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Face masks could be giving people Covid-19 immunity, researchers suggest
Face masks could be giving people Covid-19 immunity, researchers suggest
Face masks could be giving people Covid-19 immunity, researchers suggest
https://ift.tt/2RlkoNd September 15, 2020 at 11:46PM https://ift.tt/1R552o9
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The Pandemic’s Toll on Mental Health and Relationships: What Can We Learn?
When Mark asked me to write a post about the toll the pandemic is taking on mental health and relationships, I didn’t want simply to detail the ways it’s hard to live through a pandemic. Nor did I want to throw a bunch of statistics at you about how many people are having a difficult time. You know that it’s like living in the world’s least entertaining Groundhog-Day-meets-dystopian-thriller film.
If you’re like me, you’re sick of kvetching about 2020. The fact is, though, that I don’t know anyone, myself included, who isn’t struggling in one way or another right now.
After a lot of reflection, I’ve concluded that a big reason why 2020 is so draining is that our usual coping strategies don’t work like we want or expect. Most are aimed at reducing the source of our distress or dealing with the emotional aftermath. This pandemic is ongoing. We’re stuck in the middle of it, with no end in sight, and no way to speed the process along.
That doesn’t mean we’re helpless, though. Personally, I’m a huge believer in practicing self-compassion as a means of coping, almost no matter the situation. I’m talking a formal practice of self-compassion, as outlined by Dr. Kristin Neff and others.1 This requires self-awareness—mindfully tuning in to what is happening in your brain and body—and then offering yourself understanding and grace for what you’re feeling and how you’re responding. It’s perfect for situations like the one we’re in now, where we have little control over our suffering (the term used in the self-compassion literature), but we desire peace.
Because of my background, in the quest for self-awareness, I always look at situations through the dual lens of ancestral health and social psychology. Ever the optimist, I also look for opportunities to learn and do better when possible. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far.
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Facing the Unique Challenges of Living Through a Pandemic
I said I didn’t want to gripe, but let’s acknowledge that the pandemic is taking a serious toll. Survey after survey shows that more people are struggling with depression and anxiety. Distance learning is a challenge. Healthcare workers are under a tremendous amount of stress, as our other essential workers. People are sleeping poorly. Substance abuse is on the rise. 2 3
Which is to say, 2020 is exhausting, for lots of reasons.
Stressors Are Meant to Be Acute
Mark talks about this all the time. Humans are best equipped to deal with brief, intense stressors. We fight, flee, or freeze, and then, assuming a saber-toothed tiger hasn’t eaten us, we recover.
Everything about the present situation is misaligned with our genetic expectations. We’re simply not built to withstand long-term, unyielding stress—not from our jobs, chronic cardio, chronic sleep deprivation, and certainly not from six months of pandemic with no end in sight.
Remember back at the beginning of the pandemic where people were all, “Use this time to work on a new skill, build your side business, Marie Kondo your whole house!”
Lololol.
Now we’re beating ourselves up for feeling unproductive, lacking the motivation to exercise, and craving comfort foods. Instead, we should be lowering our expectations and telling coronavirus, “It’s not me; it’s you.”
Staying Afloat
When it comes to stress, even chronic stress, the goal is usually to eliminate it as much as possible. Here, though, our only real option is to try to keep our heads above water while we wait for things to get better. It doesn’t surprise me that substance abuse seems to be on the rise. When we can’t control stressors, sometimes it seems easier to numb out. The problem is, numbing isn’t coping. It’s avoidance. Drinking a bottle of wine while binge-watching a show may be great escapism, but at best, it’s a temporary fix.
In many cases, our best option is, in fact, self-compassion, radical acceptance, whatever you want to call it, plus a heaping dose of self-care. The trick, I think, is to acknowledge that the goal isn’t to alleviate stress or feel “normal.” It’s to stay afloat long enough to see the other side.
Questions I’m asking myself:
- Am I expecting too much of myself, or failing to give myself necessary grace, given the amount of stress I can’t control
- Am I using numbing strategies instead of coping strategies?
