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Measuring Anxiety and Depression Through Color and Stages

As I work to keep my mind and body in check during the pandemic, two older tools have proven useful: the Anxiety Rainbow and the Five Stages of Depression. The idea is that by measuring what you’re going through, you can take steps to manage those feelings and stay in the game.*

This isn’t a scientific breakdown, of course. It’s simply how I’ve learned to process what I feel.

Mood Music:

The Five Colors of the Anxiety Rainbow

To get a better handle on anxiety, I try to label the different kinds of anxiousness based on the first five colors of Newton’s primary color system:

  • Red. This is the worst of the worst, the type of anxiety that makes you feel like you’re at death’s door. I used to suffer from this one all the time: a cold sweat breaking out on my forehead, my heart pounding so violently that I thought it would break bones, my feet tingling and a constant feeling of having to throw up. Fear is the trigger for this one, the kind of fear that made me not want to go places, take risks or live life in general.
    Remedies: For me, Prozac has been a very effective weapon against red anxiety, as has my faith and, more recently, meditation.
  • Orange. Fear plays a big role in this anxiety as well, but unlike red, orange is usually rooted in something stressful that is really happening in your life. You could be fighting a serious medical issue and worrying about losing the fight. You could be having financial trouble that results in routine stress but the anxiety magnifies it to monstrous proportions.
    Remedies: Medication has helped here, too, as has reconstituting my exercise regimen.
  • Yellow. This anxiety is usually triggered by a lot of sustained stress at work or home. Maybe your marriage has hit a rough patch or your job is riding on the success or failure of a huge project. To get through it, your body pumps more adrenaline than you need, and you get the overwhelmed feeling that keeps you from seeing the order of work items and their level of completion. The news business is a perfect place to experience this because you face daily deadlines and a tongue lashing from your bosses if a competitor gets a big story instead of you. I don’t experience that today, but when I worked for newspapers, yellow anxiety was always with me.
    Remedies: Therapy, medicine, a heart-to-heart talk with the boss and, if necessary, a job or even a career change have all helped me. I made the career change in 2004. The medicine and therapy followed.
  • Green. This anxiety appears when the less-frequent stresses spark up. I recall one day six years ago when I was already ramped up after spending an evening at the hospital holding vigil while my father faced emergency surgery that ultimately didn’t happen. The plumber was coming to install a new dishwasher and to pound my mind into submission, I went on a chore spree. Then my cell phone died for good, and I had to spend the afternoon replacing it. The latter two events are problems we’re lucky to have, since the alternative is being too broke to afford these things. But it sent the day on a trajectory I hadn’t anticipated.
    Remedies: The only cure for this one is to reach the end of the day and go to bed.
  • Blue. This is a small, sustained level of anxiety so slight that you usually don’t see it for what it is. It’s generally a byproduct of depression. In my case, blue anxiety shows itself in the winter, when a lack of daylight sends me into blue moods.
    Remedies: Activity helps me the most with blue anxiety. Writing helps a lot, as does work.

5 Stages of Depression: Like Grief, But Different

There are plenty of articles out there about the so-called five stages of grief. Based on my experiences in that department, I find the writings mostly accurate and valuable.

I also found that these stages convert nicely to describe the course of my depressions.

  1. Denial and isolation. Things start to go wrong, but you’re not immediately aware of them. Your short-term memory starts to slip, you become disorganized, and you protest when those who love and know you best suggest you may be heading for an episode. You respond by clamming up and ignoring friends when they ask you to have coffee. You spend a lot more time on the couch.
  2. Anger. After too many days in denial, you start to realize you’re slipping into depression. This makes you angry, and you start taking it out on those around you. Your self-worth begins to sink, and you start to feel like you can’t do anything right. This leads to more anger, self-loathing, and self-pity.
  3. Bargaining. During grief, this is the stage where a person repeatedly goes over the what-ifs: what if the loved one had gotten medical attention sooner, what if you’d recognized the problem for what is was, and so on. With depression, the bargaining works a bit differently: You play the blame game with the world around you. You’re depressed because of work. You’re depressed because of a disagreeable family member. If the depression is really bad, you blame anyone and anything but the disease within your own brain.
  4. Melancholy. With grief, the fourth stage is depression. Within depression itself, the fourth stage is melancholy, at least in my experience. A deep sadness and hopelessness take hold in your gut after too many successive days of feeling like shit. It becomes hard to do most basic daily tasks.
  5. Acceptance. After a while, you realize you have a few choices. The most extreme choice is suicide. I’ve never seriously considered it, but I know people who have and, sadly, gone through with it. Another choice is to start doing things to emerge from the depression. For me, that involves talking to people and writing to get the feelings off my chest. The other step is to re-embrace coping tools. It’s not like flipping a switch; it’s more like rebooting a computer. It takes time to start using your coping tools effectively again and more time for them to make a difference. But acceptance is a start.

