When the Delta variant hit Mississippi, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) published alarming statistics for maternal and perinatal deaths. Pregnant women were dying at three times the pre-COVID baseline rate. These young, healthy women w…
An excerpt from The Vaccine: Inside the Race to Conquer the COVID-19 Pandemic. Copyright © 2022 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group. For the first time in weeks, Uğur Şahin’s calendar was clear. It was a Friday mo…
Recently, I was on several calls concerning the precipitous rise of COVID-19 cases and the burden to the health care system. There’s no doubt that we are at a point where challenges become crisis, and crisis becomes collapse. The constant influx …
How can you know that science done quickly during a crisis is good science? This question has taken on new relevance with the COVID-19 vaccine rollout. Researchers developed vaccines in under a year — easily breaking the previous record of four years. …
As a family medicine physician, I am not sure about a whole lot as we turn into the third year of pandemic living. I can’t give you a decent prognosis of where Omicron is going to take us or how many it will take from us. I am not even sure of th…
Don’t look in: No, this isn’t a typo, it’s the sentiment many of my colleagues and I feel right about now. After a long stretch of shifts over New Year’s, I needed a mental break, so I logged into my trusty Netflix account and f…
In late November, the state of the COVID-19 pandemic shifted once more when South African scientists reported the discovery of a new SARS-CoV-2 variant named Omicron. When panic surrounding Omicron’s emergence set in, numerous countries instituted trav…
I’m angry. The sound cut out again, for the fifth time in the last hour. “Why can’t I get through one telemedicine visit without some technical problem?” I ask myself. I can feel the chest discomfort, my shoulders tense, I start…
I would love to say 2021 outshone 2020. But I think sometime around mid-fall of last year, we realized the joke was, sadly, on humanity, and that was not going to happen. Yes, we finally had vaccines (thank God and bless those involved forever), but th…
If you knew we are like the “Two Fridas,” that our hearts are connected, would you change your mind? Would you stop as you are about to cut the artery feeding your heart and mine? If you knew that when you cry because of your loneliness, be…