Mismatch Between Basic Needs and Coping Strategies
I’ve come to believe that many mental and emotional hardships are due to a mismatch between why we’re struggling and what we’re told to do about it.
Let me back up. Psychologists have proposed various models of basic human needs. You’re probably familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy, for example. At the base of Maslow’s pyramid are basic physiological and safety needs (food, warmth), then you work your way up to belongingness (relationships), esteem (pride, accomplishment), and finally self-actualization.
Academics don’t put a lot of stock in it, but it’s stuck around for more than seven decades because it has high face validity. That is, it feels right. We need to attend to physiological and safety needs before we can worry about connecting to other people, and certainly before becoming the best version of ourselves.
Those foundational needs are always more pressing, and all of us are facing novel threats to our safety. Not surprisingly, data from two polls conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation and one from the U.S. Census Bureau confirm that the mental health toll has been greater for people who have experienced job loss or income insecurity.4 5
Yet, much of the coping advice is aimed at those higher-tier needs—connecting to others, learning a new skill, becoming a zen master. I’ve been guilty of this, too. I love talking about self-care. At the same time, I understand why people are sick of being told to take a bubble bath or go for a walk when they’re worried about paying rent. (I do think social connection is always important.)
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A Problem of Self-Determination
My favorite psychological needs theory—doesn’t everyone have one?—is self-determination theory. SDT posits that humans have three basic psychological needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Unlike Maslow’s hierarchy, there is a boatload of research demonstrating how meeting those fundamental needs, or not, affects motivation and well-being.6
It seems to me that most common coping strategies address competence (developing mastery) or relatedness (connecting to others). However, loss of autonomy—the freedom to control our own actions—is undoubtedly a primary reason we’re struggling.
The problem is, there’s not much we can do about that. The best option is to focus on controlling the things we can control and accepting those we can’t (major serenity prayer vibes, here). I’m not suggesting that we should be reasserting our autonomy by flouting the rules and doing whatever we want, virus be damned. No, the point is to understand why things still feel hard even when we’re trying our best to practice self-care so that we might give ourselves grace.
Questions I’m asking myself:
- Am I meeting myself where I’m at, or am I using generic coping strategies that, while well-meaning, aren’t really what I need?
- Am I blaming myself or feeling guilty for struggling, instead of accepting that the pandemic is hard in ways that are hard to cope with directly?
What Can We Learn from People Who are Doing Well?
I’m fascinated by people who are actually doing better now than before. Some kids are thriving at home, free from the social and academic pressures of traditional schooling. Lots of adults are realizing that they are happier and more productive working from home.
Getting back to the topic of this post, when I started to dig into the data on how the pandemic is affecting relationships, I expected to find dire news. I didn’t. While it’s logistically harder to see friends or travel to visit distant relatives, many people have seen their close relationships improve.
FThe Behavioural Science and Health Research Department at University College London is conducting weekly surveys looking at the psychological response to the pandemic, along with other socioemotional and behavioral variables. More than 90,000 people have responded. As of writing, data are available for the first 23 weeks here.
In July, week 16, the researchers asked about relationships. The majority of respondents said the pandemic had not changed their relationships with spouses, friends, family members, or coworkers. More people felt that their friendships had suffered since the beginning of the pandemic, compared to the number whose friendships improved—22 versus 15 percent of respondents, respectively. The data were similar for coworkers. However, relationships with some family members and neighbors were more likely to have improved:
- 27 percent said their romantic relationship got better, while 18 percent felt it was worse
- 35 percent reported their relationship with children living at home had improved, versus 17 percent who said it had suffered
- 26 percent had better relationships with neighbors, versus 8 percent worse
I really wish there was more attention to being paid to those people. Why are they doing better? What’s their secret? It must have something to do with the time we have to invest differently in relationships now, but is there more to it than that? Academics are going to be writing about this for decades, I’m sure.
Shaping a “New Normal”
Since we have no choice about living through a pandemic, I hope we can at least learn from it.
