Workers at Garfield Medical Center in suburban Los Angeles were on edge as the pandemic ramped up in March and April. Staffers in a 30-patient unit were rationing a single tub of sanitizing wipes all day. A May memo from the CEO said N95 masks could be cleaned up to 20 times before replacement. Patients...
Fallen pine cones covered 16-year-old Leslie Keiser’s fresh grave at the edge of Wolf Point, a small community on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation on the eastern Montana plains. Leslie, whose father is a member of the Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes, is one of at least two teenagers on the reservation who died...
A recent study by a team of University of Cincinnati researchers shows that suicide planning, attempts and completions were already on the rise pre-COVID-19. Add a pandemic to a holiday season, when depression and suicide are typically higher among both adolescents and adults, and the last couple of weeks of 2020 may be a time...
During the COVID-19 pandemic, health care workers have been at the forefront of the battle against the life-threatening illness. Sadly, they are not immune to the effects of the disease. Many have contracted COVID-19, and some have died. In a paper published in the journal PLOS One, Junaid Razzak, director of the Johns Hopkins Center...
Researchers have developed a way to use a simple home aroma diffuser to test whether N95 and other types of sealing masks, such as KN95 and FFP2 masks, are properly fitted, a result which could be used to help protect healthcare workers and the public from contracting or transmitting COVID-19. The researchers, from the University...
Spotting horned owls in neighborhood trees? Raising a bumper crop of winter squash? You may have much in common with individuals in a new study. People in the study–who ranged from stuck at home to stressed in essential worker jobs–reported significant increases in outdoor activity during COVID-19, especially among women. Outdoor activities seeing the largest...
It’s been shown that when two people wearing masks interact, the chance of COVID-19 transmission is drastically reduced. This is why public health officials have pleaded for all people to wear masks: they not only protect the wearer from expelling particles that might carry SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19), but masks also...
There have been over 280,000 deaths in the United States due to COVID-19, with the infectious nature of the disease preventing many patients from receiving end-of-life care at home. Researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital and collaborators found that 95.5 percent of individuals who died with a diagnosis of COVID-19 in the Mass General Brigham...
Once the COVID-19 pandemic is over, a lot of things will go back to normal. We’ll stop wearing masks. We’ll crowd into restaurants. We’ll walk whatever direction we want to down grocery store aisles. But some changes that the pandemic spurred might be here to stay. Among them: the expansion of telepsychiatry. “This will be...
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Conventional wisdom has long recognized the power of home court advantage in basketball. The specific reasons home teams perform better are less clear: Is it the adrenalin fueled by the roar of the crowd? Referees favoring the home team? What about disruptions of the internal body clock from quickly crossing time zones and poor sleep...
