C-19 research already available

Image by Dariusz Sankowski from Pixabay

It is the age of international science cooperation. After just over a month, 164 articles could be accessed in PubMed on COVID19 or SARSCov2, as well as many others available in repositories of articles not yet reviewed. They are preliminary works on vaccines, treatments, epidemiology, genetics and phylogeny, diagnosis, clinical aspects, etc.

These articles were written by some 700 authors, distributed throughout the planet. It is cooperative science, shared and open. In 2003, with the SARS epidemic, it took more than a year to reach less than half that number of articles. In addition, most scientific journals have left their publications as open access on the subject of coronaviruses.

Coronavirus: Instagram post by Italian Nurse

Image Peggy und Marco Lachmann-Anke from Pixabay 

When I hear of people rolling their eyes over the “hysteria” of the virus, or proudly proclaiming their travel plans, as if continuing onto their cruise somehow makes them superior to anyone who is staying home out of caution, I can’t help but think of the many nurses who will be on the frontline of this virus if it does spread in numbers as it has in other countries.

Other countries, like Italy, where nurse Alessia posted a picture to Instagram with a bruised face and powerful words after working long hours caring for patients with COVID-19. 

"I'm a nurse and in this situation, I am facing this sanitary emergency. I too am scared, but not of going buying groceries, I am scared of going to work. I am scared my mask is not sticking properly, or that I touched it with dirty gloves by mistake, or maybe that lenses do not fully cover my eyes and something goes through. I am physically exhausted because personal protective equipment hurts my body, the white coat makes you sweat and after I dress myself I can't go to the bathroom or even drink for 6 hours. I'm psychologically tired, and just like me also all my coworkers, which have been working in this situation for weeks. But this will not prevent us from doing our job as we have always done. I will keep curing and caring after my patients, because I am proud and in love with my job. What I am now asking to whoever is reading is not to make this effort vain. Please be altruistic and stay home, so that you can protect those who are weak. We young people are not immune to the coronavirus, we can get sick too, or even worse, we can make others get the virus. I don't have the luxury of going home in quarantine, I have to go to work and do my part. You do yours, I beg you." - @alessiabonari_ (originally written in Italian, translated to English)

Read More at Nurse.Org

Self care and COVID-19 from the RCN

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay 

Don’t panic – it’s just more information on coronavirus! Hard not to quell the rising fear when faced with front page news, running television commentary, masks on public transport, hand gel being brandished like weapons, ‘the Wuhan shake’ in place of a hand shake making us all look as if we are doing a strange chicken dance.  Has the world gone mad with overreaction and the reality is that it is “no worse than flu” (which let’s face it can be rather grim) or is this a mass conspiracy theory where information and misinformation need spy level training?

What can you do and how can you look after yourself and those you love? Think of me as the James Bond of coronavirus if you will?

This useful infographic from the BBC gives simple self care steps for protecting yourself and what to do should you feel ill or think you are at risk.

What IS coronavirus?

Coronavirus infections are not new and are a common cause of the common cold. This particular coronavirus disease, or COVID-19 for short, is caused by infection with a new strain of the virus: severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) which was first identified in late December 2019 (hence the 19 for COVID-19). It was first seen in the city of Wuhan in China but has since then spread across the world to over 100 countries or regions of the world.

Why the panic?

The reason for the worry is because it is a new infection and the full impact of it or how it will affect people is not yet fully understood. There is however, a lot we do know

Read More from the Royal College of Nursing

10 reasons not to panic about the coronavirus

Image by Claritysat from Pixabay 

Regardless of whether we classify the new coronavirus as a pandemic, it is a serious issue. In less than two months, it has spread over several continents. Pandemic means sustained and continuous transmission of the disease, simultaneously in more than three different geographical regions. Pandemic does not refer to the lethality of a virus but to its transmissibility and geographical extension.

What we certainly have is a pandemic of fear. The entire planet's media is gripped by coronavirus. It is right that there is deep concern and mass planning for worst-case scenarios. And, of course, the repercussions move from the global health sphere into business and politics.