When we go back to “normal,” it won’t be—and shouldn’t be—the normal we knew before. The ways people are suffering and thriving both offer important lessons about human nature, our ability to cope, and the ways we do and do not support one another effectively. That some people are doing better during an arguably terrible time is telling. It says a lot about the challenges and shortcomings of our pre-pandemic way of life.
The question is, will we heed the lessons?
What about you—how are you doing, really? Will you go back to “business as usual,” or have you gained any insights from the past six months that will change how you approach things in the future?
References
- https://self-compassion.org
- https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2770146
- https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/the-implications-of-covid-19-for-mental-health-and-substance-use/
- https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/the-implications-of-covid-19-for-mental-health-and-substance-use/
- https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/household-pulse-survey/data.html
- https://richarddehoop.nl/upload/file/self-determination.pdf
The post The Pandemic’s Toll on Mental Health and Relationships: What Can We Learn? appeared first on Mark's Daily Apple.
College Professors Made Models Showing How Bad COVID-19 Would Be on Campus. Some Administrators Ignored Them
Who thought it would be a good idea to move thousands of teenagers and young adults across the country to college campuses, where, unencumbered by parental supervision, many college kids did what college kids do?
Actually, Nigel Goldenfeld and Sergei Maslov, two University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign physics researchers, thought they had it figured out. They created a predictive model for the campus, which showed that with a robust, twice-a-week testing program for students, faculty and staff who are regularly on campus, a mask mandate and an app for contact tracing, COVID-19 cases could be kept below 500 people for the whole semester on a campus that includes about 46,000 people. They even accounted for close interactions among college students.
But that model failed to take into account that kids who test positive for the virus, whether sick or asymptomatic, might continue to party. From Aug. 16, when campus reopened, to Sept. 13, more than 1,800 new cases of COVID-19 were detected, according to the university’s COVID-19 dashboard. One thousand cases occurred in the first two weeks of the fall semester.
“What is not in the models is that students will actually fail to isolate,” said Goldenfeld during a Sept. 2 press briefing, “that they would go to a party even if they knew they were COVID-positive or that they would host a party while they were COVID-positive … We didn’t include that behavior in the model.”
Many other colleges across the country also thought through how to bring students back to campus. Several schools looked at computer models to see how COVID-19 would affect students and staff. But, as with the plan developed at Illinois, these models were sometimes based on a set of assumptions that ended up being wrong. In other cases, models that showed what could happen without mitigation strategies were ignored by university administrators, who went forward with plans to bring students back.
Either way, the great student migration has resulted in COVID-19 outbreaks on college campuses nationwide. The University of Central Florida: 286 cases since the week ending Aug. 8. Texas Christian University: 600 cases in the month of August and 212 in September so far. The University of Iowa: 1,732 cases from Aug. 18 to Sept. 9. The University of South Carolina: 2,074 cases since Aug. 1. Making matters worse, some afflicted schools are setting off a second student migration by sending their students back home.
The administration at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign asked students to lock down for two weeks on Sept. 2. And Goldenfeld said during a Sept. 2 news conference that it was too early for him to make a new prediction whether COVID-19 cases could be kept under control for the semester.
He said he and Maslov would be adjusting their model, but were waiting to see how students would respond to the lockdown. Cases of COVID-19 on campus have declined since the lockdown was implemented.
The administration of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has collaborated directly with Goldenfeld and Maslov, and has been transparent about the model it is are using to base its decisions. Other universities haven’t been as upfront.
After hearing that Penn State planned to open again for the fall, a concerned faculty group, Coalition for a Just University, created a model predicting what COVID-19 spread would look like at the University Park campus in State College, Pennsylvania. The Coalition’s modeling group, composed of engineering and science faculty, chose to remain anonymous, fearing retribution from the university. Its predictive model showed that more than 1,800 students could become sick and two could die from COVID-19 during the semester if only 1% of students were tested each day, which is Penn State’s plan. Since Aug. 28, 650 students at the University Park campus (which is attended by some 47,000 students total) have tested positive for COVID-19.
