Monthly Archives: March 2020

Coronavirus Diary (18): N95 Masks and Ultraviolet Lamps

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I confess to complete ignorance as to the science on this, so I’m just throwing the suggestion out there care of my Facebook friend Richard Saint Cyr, MD, who’s done some of the relevant leg work.

Wouldn’t it be amazing if you could reuse your N95 masks dozens of times, knowing it’s completely sterilized from COVID-19 and all other germs? What if first line responders could come home and sterilize all their gear overnight? Doesn’t that sound like a fantastic way to help this critical shortage of PPE? Of course! Get the Gates Foundation on this! Call Elon Musk! Oh, wait… it already exists… it’s called ultraviolet light! More commonly called UV-C sterilization or Ultraviolet germicidal irradiation (UVGI) , ultraviolet light in the C-band at 254 nanometers destroys DNA and RNA just enough to stop reproduction of all germs. It’s been around for over 140 years, it’s used in many industries, and hospitals across the world already use UV-C to sterilize their rooms of all germs. It can be cheap, easy to do, and quick. It’s already approved by the FDA for medical use! So… why is no one shouting from the rooftops about this? 

I don’t know, but I’m always up for shouting. Read the rest here. Continue reading →

Coronavirus Diary (17): Geriatric Oncology during COVID-19

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Here’s a press release from an old friend that I’ve mentioned here a couple of times before, William Dale MD, the Arthur M. Coppola Family Chair in Supportive Care Medicine at the City of Hope in Duarte, California. William specializes in geriatric oncology, the treatment of cancer in older patients, which for obvious reasons presents severe challenges during an event like the COVID-19 pandemic. His pushback against the repulsive ageism that has recently come to the surface of our discourse is an enormous relief to read. Continue reading →

COVID-19 Narratives (1): Jennifer McKitrick

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This is the the first of what I hope to be many installments in my “COVID-19 Narrative Project.” 

Making Fabric Masks
Jennifer McKitrick

I am a philosophy professor and department chair.  I started staying at home March 13th, 2020, when my university cancelled classes in advance of  transitioning to online instruction two weeks later.  I was trying to figure out how to finish my course on early modern philosophy online.  As department chair, I was dealing with nervous staff and colleagues making the transition to working from home, and administrations wanting documented contingency plans, etc., as the crisis deepened. Continue reading →

Coronavirus Diary (16): One State, One Curfew

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March 29, 2020: Everything I originally wrote in this post has now been superseded by Executive Order 107.  I think I may have been confusing the terms of Order 104 with Order 107.

12:45 pm, March 25, 2020: After some online searching, and some inquiries to Newark residents, I so far have not been able to confirm the basis of the claim I make in this post, but having made it, I don’t want to delete it as though I hadn’t written it. So I’ve decided to leave it up, but cross the whole thing out. It may be true, but I simply cannot determine its truth with any reliability. The closest I came was this article, but it says something different. (See this as well.) I’ll keep looking into the matter insofar as I can. Obviously, the ethical point I was making stands: there should be one curfew throughout the state. Continue reading →

Coronavirus Diary (15): What to Do When You’re “Locked Down”

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Apologies for deluging you all with posts; I’ll try to keep these to a maximum of two a day. But the situation here in the New York/New Jersey metro area is getting increasingly critical. As I said in my very first post in this series, our situation is closer to Italy’s right now than most people realize. That outcome isn’t inevitable, but it can only be averted if we act. There’s no need to be sitting at home “bored” with the lockdown. There’s more than enough to be done even within its constraints. (If Gazans can do it, so can you.) I can’t publicize every plea for assistance I see, no matter how legitimate; I can only ask concerned readers to be on the lookout for them, and please consider responding to some. Continue reading →

Coronavirus Diary (14): “The Eyes of a Masked Stranger”

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A message from my sister-in-law Jessica Franklin, MD, after her first full day treating COVID-19 patients at Valley Hospital in Ridgewood, a region (meaning New York City and its immediate suburbs) that’s been described as “the epicenter of the global pandemic.” Her message begins in the block quote below the fold.

As a one-time hospital “environmental services worker” (aka “janitor”), I particularly appreciate Jess’s inclusion of that profession in what she says below. If physicians and nurses will have to go without personal protective equipment, what do you think will happen to janitors? I can tell you what happened to us when I was working as a hospital janitor at Overlook Hospital in my 20s. We were told to clean up hazardous waste without any personal protective equipment at all. Because if we didn’t do it, who would? At that wage, what choice would anyone have? Say “no”? Continue reading →

Coronavirus Diary (12): Lockdown and the Calm Before the Storm

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I drove through the “epicenter of the global pandemic today.” What was it like? Nothing in particular.

Colleagues in the Department of Art at my university answered my earlier plea for medical supplies by offering up their hidden stash of nitrile gloves. So I drove from my home in Readington, New Jersey to the university in Lodi (Bergen County), and called security to let me in. The security guard, who’s seen me hundreds of times before over more than a decade, professed for the nth time not to know who I was. After some pro forma wrangling, interrogation, and perusing of my ID from-a-distance, he let me in. Continue reading →