But it is also right that we must not panic. It would be wrong to say there is good news coming out of COVID-19, but there are causes for optimism; reasons to think there may be ways to contain and defeat the virus. And lessons to learn for the future.

(1) We know what it is

The first cases of AIDS were described in June 1981 and it took more than two years to identify the virus (HIV) causing the disease. With COVID-19, the first cases of severe pneumonia were reported in China on December 31, 2019 and by January 7 the virus had already been identified. The genome was available on day 10....

Read More on RTE

Some Doctoral-Prepared Nurses Use The Title, “Doctor” and It’s Causing a Heated Debate

As doctoral-prepared nurses become more mainstream, a debate between medical doctors and doctoral-prepared nurses, is growing more prevalent. The number of nurses with doctoral degrees has increased significantly in the past decade. For instance, in just four years, from 2014 to 2018, the number of nurses with doctoral degrees, either DNPs or PhDs, nearly doubled, from 3,065 to 6,090.  

For example, let’s take a look at a recent informational video on our Instagram page featuring Dr. Charnelle, “Nurse Nelle,” a doctorate-prepared CRNA, that brought up an interesting question in the healthcare community: should doctorate-prepared nurses be called doctors? Or is the distinction too confusing for patients and even fellow staff?

Here’s a closer look at doctoral-prepared nurses, why there’s controversy over the use of “Dr.” in their title, and how nurses feel about the topic

Read more at Nurse.org

Is there a cure for the new coronavirus?

COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by the new coronavirus, has spread to every continent except Antarctica. Not too long after the virus was first discovered at the end of December, labs turned their sights toward treatment.

Currently, however, there is no cure for this coronavirus, and treatments are based on the kind of care given for influenza (seasonal flu) and other severe respiratory illnesses, known as "supportive care," according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). These treatments essentially treat the symptoms, which often in the case of COVID-19 involve fever, cough and shortness of breath. In mild cases, this might simply mean rest and fever-reducing medications such as acetaminophen (Tylenol) for comfort.

Read on at livescience.com

10 Tips For Surviving The 12-Hour Shift

We all know that nursing is both a challenging and rewarding career. Working in a 12-hour hospital shift is an inevitable part of the “challenging” category.

Though nurses have been used to this kind of set-up, sleep deprivation and fatigue (1) could be detrimental both for the nurse’s health and also for her patients’ safety. There are surprisingly few studies describing how shift work is associated with diet and weight-related conditions.

Shift work has been associated with increased body mass index (BMI), waist circumference, blood pressure, and low-density lipoprotein. In other words, metabolic syndrome.

But according to a Lippincott’s Nursing Center journal, there are proven ways to keep nurses in their best shape despite the mandatory 12-hour shift that they have to withstand.

Here are the 10 tips for the 12-hour shift survival:

Some of the tips include:

Follow a Mediterranean-style eating plan 

Make sure you’re getting enough vitamin D  

Get enough sleep   

Stay hydrated

Read more at Nurse Bluff

Why Can't Science Explain Consciousness?

Explaining how something as complex as consciousness can emerge from a grey, jelly-like lump of tissue in the head is arguably the greatest scientific challenge of our time. The brain is an extraordinarily complex organ, consisting of almost 100 billion cells — known as neurons — each connected to 10,000 others, yielding some 10 trillion nerve connections.

We have made a great deal of progress in understanding brain activity, and how it contributes to human behavior. But what no one has so far managed to explain is how all of this results in feelings, emotions and experiences. How does the passing around of electrical and chemical signals between neurons result in a feeling of pain or an experience of red?

There is growing suspicion that conventional scientific methods will never be able to answer these questions. Luckily, there is an alternative approach that may ultimately be able to crack the mystery.

For much of the 20th century, there was a great taboo against querying the mysterious inner world of consciousness — it was not taken to be a fitting topic for "serious science." Things have changed a lot, and there is now broad agreement that the problem of consciousness is a serious scientific issue. But many consciousness researchers underestimate the depth of the challenge, believing that we just need to continue examining the physical structures of the brain to work out how they produce consciousness.

Read more at Live Science