The team sent the model to university administrators but received no response. A Penn State spokesperson told the Centre Daily Times, a local newspaper, that the methodology of the model was “flawed” and the group that released it had “advocated against any reopening of campuses.” The Coalition has asked that faculty be given an option to conduct classes remotely and for more transparency in the data behind the decision to reopen campus.
The Penn State spokesperson later said that the university had developed its own predictive model but declined to share its results with the paper. Penn State did not respond to a request for comment.
Penn State isn’t alone in its lack of transparency. Edwin Michael, a professor of epidemiology who recently left the University of Notre Dame to work at the University of South Florida, said he created a simulation in April to show how COVID-19 could spread on Notre Dame’s campus in South Bend, Indiana. He said he shared it with the university officials but never heard back.
The model showed that on a campus of 20,000 people, if 25 students returned to campus with COVID-19 and there were no mitigation strategies, up to 7,500 students could soon be infected. Roughly 470 would need hospitalization and 365 would need treatment in the intensive care unit.
It was a dire prediction with a purpose. He said it was created “simply to highlight that an outbreak is inevitable if students were to return infected.”
Dennis Brown, a spokesperson for Notre Dame, said that Michael’s predictive model was forwarded to members of the planning committee in May “and subsequently taken into consideration.”
“However, because it made certain assumptions that did not align with the plans being made at Notre Dame, we did not find it relevant to our situation and decided to use other predictive models,” Brown wrote in an email.
Brown declined to give more information on what predictive models Notre Dame did use. Notre Dame has implemented mitigation strategies, such as requiring mask wearing on campus at all times and limiting gatherings to ten people, but on Aug. 18, imposed two weeks of remote classes for all students after a spike of cases on campus the first week back. The university has documented 642 cases among students since Aug. 3. It started phasing in-person classes back in on Sept. 2.
Professors elsewhere have, like Michael, developed models not necessarily to make accurate predictions, but to make a point that without some kind of mitigation strategy there would inevitably be a COVID-19 outbreak on campus—and that part has held true.
On Aug. 15, five days before the University of Georgia started classes for the fall semester, John Drake, director of the Center for the Ecology of Infectious Disease there, predicted that from 210 to 1,618 students could bring COVID-19 back with them to campus. He also predicted that without any type of risk mitigation, reopening campus could result in more than 30,000 infections among the campus population—about 60% of all students and staff.
“Campuses should anticipate explosive localized outbreaks,” Drake wrote when making his model public. (Like most of the university COVID-19 models mentioned here, his was not peer-reviewed or published in a journal.)
There’s no way to know whether Drake’s prediction was right, since the University of Georgia didn’t conduct entry testing for students who returned. Instead, the university is conducting voluntary randomized testing of asymptomatic individuals on campus and asking anyone who has symptoms to get tested.
On Sept. 9, the university reported more than 1,400 cases of COVID-19 among students in a week. University of Georgia officials did not respond to questions about whether they used Drake’s model or others when opting to reopen.
About 70 miles away, Joshua Weitz, a professor who studies viral dynamics at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, created his own predictive model, this one with a more dire message: Without any mitigation strategies, 50% of people on Georgia Tech’s campus of about 31,500 would be infected with COVID-19 and 75 would die. The majority of those deaths would be among older faculty and staffers.
He hoped laying out this extreme scenario would show why the school needed to test everyone on campus once a week. Although Georgia Tech has enough tests available and encourages students to be tested once a week, it is not mandatory. Georgia Tech confirmed that Weitz’s model had been taken into consideration when it planned its COVID-19 response. Georgia Tech reported 571 cases of COVID-19 for the month of August.
While some professors created models without mitigation strategies as a cautionary tale to show university administrators what would happen without interventions, others were developed to help campuses adopt a framework to reduce infections once students arrived. Though, the limitations of these models run the gamut, their message seems to be the need for constant agility in enforcement policies and awareness about COVID-19’s local spread.
