Category: COVID

Pandemic lessons: How better staffing and communication can save health care

An excerpt from Healing Healthcare: Evidence-Based Strategies to Mend Our Broken System. The greatest challenge facing our professional workforce today is creating a healthy work environment in which nurses care for patients. A significant characterist…

Health care communication in a post-COVID world: What’s changed and what’s not since the pandemic

An excerpt from The Mumbo Jumbo Fix: A Survival Guide for Effective Doctor-Patient-Nurse Communication. If you’re like me, you mark life’s timeline by three milestones—before COVID, during COVID, and after COVID. While most of us no longer …

The U.K.’s pandemic missteps: insights from the ongoing inquiry

Since June 2022, the U.K. has been carrying on an inquiry, still ongoing two years later, into the response to and impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, hoping to learn lessons that could be useful in the future. Here are a few of its revelations. Matt Hanc…

Long COVID and your brain: the effect of virus and vaccines

A bunch of symptoms, which may persist many months or even years after an acute COVID infection has cleared, have been described in the medical literature with increasing frequency since the onset of the pandemic. This constellation of findings has bee…

Navigating COVID: a journey from academic intensity to healing

Springtime. Blooming trees. Green grass. Cool winds. Sunny skies. COVID. That is where my mind wanders every year since 2020, when the season turns. I flash back to the drive between the hospital and my home. Every evening after fighting a losing battl…

A potential discovery of highly fatal SARS coronavirus?

Has a highly fatal SARS coronavirus already been discovered? Maybe yes, but just its report is highly concerning. On January 4, 2024, a letter to the editor was uploaded to a preprint server which gave too few details but described a 100 percent fatal …

Critical care physician battles long COVID with hope and grit

I recognize your anguish. Long COVID is new, and I will do my best to support you through this new and confusing illness. This is all I wanted to hear in my countless doctor’s visits. Some came close. The rest were baffled, given how healthy I wa…

Beyond medical vs. N95: strategic masking for COVID protection

Do masks prevent COVID-19 infections? You might be thinking that it is a bit late to ponder these questions. But better late than never! As shown in the following graph provided by the CDC, COVID is here to stay with us, at least for the time being. Ev…

How one family’s hero ended a pandemic [PODCAST]

Subscribe to The Podcast by KevinMD. Catch up on old episodes! Join Shan Liu, an emergency physician and co-author of Masked Hero: How Wu-Lien Teh Invented the Mask and Ended an Epidemic. Discover the journey of Wu Lien-teh, Shan’s great-grandfat…

Pandemic aftermath: Navigating a new normal in health, education, and social dynamics

Psychological distress. In 2021, 40% of high school students felt sad and hopeless, 20% seriously considered suicide, and 10% attempted it, with suicides among young people hitting their highest rates ever, though they fell in 2022. Since the greatest …