Do We Really Need 100,000 Contact Tracers?

According to lexicographer and dictionary expert Susie Dent, the average active vocabulary of an adult English speaker is around 20,000 words. We also have a passive vocabulary of around 40,000 words, words we have stored but don’t use. The current environment is adding to our active vocabularies. It seems every day we hear the words […]

News from johnpatrick.com

There is an overwhelming amount of information out there about Covid-19, more than anyone can read. Bill Gates wrote in his Gates Notes a post he calls “The first modern pandemic“.  It is quite long and parts of it are technical. However, it is the best article I have seen. Gates breaks the needed innovation […]

Why Did It Take a Pandemic to Be Able to Use Telehealth?

In early April I had a routine consultation with my electrophysiologist at Nuvance Health via telehealth. Nuvance uses telehealth technology from American Well. In preparation for the consult, I took my blood pressure with a Qardio cuff and my iPhone, weighed myself on the Fitbit scale, and took a 30-second ECG with the Apple Watch. […]

Do It Yourself For Covid-19

On March 13, I posted a story about the silver lining in the coronavirus cloud (See re-post below). Despite the enormous pain and suffering millions of people will endure, I continue to believe there will be many good things, in addition to the things I mentioned in the earlier post, which will emerge on the […]

The World of Viruses

In January, virologists in China isolated a new virus. In March the Coronaviridae Study Group of the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses named the virus SARS-CoV-2. Most people call it the coronavirus. The virus causes a disease called Covid-19. The vocabulary can be very confusing. The goal of this article is to shed some […]