After all, models can’t change one underlying risk that continues regardless of testing plans and other public health strategies: in the end, some college students are still going to be college students, says Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. (The University of Minnesota delayed the moving of students into university housing by two weeks and started classes online on Sept. 8. The university has had 87 students test positive for COVID-19 through Sept. 10, though students are just this week beginning to move back in to residence halls).
“You don’t need a model to understand that bringing together all the young adult population in college campuses around the country is putting a lit match in a gas can. You don’t need a model to know what’s going to happen next,” Osterholm says.
KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a nonprofit news service covering health issues. It is an editorially independent program of KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation) that is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.
6 all-natural sex tips for men
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If you believe those upbeat, seductive advertisements, men only need to pop a pill to awaken their dormant sex life. Whether the problem is erectile dysfunction (ED) — the inability to maintain an erection for sex — or low libido, ED medications appear to be the quickest and easiest solution.
While these drugs work for most men, they are not right for everyone. ED drugs are relatively safe, but can cause possible side effects such as headaches, indigestion, and back pain. Plus, some men may not want their sex life dependent on regular medication, or simply can’t take them because of high or low blood pressure, or other health conditions.
Fortunately, there are some proven natural ways for men to manage their ED and increase vitality. Bonus: these strategies also can enhance your overall health and quality of life, both in and out of the bedroom.
Six ways to boost your sex life without medications
- Get moving. Research has shown that regular exercise is one of the best medicines for ED. One study of almost 32,000 men ages 53 to 90 found that frequent vigorous exercise equal to running at least three hours per week or playing tennis five hours per week was associated with a 30% lower risk of ED compared with little or no exercise. It doesn’t really matter how you move — even walking is great — as long as you keep moving.
- Eat right. Go bullish on fruit, vegetables, whole grains, and fish, while downplaying red and processed meat and refined grains. This type of diet lessened the likelihood of ED in the Massachusetts Male Aging Study. Another tip: chronic deficiencies in vitamin B12 — found in clams, salmon, trout, beef, fortified cereals, and yogurt — may harm the spinal cord, potentially short-circuiting nerves responsible for sensation, as well as for relaying messages to arteries in the penis. Multivitamins and fortified foods are the best bets for those who absorb B12 poorly, including many older adults and anyone with atrophic gastritis, a condition that may affect nearly one in three people ages 50 and older. Also, make sure you get enough vitamin D, which is found in fortified milk or yogurt, eggs, cheese, and canned tuna. A study in the journal Atherosclerosis found that men with vitamin D deficiency have a 30% greater risk for ED.
- Check your vascular health. Signs that put you on the road to poor vascular health include soaring blood pressure, blood sugar, LDL (bad) cholesterol, triglycerides; low HDL (good) cholesterol; and a widening waist. Check with your doctor to determine whether your vascular system — and thus your heart, brain, and penis — is in good shape, or needs a tune-up through lifestyle changes and, if necessary, medications.
- Measure up. A trim waistline is one good defense — a man with a 42-inch waist is 50% more likely to have ED than one with a 32-inch waist.
- Slim down. Tip the scales at a healthy weight. Obesity raises risks for vascular disease and diabetes, two major causes of ED. And excess fat tinkers with several hormones that may feed into the problem, too. Need more reasons? Slimming down helps with tips 3 and 4.
- See your dentist. A study in The Journal of Sexual Medicine found an association between gum disease and risk for ED. Gum disease causes chronic inflammation, which is believed to damage the endothelial cells that line blood vessels, including those in your penis.
The post 6 all-natural sex tips for men appeared first on Harvard Health Blog.
RHR: Unconventional Cancer Treatment and the Gut–Dental Connection, with Dr. Al Danenberg
Dr. Al Danenberg is a periodontist, ADAPT Trained Practitioner, and expert on the relationship between nutrition, the gut, and periodontal and tooth health. He’s also recently in remission from cancer after utilizing some unconventional, holistic protocols during treatment. In this episode of RHR, we discuss his approach to his cancer treatment and we talk about biological nutritional dentistry.
The post RHR: Unconventional Cancer Treatment and the Gut–Dental Connection, with Dr. Al Danenberg appeared first on Chris Kresser.
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