With COVID-19, I’m at acceptance now and I’m grateful for it.

* While I’ve written about these tools before, they’re often used together so I’ve aggregated them into one post.

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Be Patient with Each Other

Back in March when everyone was beginning to shelter-in-place, I remember someone saying that moving to stay-home mode would be easy compared to re-opening mode.

Now that we’ve begun that stage of the journey, I’m talking to friends and family who might agree.

Mood Music:

  • There are the endless procedures now necessary for people to return to their shops and offices.
  • There’s the long list of questions for how families safely resume gatherings.
  • As summer drags on, discussion about how and when to open schools will create enough stress to fuel a thousand migraines.

I don’t want to argue about whether the lockdowns or all of the re-opening precautions are justified. The arrows directing movement in buildings will be there for some time, as will the mask wearing in public.

Instead, we all need to:

  • Try to understand each others’ concerns as we head back out into the world,
  • Not brush someone off as paranoid because they’re worried about exposure to their households, and
  • Not take every question you get about your own precautions as a sign that the person asking doesn’t trust you.

Some will stride out into this new world more enthusiastically than others.

It’ll be easy to look at someone who wants to go through all the safety procedures before a gathering and believe they’re overthinking it.

It’ll be easy to take offense if you’re asked about your own potential exposure to COVID-19 — especially when you’re taking every safety measure known to humanity.

This is one of the more insidious things about the pandemic — it’s tendency to pit people against each other. I don’t mean the “it’s a hoax and it’s tyranny” crowd, or the “you went out in public because you don’t care about saving lives” crowd.

I mean the mistrust over how exposed someone is. About friends and family eyeing each other with suspicion over who is being careful or reckless.

It’s easy for mistrust and frustration when we don’t know for certain what all the right answers are in the first place.

As we move forward with each suggestion of a small get-together, there are a few things I hope we can all keep in mind:

  • A lot of us miss each other terribly and want to be together again.
  • We also have different feelings about how to come out of sheltering and having family events again.
  • Everyone’s concerns should be taken seriously and not be dismissed as overthinking or not being trustworthy.
  • If you’re gathering as a family for the first time in three months and one family member wants to know how it’s going to work, that’s a valid thing to ask about.
  • It’s entirely appropriate to ask what everyone’s exposure has been.
  • It’s entirely appropriate to let people know what your own exposure is.

It’s good to be at a point where we can start to think of doing some things together again. But make no mistake: We’ll be in this pandemic for many months to come.

We can’t stay locked away, and that means extra precautions. It’s a hard, complicated pain in the ass, so we have to keep working together, be more trusting and more patient with each other.

"Spectre of the Past" by EddieTheYeti is a black skeleton with skeleton wings on a brown and black background.
“Spectre of the Past” by EddieTheYeti
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Good Things Are Happening (Updated)

With all the turmoil going on in the world — a pandemic, polarized politics — it’s important to remember that every day, even amid the bad, good things are happening. Here’s the current slice of that from where I sit.

We’ve entered a new phase of space exploration

NASA astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley blasted into space Saturday in the first launch from U.S. soil since the space shuttle program ended nine years ago. Unlike past launches when NASA ran the show, this time a private company, SpaceX, is in charge of mission control. The company, founded by Elon Musk, built the Falcon 9 rocket and the capsule, Crew Dragon.

The curve is flattened

We still have a long way to go in this pandemic and it’s widely expected that we’ll see a second wave in cases — and deaths — later in the year. But for now, there are clear indications that the COVID-19 virus is slowing down, showing that we can gain the upper hand. (How best to keep that upper hand will be a fierce debate for some time to come, but the optimist in me feels more confident that we’re going to get better at learning to control spread without keeping everything shut down.) This New York Times chart tells the story:

We’re rediscovering old pleasures

One example I’m excited about: the return of drive-in movies, something I remember doing as a kid in the 1970s.

Business owners struggling with the shutdowns are increasingly repurposing their properties for this old pastime. Outdoor cinema venues are popping up all over the country.

Retirees are beating isolation by hosting a radio station

Radio Recliner is an online pirate radio station hosted exclusively by elderly DJs from assisted living communities across America. It was started in April by marketing firm Luckie to entertain lonely seniors and keep their spirits up.

