Nursing Assistant in a War Zone: COVID-19 at Englewood Health Center
Kendra Francisco

Three to eleven pm was the shift I worked. I remember being at work one evening, looking at the news, and regarding myself as lucky not to have to work with or around COVID patients. Unlike a lot of my colleagues at Englewood Hospital, I wouldn’t need to wear a mask or protective gear because I was just a nursing assistant on a regular surgical recovery floor that Recovery shared with Pediatrics. “We’ll never get COVID patients here,” I remember thinking, “because for one thing, there just aren’t that many cases in the country, and second, kids don’t get it, so we won’t face the risk COVID-positive pediatric cases.” I went home that day without a worry in the world. Little did I know that the next twenty-four hours would change my life forever. Continue reading →

I’m saddened to report the death, due to COVID-19, of my friend and one-time neighbor Charles “Rob” Roberts, of the Glen Ridge (NJ) Police Department. My deepest condolences to his wife Alice, and his kids, Natalie, Shea, and Gavin. Even in memory, I think of Rob as too vividly alive to be fully gone. I will miss him deeply, as will many others in his family, his department, his community, and beyond.

This is a tweet from the police department in neighboring Bloomfield Township; the Glen Ridge Department will make a formal announcement later.

Notices in NorthJersey.com, Essex Daily Voice, NJ.com, and Barista.net.

I first mentioned the story here at PoT back on April 22nd.

Requiescat in pace.

I often find myself disagreeing with academics, and particularly academic philosophers, about the value of journalism. Many of the philosophers I know look down on journalism; ordinary reportage seems philosophically jejune to them, and the arguments one finds in editorial writing tend to be weak on precision and rigor. There’s something to that, but I think it could with equal validity be said that academics lack the robust sense of reality and common sense that some of the best journalists tend to have. Sent out into the field, the average philosopher (or data-oriented social scientist) would, I think, quickly fall prey to some version of Meno’s paradox: not knowing what to look for at the outset of the inquiry, and not grasping the significance of what one encountered along the way. By contrast, journalists solve that apparent paradox every day–just without any sense that it is one. Continue reading →

Back on April 12th, I posted a call for platelet donations issued by Valley Health and Mt. Sinai Hospitals. I know of a handful of people who’ve donated blood or platelets, including my Felician colleague Amy Dombach and (I believe) PoT’s own Michael Young, but I know of only one person who did so specifically in response to my post. Loyal but low-key PoT reader Chris Paglinco tells me (if I understand correctly) that he donated blood to the Valley/Mt. Sinai program after being presumptively COVID-positive, and getting the idea for a platelet donation by reading about it here. In his words: “They took samples of my blood for antibody testing. If I have had COVID-19, and have the requisite level of antibodies, I will go back and make the actual plasma donation.”* Continue reading →

The business and political leaders featured in this NJTV News segment sound delusional to me. They’re talking here as though things will be fine “down the Shore” by June 1, and that there’s a good chance that we’ll have a normal shore season. You don’t need a crystal ball or some sophisticated econometric model to see that that’s ridiculous. Continue reading →

Coronavirus, Chronic Pain, and College Life: A Student’s Perspective
Kiara A. Almendarez

The coronavirus pandemic is striking fear in people across the entire world, but how is this invisible enemy able to do this so effectively? As a student, I would say that the main reason is the anxiety produced by the uncertainty it’s produced. Personally, I’ve found the “lockdown” challenging to deal with as a college student. Once my university announced the transition to online classes, classes got increasingly difficult for me. Given the new circumstances, some professors were apt to give more assignments on the assumption that we now had more leisure time to spend on them, but this overlooks the fact that many students faced other severe challenges at home–including, most obviously, illness from the virus itself. On April 8, 2020, my younger cousin informed me that my maternal uncle and aunt had passed away. I had to restrain my emotions in order to finish an assignment that was due before midnight that night. It was extraordinarily difficult to do, but I had no choice. Continue reading →