attend. They were all crammed under a tent shoulder to shoulder. Nary a mask in sight.

Maria from Maryland: The thing is, a lot of us are coming to the conclusion that all our problems are the same problem. Botched coronavirus response? Republicans. Insisting on doing things that spread the disease? Same. Economic deprivation? Republicans again. Two generations of failing to address racial issues? Again. Two generations of banging our heads against the same gender barriers? You guessed it. Failure to deal with climate change? Do you need to ask? Guns? Infrastructure? Science? Arts? They’ve been at it my whole adults life, ruining everything. And at their apex, they produced the very worst man in the world. There will be a vaccine for the virus, but what about the humans who are ruining our lives?

Coronaplague wouldn’t bother them at all, apparently, if Joe Biden were the Great Father in Washington right now!

Coronaplague obviously is a real problem for the elderly/vulnerable. And in societies where it is allowed to run wild, e.g., Sweden, it will kill approximately 0.05 percent of the population within a few painful months. But will readers agree with me that if young people are afraid of getting the disease personally, despite having no actual or planned contact with the old/vulnerable, then coronavirus has mutated into something whose main effect is mental illness?

Related:

• “Coronavirus Pandemic Causing Anxiety, Depression in Americans, CDC Finds” (US News): “MORE THAN 4 IN 10 Americans are struggling with mental health issues stemming from the coronavirus pandemic, a new survey found.”

What’s the best strategy for dealing with a virus that attacks the obese and out of shape? Stay home for three months right next to the fridge.

“In Fight Against COVID-19, Physical Activity Falls Off a Cliff — Drastic change in worldwide daily step counts since March” (MedPage Today):

In the first 10 days after the World Health Organization’s March 11 declaration that COVID-19 was officially a global pandemic, smartphone users worldwide showed a 5.5% decrease in mean daily steps (287 fewer steps).

In the first 30 days, mean daily steps dropped 27.3% (1,432 fewer steps), reported the group led by Geoffrey Tison, MD, MPH, of the University of California San Francisco. Their paper was published online in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

For example, people in Italy had a 48.7% maximal decrease in daily steps, whereas those in Sweden showed only a 6.9% maximal reduction in steps. The difference may have stemmed from government responses, as Italy issued a lockdown on March 9, whereas Sweden has yet to implement such a measure.

(I like the last part. There is still hope among the righteous for saving Swedish souls by converting them to the Church of Shutdown.)

“This is an interesting natural experiment that has health implications for global and regional populations, and especially those with underlying chronic health conditions who are particularly vulnerable to COVID-19-related morbidity and mortality and who may depend on routine physical activity as a preventive measure,” according to Messiah.

i.e., it will be interesting for a “scientist” (named “Messiah”! As someone who evaluates coronaplague “science” from a comparative religion point of view, this is my dream fulfilled!) to watch fat people die.

From the Newport Jazz Festival, 2005 (canceled until a hardier breed of Americans can be produced?):

Related:

• “StayHomeSaveLives or #StayHomeTradeLives?”
• “The COVID-19 shutdown will cost Americans millions of years of life” (The Hill, May 25)

I met with a cardiologist friend last night. He says that he is working roughly 60 percent as much as he was pre-coronapanic. “Where we would do five procedures per day, we can now do only two,” he said. “That leaves enough time for deep cleaning between patients. Also, they’re reserving 20 percent of the rooms in the hospital for Covid patients, just in case.”

He and his colleagues have already had multiple patients die while waiting for heart valve procedures that were considered “elective”. (see “StayHomeSaveLives or #StayHomeTradeLives?” and the link to the NEJM article) He gets paid in full despite the reduction in work and billing, and is at a vulnerable age for Covid-19 (70s), but is nonetheless anti-shutdown: “It was only a few years ago when parents were supposed to make sacrifices for their children. Now it is the other way around.”

Today is #ShutDownSTEM day. Plenty of righteous posts on Facebook from friends who are professors of various flavors of nerdism. They’ve been sitting on their butts for three months now, taking baby steps in the direction of online teaching (nowhere near as competently as faculty at Western Governor’s University, which has been online since the mid-1990s). Today they will sit on their butts even more firmly? It has been a struggle for me to refrain from asking “How could you possibly do less than you’ve been doing since mid-March?”