The Good News Network notes that Luckie only planned to air daily 60-minute shows for a month, but the project has taken on a life of its own. Radio Recliner now has a team of 18 senior DJs.

When bad things happen in the world, good things happen, too — always. The pandemic is just another example of that. We can take solace in knowing that in the midst of such uncertainty, humans continue to shoot for the starts and achieve acts of innovation large and small.

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Grinding Beans for Anger Management

This past week brought the anger/rage/tantrum portion of this pandemic program to my mental doorstep. The dumbest, most inconsequential things sent me into sharp bouts of anger and rage — things that might annoy me in normal times but would never send my temper boiling over.

Mood Music:

I’m usually very slow to lose my temper. I always strive for the cool-headed approach. But these days, my usually long fuse is burning its way to the nub.

Example: The song above played on a loop in my head Sunday morning when I ventured out for groceries.

I wore the mask and gloves, doing my part to limit risk. A lot of people around me were doing their groceries without taking the same steps. I called them names from behind the mask. I wanted to ram a guy in the canned vegetable aisle for going the wrong way. Arrows on the floor now direct the flow of traffic to help keep the social distancing, and this guy and two others seemed to be ignoring it.

In the cereal/coffee aisle, I realized something: I was going the wrong way.

The grocery store was the clearest example of my jagged temperament of late, but it’s been there in other moments, when people would talk over each other in Zoom meetings, when a takeout order was missing an item, when a computer monitor arrived two days late without the right adapter.

Luckily, I’ve found a new tool to help me manage it. Erin got me a manual coffee bean grinder for Easter. When I feel anger getting the better of me, I pace around the house clutching it in my hands, cranking it as fast as I can, turning beans into powder.

Who knew this thing could work like a punching bag?

Saturday I cranked it for a good hour, grinding up half a bag of beans. The coffee brand, appropriately, is Battle Grounds.

To anyone I’ve blown up at in recent days: I’m sorry.

To those I’ve gotten judgmental toward: I know I’m a hypocrite.

Hopefully, I’m hitting the peak of the anger curve and am about to head back down to some level of normal (for me) temperament.

Meantime, I’m super grateful for this simple bean grinder.

Maybe for balance, I should pick up the guitar I’ve struggled to play in recent months. (Yes, you should. — Ed.)

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Trolling in the COVID-19 Era

Many of my friends and I troll each other a lot online. Those who doesn’t know us might think we’re mean-spirited old geezers. But really, it’s how we show affection and even respect. It’s how we know we’re buddies.

Mood Music:

Today’s Mood Music is for my pal Dave Marcus, who is vain and no doubt thinks this post is about him. Also, Faster Pussycat will annoy him. (Too bad Def Leppard never covered the song.)

In this era of lockdowns and political dysfunction, a lot of people are easily offended. That was true before the pandemic, too, but with life as upended as it currently is, people have reached new levels of prickliness.

This post isn’t about how people should behave. Who am I to tell anyone what to think or how to feel? It is, however, about how I personally choose to carry on with people whether I agree with them or not.

My friends fall into the following three categories:

  • Group A thinks all the mask wearing, school closing and economic lockdown is a government plot to enslave us.
  • Group B thinks Group A is a bunch of right-wing thugs willing to let people die to preserve their economic comforts.
  • Group C tries to urge calm and point to sunnier days ahead, sometimes ignoring realities staring them in the face.

I’ve jumped between the three groups since the pandemic began. I don’t think current safety measures are a plot to steal our freedom, though I do worry about government amassing levels of new power we won’t be able to claw back.

I don’t think all of those who oppose social distancing and lockdowns have their head in the sand. Some have prepared for many kinds of emergencies as a matter of course.

I agree with those who believe that if we freeze the economy for too long, there won’t be much of an economy left when it’s all over.

I mostly fall into the C group. I always go looking for the bright side, sometimes to a fault. No apologies here — we need hope to battle through the tough stuff.

I’m going to continue to share articles I believe are from reliable sources and have details we can use to plot our way forward. Some of those will be scary articles about China and bio warfare (never thought I’d share from The EpochTimes, but I trust the writer). Some will paint pictures of economic depression, because we have to be realistic about what we face and plan accordingly. Many will show the better side of humanity during this emergency, because we need reminders that humanity is capable of good.

Some of my friends will affix the laughing emoji to the comments and drop memes and gifs suggesting that I’m overreacting. Others will use the comments section to question my sanity, conclusions or whatever else comes to mind.

I see people on Facebook who hate being questioned or disagreed with. They respond with words like “asshole,” “liberal,” “fascist,” “communist” or just react with the standard “fuck you.” That’s unfortunate, but I wish them well.

