Category: COVID

The CDC’s continuing failures: Is there a way out?

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) director Dr. Rochelle Walensky is in the eye of a storm after a controversial new guideline from CDC regarding the isolation of COVID-19 patients. The recent CDC directive suggested that everyone stay ho…

What really happens when the unvaccinated get sick with COVID

“My body, my rights.” “My body is a temple.” “I don’t want poison going into my body.” ” I’ve done my research.” And they refuse to wear masks; they refuse to social distance. They refuse COVI…

What does it even mean to work through the unimaginable?

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…

Inside the race to conquer the COVID-19 pandemic

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…

Changing the game plan: COVID’s second half

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 …

Here’s what it takes to do good science under pressure

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. …

We need each other, as COVID pulls us apart

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. What you will see is uncomfortable.

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…

Why travel bans in response to Omicron are harmful

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…

Telemedicine exhaustion is real

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…