Category: Health

Are Americans better off than we were four years ago? ask some Republicans, trying to score political points.
Well, yes. Hell, yes— we’re better off.
Exactly four years ago, the WHO declared COVID-19 a world-wide pandemic.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans died in 2020, the economy ground to a halt, started up again, inflation spiked, but is now coming down while unemployment is staying low.

On the topic of pandemics and epidemics*: we do have a fentanyl epidemic.
Per a report in The Economist, ‘America’s ten-year-old fentanyl epidemic is still getting worse’.

*While an epidemic is large, it is also generally contained or expected in its spread, while a pandemic is international and out of control (from Columbia University Public Health’s website).

I scheduled an appointment for myself for a second Omicron booster shot. (The omicron subvariant XBB.1.16, known as “Arcturus,” has been listed by the WHO as a variant under monitoring since March 22. Experts say this variant has a higher transmissibility rate than previous strains but doesn’t appear to be more dangerous).

On World AIDS Day, we raise a red ribbon to remember how far we’ve come, the work that’s left, and those devastated by this disease, particularly the LGBTQI+ folks and people of color who endured the brunt of this epidemic instead of being seen.
Let’s finish this fight.
– President Biden on Twitter

I got my flu shot today, and checked the CDC website for numbers for the last few years.
These are graphs I pulled together from the CDC website, just for myself.
Bottom line, and just speaking rough numbers: flu can make 40 million people in the USA sick in a bad season— 1 out of 10 in the population!— and result in 40,000 deaths.

As of midnight Tuesday, Shanghai’s 25 million residents were allowed to leave their apartments and residential compounds to go to work.  Businesses are  cleared to resume normal operations with restrictions (such as no inside dining in restaurants).

Officials are eager to get China’s most economically important city running again.

Peter Jolicoeur enjoying an Oktoberfest-sized beer in Shanghai. His Twitter profile says he is a ‘Shanghai-based aviation consultant, pilot, musician, runner & Chinese student’. Cheers!

---

P.S. —for your vocabulary

shanghai
shang·​hai | \ ˈshaŋ-ˌhī , shaŋ-ˈhī \
shanghaied; shanghaiing

transitive verb
1a: to put aboard a ship by force often with the help of liquor or a drug
b: to put by force or threat of force into or as if into a place of detention
2: to put by trickery into an undesirable position

Example sentence: “To shanghai your friend into a mental health intervention might be a mistake”.

Here are two questions that Bill Gates had answered on Reddit today:
Why do you think the world was utterly unprepared for Covid?
Infectious disease in rich countries isn’t the big problem it used to be. For things like fire and earthquakes we have small ones to remind us of the problem. A pandemic that gets into Europe or the US only comes along rarely so it is easy to not practice and not have dedicated resources. A few countries like Australia did a better job and have 10% of the deaths of most rich countries.

Why is the COVID-19 model behaving very differently in America as compared to other countries? With state-of-the-art vaccines and close to 70% of people fully vaccinated, the cases are always rising after dipping for a few days. Looking at the statistics of the number of people catching COVID and the number of people dying due to it, seemed like this was to end by January / February. The model is quite weird.
The new variants come along and evade immunity from vaccination and infection. Also immunity wanes fairly quickly in the elderly. When the cases are high people do change their behavior and when they are low they go back to normal behavior. So you get huge ups and downs in the case rate driven by seasons, variants and people’s behavior. Fortunately Omicron is less fatal than previous variants.

So a Trump-appointed judge in Florida overrules the national mask mandate for airplane travel and throws the CDC’s recommendation out the window .. and then the Biden administration promptly announces that the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) will no longer enforce it.

To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
– from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Act III, Scene I

---

 

The Apple Health app that tracks my sleep every night, has been reporting only 4 to 5 hours of sleep for me, even after I had been in bed ‘sleeping’ for the most part of 8 hrs.

