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MWEG Member Op-Ed :: “An Epidemiologist’s View on Personal Liberty and Mask-Wearing”
“The tricky part is that we can’t eliminate COVID-19 by focusing only on our individual liberty — we have to exercise a kind of generous, communal commitment to liberty as a principle. We have to believe in protecting the liberty of another as much as protecting the liberty of ourselves, and that belief has to drive us to make some necessary personal sacrifices.” MWEG member Chantel Sloan is an infectious disease epidemiologist who has a front-row seat to COVID-19. Read more of her thoughts on the pandemic, mask-wearing, and freedom in this Deseret News opinion piece. “An Epidemiologist’s View on Personal Liberty and Mask-Wearing” • May 27, 2020 • Deseret…
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Are You Aware? Who Will Survive?
This is part V in our “battlefronts” Awareness Wednesday series. Read the other posts in the series here. So many of us are home with our families and are relatively safe and going out infrequently. Imagine if the situation were different. Imagine trying to survive in this time without a home. Many homeless people are afraid to go into shelters at this time. They fear the close quarters and the infection rates in the shelters. Earlier this month 94 men tested positive at a homeless shelter in Salt Lake City. Recently in the Boston area all residents and staff at certain homeless shelters were tested for COVID-19. At one of these…
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Are You Aware? Front Lines
This is part IV in our “battlefronts” Awareness Wednesday series. Read the other posts in the series here. My favorite toy as a 4-year-old was a little black doctor’s bag. It included an orange reflex hammer and a yellow-and-blue shot and stethoscope. I took a first-aid course my freshman year in high school and was chosen as one of six first responders for the junior high. Our advisor would call us out of class, then we’d triage the situation and get started on taking care of our patient. We’d fill our advisor in once he was able to get his class situated and come join us. We also served as the…
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Are You Aware? On the Street — Greater Love Hath No Man
This is part III in our “battlefronts” Awareness Wednesday series. Read the other posts in the series here. Are you an essential worker? I am. Every day I go out into the world to help you, my friends, to be able to remain safe. I am not a nurse like Kious Kelly, a 48-year-old assistant nurse manager at Mount Sinai West. This is the hospital in NYC where nurses wore trashbags because they did not have access to the recommended personal protective equipment (PPE). Kious Kelly died of COVID-19. I am not a doctor like Frank Gabrin who had texted a friend to report the lack of PPE in the emergency…
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Healthcare Education :: PPE and Ventilators
As we’ve seen over the past weeks, we are all interconnected in the fight to slow the spread of COVID-19 and save lives. Social distancing was our first crucial step. As we continue to maintain social distancing protocols, if we do it right, we can “flatten the curve” of infection. This buys us precious time to ramp up our efforts on the second vital step: increasing the capacity of our hospital systems. As exponentially more people get sick, emergency rooms and hospitals will need far greater numbers of personnel and equipment. Frontline responders in hospitals across the country are already reporting shortages of essential equipment. This is taking place on a systems level,…
