Photo: medipics1066 via Flickr
One of the nation’s most interesting, patient- and media-friendly medical organizations next week will focus on a topic more relevant than ever during a pandemic. The annual meeting of the Society to Improve Diagnosis in Medicine (SIDM), which starts Monday as a virtual event, will focus on “Transforming Education and Practice to Improve Diagnosis.” Continue reading
Photo: BES Photos via Flickr
As you write about the continuing back and forth over the how and when — and if — it will be safe to reopen schools for on-site classes next month, journalists might ask these questions:
In California, for example, case counts among those 17 and younger have been climbing, from 1.3% of the state’s case counts on April 7 (222) to 3.4% on May 7 (2,181) to 8.3% as of Saturday (July 11), (26,652). Continue reading
Photo: The National Guard via Flickr
When Seema Verma, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services administrator, announced June 4 that she and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were unveiling COVID-19 data for all the nation’s nursing homes that get federal payment, I thought, “Wow!”
These days, how states are reporting their nursing home COVID cases is varied and random. So this new “unprecedented” federal dataset, “constitutes the backbone of a national COVID-19 virus surveillance system,” Verma said. Continue reading
Photo: Cheryl ClarkCars lined up Wednesday afternoon at the COVID Clinic testing site before it was shuttered by San Diego County health officials.
Cities, counties and states around the country are probably on heightened alert for unauthorized pop-up COVID-19 testing operations after San Diego County took steps to shut down one such clinic Wednesday, lest a bogus test give someone a false result and jeopardize public health.
For $75, COVID Clinic invited applicants to sign up for COVID-19 IgM and IgG serology antibody, or “finger poke” tests, with partial results in 15 minutes. Continue reading
Image: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
In my corner of Southern California, sewing equipment stores say they’re out of stock on machines priced under $500 because face mask entrepreneurs have gobbled them all up.
As of this weekend, none of the usual suppliers, including Amazon, would ship the quarter-inch elastic, the kind that secures a mask around the ears, at least until late May. Fabric stores are filling online orders with more than a week or two delay in shipping.
Photo: Still from deposition video provided by plaintiff’s attorney Eugene Iredale.Bradley Glenn Hay gave a deposition in November 2019.
This is any hospital’s or medical group practice’s — and thus any affected patient’s — worst nightmare. A long-time trusted and well-liked doctor at a large academic medical center in Southern California had been stealing sedatives from his health care system and from patients for years, injecting them into himself, and was doing it off and on, largely undetected, for 14 years.
The story of Bradley Glenn Hay, who surrendered his license to practice to the Medical Board of California in 2018, is almost unbelievable. Continue reading