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Showing posts with the label social distancing

Social Isolation as a High-Risk Elder

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It's a Marathon,  Not a Sprint A friend said this had been the longest month of her life. I paused. Qatar University switched to distance learning on March 10. Had it been the longest seven weeks of my life?  The answer is no. I've had practice. In 2005, I had a tri-malear fracture of my left ankle just before Christmas. While friends gathered for celebrations, I sat home with my leg elevated for 8 weeks. The injury set off a cascade of related events. Two years later, as the cartilage failed, I had ankle fusion surgery.  That required ten weeks of social isolation, recovering with my leg propped up on pillows in bed.  But, in week 8 or 9, I fell out of a car door trying to get to my wheeled walker and broke my sternum. That was another four to six weeks back in bed, now hopping around on one leg the short distance to my bedside potty chair. I saw my nurses, my housekeeper, and a few friends during those three months. Luckily, I had two dogs to k

How Universities Can Open for the Fall Semester?

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Start Early, Vaccines, Social Distancing in Classrooms, & Testing Law professor and legal blogger, Brian Leiter , offers this advice: Having followed carefully the work of experts and science writers the last few weeks, this is my assessment of how a fall term will be possible in the U.S. (at least for some schools), assuming there is no significant medical breakthrough in the coming months (let us hope there is, then it will be easier); readers are invited to offer corrections, suggestions, links to other sources etc. First, universities would be well-advised to start the school year earlier than late August, on the assumption that by June and July we will see some decline in illness and infection (either because of the weather or because of the massive lockdowns). If schools start in early or even mid-August they could conceivably finish the fall term by Thanksgiving, that is, before the ordinary winter flu season gets going, which will just compound the proble