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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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MWEG Member Op-Ed :: “Trump’s Name Is All Over This Catastrophe”
“It’s unusual, to say the least, that Donald Trump’s name is on the stimulus check being mailed to millions of Americans starting this month. No previous U.S. president has put his name on a Treasury check, as if the money in the Treasury were his own and he were a personal benefactor to American citizens. And yet, in a symbolic sense, it’s fitting that the president’s name should be on that check.” Click here to read MWEG member Stefanie Condie’s Salt Lake Tribune op-ed outlining why Trump’s name is all over the catastrophic loss of life and livelihood we’re seeing as a result of COVID-19. Trump’s Name Is All Over This Catastrophe…
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MWEG Member Op-Ed :: “Congress Does Not ‘CARE’ About My American Family”
“Intentionally disqualifying millions of Americans from much-needed stimulus funds during this unprecedented health crisis is both unnecessary and cruel. It also further contributes to the demonization of immigration and labeling of immigrants—and their citizen family members—as unworthy.” MWEG member Dr. Jane Lilly López will not receive the stimulus funds due to her, despite the fact that she is a U.S. citizen who paid thousands in taxes in 2019. Read her op-ed to learn more about the American families who are being excluded from the “CARES” relief bill. “Congress Does Not ‘Care’ About My American Family” • April 24, 2020 • The Appeal
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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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Sabbath Devotional :: Navigating the Now — and Planning for the After
Has anyone figured this out yet? How to make Now work? We all knew what to do in the Before. Even if there were lots of days when I didn’t like Before, I understood it. I could walk its well-worn paths without needing to pay much attention to the obstacles, vistas, or valleys. But Before is gone, and given how solid and permanent it seemed at the time, it went away surprisingly quickly! So I am figuring out Now along with the rest of you, and while we need to understand Now and make it work, it is still both weird and temporary, because though it feels interminable it isn’t.…
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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,…
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Sabbath Devotional :: Love in the Time of Coronavirus
A few nights ago, as we were falling asleep, my husband said to me, “I’m getting pretty tired of living in interesting times.” I feel the same way. The past three years have felt surreal, and the past week or two especially. I feel like I hardly recognize my world from day to day. As we read the Come, Follow Me Book of Mormon lesson this week, I was struck with Jacob’s fixation on and concern for his people. I was especially moved by the last verse of the reading. As he transitions into his analogy of the olive vineyard, he says this: “Behold, my beloved brethren, I will unfold…
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Awareness Wednesday :: Xenophobia, Part II — Symptom of a Virus
The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names. — Chinese Proverb In the closing months of 2019, a novel coronavirus jumped from animals to humans and began spinning a web of infection, starting with the people of China and spreading with staggering speed worldwide. The virus, and its potentially deadly symptoms, are not the only thing being disseminated on a global scale. Xenophobia, particularly toward those of Asian descent, has seen a dramatic rise in the ensuing months, both here in the United States and around the world. A young woman from Brooklyn reported that while visiting Washington D.C., a man started making faces at her on the metro. She…
