Tag: covid-19
Journeying to Manila, Part 3 of 3: Flying, Arrival in MNL, and Travel to the Hotel
Read part 1 and part 2 to get caught up. Flying and Arrival The flight was pretty uneventful, as you would like flights to be. To comply with COVID-19 protocols, the flight attendants wore personal protective equipment (PPE) which included goggles, a mask and a protective gown. All passengers were asked to wear masks for […]
Journeying to Manila, Part 2 of 3: OneHealthPass and the Sydney Airport
Part 2 of my travel experience flying to Manila. Read part 1 here. OneHealthPass The Philippine Bureau of Quarantine has a system called OneHealthPass, through which they gather all your necessary documents and trace your movements through the various health stations at the Manila airport. While you can register for this and create a profile […]
Journeying to Manila, Part 1 of 3: All the Stuff You Have To Do Aside From Getting on the Plane
International travel is very different in the time of COVID-19 (the pandemic caused by the SARS-Cov-2 virus). A lot of people have asked about my experience and suggested I write about it, so here goes: I am currently in home quarantine so might as well be productive and make use of my time. This trip […]
Critique: Pandemic! A Winter Intensive.
Yesterday was the last day of our Winter Intensive (a whole semester’s worth of material crammed into two weeks) called Beyond Chaos – Critique: PANDEMIC! According to the course description from convenors Prof. Desmond Manderson and Dr. Nick Cheesman, it is “not about the Coronavirus pandemic itself. It is, rather, a response to it. The […]
COVID-19 Vaccines for ALL
If poor countries go unvaccinated, a study says, rich ones will pay. That’s a piece originally from the New York Times, and picked up by multiple news outfits internationally. My thoughts: Control the virus first, and the economy will follow. The economy concerned is not confined to one location. Each location or community is dependent […]
Face-to-Face Dance Classes during COVID-19 Pandemic
I co-authored a “how-to” guide for #COVID19 safe practices in the dance studio. Happy to see our journal article published but #vaccine and normalcy can’t come soon enough. Dr. Filomar Tariao and I were classmates in medical school (from the INTARMED program). We both ended up in arts-related careers… him being more in the arts […]
Reports of COVID-19 Vaccine Safety in Norway: Some Titles Could Have Been Written Better
News reports about 29 frail elderly people dying after receiving the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccination in Norway were an exercise in critical reading. Some of them were especially scary if one saw the news item titles alone, without clicking through to the article and reading the actual accompanying text. Yes. The headlines can look scary and […]
The Short Telomere Double Whammy of COVID-19
Study Finds Shortened Telomeres in Patients With Severe COVID-19 – a recent article discussing a study in the medical journal Aging. Scientists found that people with COVID-19 have shortened telomeres – think of these as the “edges” of your genes that can unravel. Long telomeres mean your body has the capacity to recover and generate. […]
Handel’s Messiah for Our Time (the COVID-19 Edition)
The Handel and Haydn Society of Boston, Massachusetts presented an annual Handel’s Messiah concert for the holidays last December 20, 2020; they have done so since 1854. Like so many performances in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, it pivoted (and overall quite successfully) to an online format this year. From a Performing Arts Medicine […]
When Algorithms Fail
After approval by the United States’ Food and Drug Administration on December 10, 2020, the Pfizer vaccine made its way to hospitals all over the country. By Monday the 14th, I started seeing colleagues and friends’ social media posts about receiving the vaccine – all very uplifting: excited, ecstatic, emotional about what people called the […]
