Pandemic Emotions
A friend shared this article with me and I want to share it with you. This pandemic has caused a lot of emotions in all of us. I found myself going through a gambit of emotions, with wide swings from day to day, depending on the news received. As parents, we tell our children to name their emotions. But I didn’t have names for these new emotions I was feeling . . . until I read this article written by Esther Perel, a psychotherapist who practices in New York. This article named everything I was feeling. Names like prolonged uncertainty, ambiguous loss and anticipatory grief. And of course, not only did she tell us what we were feeling, she gives advice on what we can do about it. Please check it out!
https://estherperel.com/blog/anticipatory-grief
SWISH and Spit Test
It all begins with an idea.
A saliva test, developed by Yale, funded by the NBA, could be the answer to a widespread and cheap test for SARS-Cov2, the virus that causes Covid-19. This is not a testing kit, but a testing method, a protocol that was devised by scientists at Yale. The method, called SalivaDirect, has received an EUA, an Emergency Use Authorization, from the FDA. Currently the EUA is only valid for suspected Covid cases, people who have developed symptoms, or had an exposure to the virus. They are teaming with with the NBA to see if it would also detect asymptomatic cases in a subset of the population. The players and staff are being tested anyway, using the currently nasal swab method. So spitting in a cup on the same day is an easy ask. So far, the results from the nasal swab and the saliva tests have matched almost completely.
The SalivaDirect method skips a step of RNA extraction. This one step takes longer and makes the test more expensive. Taking this one step away makes the test slightly less accurate, but because it’s cheaper it can be used more widespread, and the results will come back faster.