I generally feel OK in the daytime, so I believe I get more than 4 or 5 hours of official ‘sleep’.

For comparison with the Apple Health app, I’m trying an app called Sleep Cycle (screen shot on the right). The results from last night look encouraging (more accurate).

The hard cast came off my wrist and forearm today. In addition, two stainless steel pins were extricated. The surgeon pulled them out with sterile pliers, basically.

The pins had held the lunate and scaphoid bones against each other so that the new scapholunate ligament could establish itself.

The second pin had a slight bend in (by design), and was not easy to pull out. I was very thankful for the fat syringe of lidocaine that was deployed on my wrist. Lidocaine blocks the pain signals that nerve cells send to the brain, by interfering with the so-called sodium channel that is the pathway for the signals.

 

I got my final cast today.
It allows my thumb to move a little more, and actually touch my index finger.

I also have exercise instructions for my digits— a set of ten that I do four times a day (hold fingers straight, make a hook, make a fist, and so on).

 

I entered my address into the new Washington State COVID-19 test kit page on Friday.
Just yesterday, two 2-pack test kits landed on my porch.

The manufacturer’s website says these test kits correctly identify positive specimens in 94% of tests, and negative specimens in 98% of tests.

The test kits are for doing a so-called lateral flow test for COVID-19 antigens (proteins from the virus).

Doing the test seems pretty straight forward.
The test strip looks the same as the strip in a pregnancy test kit.
C stands for ‘Control’ and T for ‘Test’.

If both lines are colored (the T line may be very faint), the test is positive.
If only the C line is colored, the test is negative.
(If no line is colored, you did something wrong and the test is invalid.)

Here’s a table that I compiled of the types of COVID tests.

Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) ('Molecular')	Antigen	Antibody
Detects genetic material from the virus.	Detects proteins from the virus.	Detects immune system antibodies (a spike protein test or a nucleocapsid test).
The gold standard to test for an active COVID-19 infection.	Not as sensitive as PCR tests.	Not suitable to diagnose an active COVID-19 infection.
Nasal swab sample processed by a lab.	Nasal swab sample processed by lab or with home test kit.	Blood sample processed by lab.

 

The stitches on my wrist & arm came out today.
Next up was an X-ray to peek inside, and make sure the scaphoid and lunate bones are still in their proper places.
The surgeon said everything looks good.
Finally, I got a new cast.

It looks like the Omicron wave of the Covid-19 pandemic has crested in the Northeast of the United States. Recent numbers for the other regions show it is (at least right now) no longer increasing there.

I bought a box of N95 masks on Amazon to use (instead of my cotton cloth masks— that are apparently no longer cutting it against the Omicron variant).

The N95 masks are more difficult to put on than ones with ear loops .. and then there is the question of how many times they can be used before they should be discarded. (They cannot be washed in the washing machine).

The short answer: it depends. If the mask was used in a crowded place, or for a long time (say, 4 to 8 hours), it should probably be discarded.

My wrist operation went without a hitch. My forearm now has a splint and a casing with a thick bandage on, with four fingers sticking out.  The recovery period is going to be three months, all told.
During the preparation for the surgery, the  anesthesiologist explained to me that they were going to do a Bier’s block. ‘Nothing to do with beer— it’s named after a German doctor August Bier’, said he.

The Bier’s block involves the injection of a local anesthetic solution (such as lidocaine) into the arteries of an upper or lower extremity, from which the blood had been squeezed out, or drained by gravity. The careful application and use of two tourniquets isolate the bloodless and numbed arm or leg from the central circulation system.

I injured my wrist on the tennis court some time ago.
An X-ray (done in November) had revealed that the two bones at the base of my thumb (the scaphoid and the lunate) are no longer snug against each other, but separated. This means that the ligament between them is torn.

So I’m going in for an outpatient operation on Wednesday to have the ligament repaired, and I have to present a negative Covid-19 test. I will get the results of the test tomorrow. I should be good to go. Fingers crossed.