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...
Think about it, chances are high you’d know someone who succumbed to some form of cancer or is a cancer survivor. Whether it be a loved one, family member, friend, co-office worker, or acquaintance, there’ll be someone in your social network who’s had the dreaded big C. That’s just one of...
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...
SPEAKING OUT Ignacio R. Bunye Until recently, my knowledge of Ukraine (Crimea in particular) was limited to what I picked up in high school. My English teacher, who also happened to be my mother, Sofia Rivera Bunye, asked her class to memorize “Charge of the Light Brigade” by Alfred Lord...
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...
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...
‘Stealth’ Omicron, a decline in cases, and preventing the next variant CLINICAL MATTERS Whenever new scientific information is released on COVID-19, misinformation isn’t far behind. There are many factors that contribute to this. Scientists being unable to properly communicate their findings...
When will we start dropping masks? CLINICAL MATTERS One contentious point of discussion throughout the whole pandemic has been the issue of masks. At the start of the pandemic, the prevailing scientific understanding of what was then called nCoV (short for novel coronavirus, now formally named...
A review of our response and how to safely exit CLINICAL MATTERS As cases continue to drop in NCR and across the country, many people are talking about the pandemic “end-game.” The exponential increase in cases in early January 2022 quickly peaked and has precipitously dropped. This occurred in...
It’s a paradigm shift CLINICAL MATTERS As new daily cases of COVID-19 in the US breach the one million-mark, government leaders and healthcare officials in many countries are being forced to confront the inevitable question: Since the Omicron variant is out of control, what is an acceptable...
Is it really the COVID killer they say it is? CLINICAL MATTERS As more and more local cases of Omicron are reported, it is very likely that it is driving the exponential increase in cases. Community transmission is confirmed when it is no longer possible to trace individual cases to distinct...
Isolation, quarantine, and what it means in the age of Omicron and Delta CLINICAL MATTERS Many people, including doctors, were puzzled by the recent changes made by the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to the duration of quarantine and isolation. The CDC shortened both quarantine and isolation...
