Here are some reminders CLINICAL MATTERS With only one week left until the May 9 election, campaigns are in overdrive with their final pushes and rallies. While candidates look favorably upon huge crowds of people coming out to support them, healthcare workers look on in horror as people are packed...
CLINICAL MATTERS Last week I wrote about my first international trip in two years and the truly incredible experience of attending TED 2022 in Vancouver, Canada. Many readers asked me to expound on the TED conference and the fellowship I received. They also wanted to know the details of the return...
What to expect for long-haul flights CLINICAL MATTERS On April 7, 2022, I took a long-delayed trip to Vancouver, Canada as my first international trip in two years. The trip had originally been scheduled in 2020 when I received a senior fellowship at TED. Most people are familiar with TED Talks but...
Understanding XD, XE and XF CLINICAL MATTERS There has been a recent flurry of news articles on the latest twist in the Covid-19 saga—recombinant SARS-CoV-2 viruses. XD and XF, both recombinants of Omicron and Delta, have been unceremoniously dubbed “Deltacron” by the media. XE, a recombinant...
Are yearly shots in the works? CLINICAL MATTERS Do you need a fourth shot? When should you get one? What about a fifth shot? Is this going to be a yearly thing? The resurgence of Covid-19 as a result of breakthrough infections by the variants of concern has tempered expectations on the ability of...
Are we endemic yet? CLINICAL MATTERS Six hundred thousand new Covid-19 cases in one day in South Korea! Nearly 300,000 in Germany! Almost 200,000 in Vietnam! These numbers almost sound made up. Unimaginable. While many people were apoplectic at the nearly 39,000 cases we had in January 2022, the...
Variant Alphabet Soup: Deltacron redux, AY.4/BA.1, BA.2.2 nightmare in Hong Kong, and the truth about BA.2.3 CLINICAL MATTER Deltacron! As if Delta or Omicron wasn’t bad enough on its own, this hodge-podge of a virus is now a thing. Or is it? The initial report of a “Deltacron” virus came...
A fourth dose, boosters for younger kids, masks, and keeping the virus at bay CLINICAL MATTERS It is remarkable how fast people forget and move on to other things when there is a perception that the danger has passed. It was barely two months ago when people were bunkered in their homes as the...
It’s finally Alert Level 1, and we have vaccines to thank CLINICAL MATTERS The transition to Alert Level 1 has been a long time coming. After one year of the nationwide rollout of vaccines, Covid-19 has been tamed. But we would not have gotten to this point so quickly if not for the...
Can we now throw away the masks? CLINICAL MATTERS Lockdowns have been a major feature of the pandemic since the first city-wide lockdown in Wuhan. Faced with a novel coronavirus for which there was no pre-existing immunity and no known treatment, the world had little choice but to drastically limit...
The world doesn't stop, even when there's an ongoing war. Babies are still born every day. Dr. Denis Surkov of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast Children's Clinical Hospital With the bombings over the weekend, in Dninpro city, Ukraine, a children's hospital was under siege and the doctors rushed these babies...
Here are the latest medications against COVID-19 CLINICAL MATTERS Try this, it might work! Early in the pandemic, doctors desperate to improve the chances of their patients surviving COVID-19 were willing to use whatever treatment showed some promise. The number of drugs tried as potential...
