I was seeing a few patients in the office yesterday. Wearing masks, weaving in COVID advice, and reminding the patients about isolation strategies are now part of routine CKD discussion. It bothers me that I am expending valuable clinical time on navigating the pandemic. But pandemic exhaustion is a thing. Vigilance is exhausting, and complacency yields unintended risks for my vulnerable patients. There are so many subtle consequences of a poorly controlled pandemic.
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Latest Data
Global-View:
https://www.ft.com/content/a2901ce8-5eb7-4633-b89c-cbdf5b386938
Nationally:
a slow decline in new cases in the US (still around 50,000 a day)
stable deaths @ 3.2 per million (or about 1000 deaths per day) in the US for the last week
Also, look at:
https://covidtracking.com/data
The US Regionally:
The NY Times state-level data visualization:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html
About the data:
https://covidtracking.com/about-data/visualization-guide
is the best resource to understand data visualization and data integrity.
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Case reports of the immunity of previously infected and recovered COVID patients are starting to emerge. While this data is comforting, we need much more exploration of this topic.
or the pre-print, not yet peer-reviewed article
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.08.13.20173161v1
I notice a lot of schools quickly closing due to near-immediate coronavirus outbreaks.:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/schools-are-reopening-then-quickly-closing-due-to-coronavirus-outbreaks-11597700886
because of choices like this:
https://kfor.com/news/moore-student-who-knowingly-had-covid-19-attends-school/
or
Wired celebrates the hygienic properties conferred by QR codes during COVID. Some days, I believe I have slipped into an alternate reality timeline.:
https://www.wired.com/story/in-a-touch-free-world-the-qr-code-is-having-its-moment/
I see others have expressed concern about Oleandrin; the latest obscure compound touted as a COVID therapy (mentioned yesterday). It appears some of the more vocal advocates for this therapy may have conflicts and lack data.
https://twitter.com/MollyJongFast/status/1295837646330245128
Infographic of the day: Coffee
Here is a delightful and busy infographic on how coffee ends up in our cups.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Coffee-supply-visualized-full.html
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Bonus Round - The beauty and beasts of brevity
I found a modern version of Haikus this morning - the Wired Six-word Sci-fi Story project.
https://www.wired.com/tag/wired-backpage/
and
https://twitter.com/search?q=%23WiredBackpage&src=typed_query
This Atlantic editorial offers this analysis of the virtualized Democratic National Convention - which the author believes is now fully realizing the teleologic endpoint of all political conventions: theater. To be fair, I am biased towards anyone that evokes Daniel Boorstein and his thesis on the pseudo-image. The article highlights how far political conventions have moved from function to form, including shortening speeches to accommodate attention spans and advertising. It is a great reminder to be critically thoughtful of all things we mentally ingest, irrespective of our philosophic orientation.:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/the-pseudo-event-about-a-pseudo-event/615346/
Daniel Boorstein book:
https://thisissuperserious.com/2012/02/17/daniel-boorstin-the-image/
Clean hands and sharp minds,
Adam