(Not all professionals are idle. A friend Facebook messaged me today about some divorce litigators who are fully engaged on an issue of life insurance. The defendant father wants to have the beneficiaries of his life insurance be a trust for the children (tweens). The plaintiff mother wants to ensure that the life insurance cash is paid to her, to compensate her for any reduction in profits from alimony and child support. The parties are divorced, but the litigation lives on (legal fees on both sides paid for by the father’s earnings that would have been the children’s inheritance).)

Speaking for myself, I participated in a Zoom meeting regarding some health records data analysis today, but all of the coding was in SQL so I am not sure if that qualifies as “STEM”! Later today it will be time to fly the helicopter, which can be considered a “STEM” activity by American journalists when a member of an officially recognized victim group is at the controls. One of the participants in the call is a third-year medical student. He won’t be able to do a clinical rotation until about a month from now (i.e., he will miss at least three months of clinical training).

From a neighbor’s front yard, “Science is Real” (but also not so important that you’d want to do it every day?):

From a recent visit to the doctor’s office in Concord, Massachusetts to get some blood drawn in advance of a regular checkup:

(any of 50+ gender IDs is okay, but we will depict, recognize, and give priority to only two?)

A righteous Church of Shutdowner on Facebook regarding the infidels of the frozen north:

The Swedish approach makes sense if and only if you are certain that everyone is going to get the virus in the end. If you think there is going to be a vaccine available within 18 months, it means far more deaths than necessary.

[“far more deaths than necessary” in Sweden to date translates to half as many as in Massachusetts (adjusted for population size). Their failure with continuity looks pretty good compared to our success with shutdown!]

I asked why he was confident regarding vaccine development:

We produced a vaccine for Ebola within months of the disease appearing. And right now we have every vaccine lab in the world and more looking for the COVID vaccine. The question hasn’t been time, it has been whether immunity was possible. If you have thirty world class labs each taking a shot at producing a vaccine that has a 10% chance of success, you are pretty much certain to succeed if it is possible with that approach.

I certainly hope that he is right (he’s a computer programmer, not a virologist, so he is guessing just like the rest of us!), but I decided to check out Wikipedia on Ebola and discovered that it first broke out within humans in 1976 and an approved vaccine become available 43 years later, on December 17, 2019 (i.e., we were perfectly set up to fight the last war almost to the day that the next war broke out).

(The press release might have to be walked back a bit, given recent events: “The first-ever FDA approval of a vaccine for the prevention of Ebola is a triumph of American global health leadership.”)

Related:

• “‘Against all odds’: The inside story of how scientists across three continents produced an Ebola vaccine” (STAT) provides interesting background on the process.

A friend in medical research and I were joking about people who claim to have hindsight regarding coronavirus. I said that I alternate between bragging about my garage full of N95 masks and ventilators and, if someone else says that it should have been trivial for Donald Trump to foresee, if I can come over to his/her/zer/their house to borrow some of the stockpiled N95 masks and ventilators.

He said “We were actually the worst.” What could that mean? “We [doctors] were still holding huge conventions, flying on packed airline flights, meeting by the thousands in hotels, and then returning home with whatever we’d caught to our patients, often some of the sickest and most immune-compromised people in the U.S.” Until when? “March 10.”

(note that the typical school system in Massachusetts shut down on the afternoon of March 12 or 13 and a lot of companies went to work-from-home after March 13)

For decades the government has been telling people that smoking cigarettes is bad for their health. For about a decade, the government has been telling people that smoking marijuana is good for their health (cures most illness!).

We know that coronavirus attacks smokers. Americans right now are as scared of coronavirus as they’ve ever been of anything. Could it be that the coronaplague will get people to stop smoking both tobacco and marijuana?

Cigarettes are taxed at the federal level, right? So we should be able to get clean data on how many are sold, no? All that I could find was a December 30, 2019 report on tobacco sales in 2018 (i.e., it took a year to get the data and report together).

Readers: Predictions?