To those in my orbit who want to troll: Have at it. You may be idiots, but you’re my idiots.

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Gripped by COVID-19 Fear? Look to Cancer Survivors’ Coping Tools

"The Scream" by Edvard Munch

I’ve spent a lot of time here chronicling efforts to keep fear from rendering myself and others inert. This morning, an article in The New York Times captured it from the vantage point of people living with cancer.

There’s much to unpack in this narrative by Susan Gubar, distinguished emerita professor of English at Indiana University who has battled ovarian cancer since 2008.

Her storytelling and personal reflections are not to be missed. Read it all. But for the sake of some quick takeaways, I’ve distilled it into the bullets below.

Mood Music:

Gubar sets the stage by describing things cancer patients have to worry about daily in a world teeming with contagions and how steps that are standard operating procedure for them are the very things that still seem weird for the rest of us who now must do these things:

Having survived months or years of living intimately with the mortal threat of cancer, the members of my cancer support group — who now connect via email — manage to carry on while keeping as calm as possible during the current health crisis. Not fully resistant to bouts of contagious terror, we nevertheless find coping mechanisms.

We know that fear can be debilitating, but it can also be self-preserving. The chronic patients in my support group cultivate vigilant fear: They use their trepidation to do everything they can to extend their survival without being capsized into despair, hysteria or paralysis. One of us picks up her shopping wearing Nitrile gloves, just as she did when in chemotherapy. Upon returning home, she swabs what she has bought with a disinfecting wipe.

Gubar describes the usefulness of fear as the trigger to make people take the necessary safety precautions while acknowledging that fear unchecked will grind people to rubble. To combat that and maintain a degree of mental health, she describes some of what cancer patients have put in their toolboxes.

The ultimate value is that these tools help distract people from their fears, even if only for a little while. Routines and challenges allow them something they can exert control over. These are not new by any stretch, but the the solace they bring illustrates their continued value. They include:

  • Breathing or stretching
  • An intriguing task to accomplish
  • Baking/cooking
  • Nature walks
  • Knitting
  • Volunteering for a cause or organization: food banks, for example
  • Practicing a musical instrument
  • Painting

There are many more I could add to the list, and it’s important to acknowledge that if fear has pushed someone into depression, the motivation to do any of these things can ebb.

But when confronted with disease and other threats, it’s good to have these lists lying around.

Wishing you all peace and strength, amid cancer, COVID-19 and everything else that threatens our well-being.

Painting by Jon Han based on Edvard Munch's "The Scream"
Image by Jon Han

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The Military Has Given Me a New Coping Tool

Through my work in the information security industry, I’ve come to appreciate a decision-making cycle created by military strategist and U.S. Air Force Colonel John Boyd called the OODA Loop (observe–orient–decide–act).

Mood Music:

It was designed as a combat operations process but has become more widely applied to commercial operations and learning processes. The basic idea is to use agility to overcome the raw power of opponents.

I’ve been fortunate in getting to know some super-smart people who use it for cyber security and, in the current environment, operations in a pandemic. The OODA Loop site, operated by OODA LLC founders Matt Devost and Bob Gourley, has become daily reading for me.

Lately, I’ve been taking this to the meta-personal level, trying to apply it to how I conduct myself daily and keep steady as a guy living in uncertain times with a mind sometimes hobbled by OCD, anxiety and depression.

I’m not sure if this is even a logical path. I’m hoping my friends in the OODA Loop realm will have comments about it after reading.

I’m using it against the raw power of the depressive and anxious effects of the current lockdown, which has fueled the potentially destructive side of my OCD and threatened to cripple me within the mental battlefield.

Observe: Since early January, I’ve kept a daily eye on the infection, recovery and death rates, as well as geographic spread. I’ve opted for emotionless data points from the likes of Worldometers. As the data has painted a picture of trajectory, my feelings have ranged from disbelief and denial to fear and uncertainty. Along with the useful data points are myriad articles that make predictions based on information that varies widely in levels of emotion and accuracy. This makes useful observation tricky.

Orient: By late February, as the data points showed a clearer picture of what by then was, to me, an inevitable pandemic, I started to work on adapting my brain to the idea that this would be a daily reality and that I’d have to keep being my best self as the world spiraled out of control. I doubled down on my exercise and food regimen, went from an originally planned 60-pound weight loss to 75 pounds (just about there now), and started to shift my daily research efforts to anything that would help clients stay running amid lockdowns and mass working from home (WFH).

Decide: About two days before my company moved to full WFH mode, I decided to quarantine from the office, at least. I had been to the RSA Conference in San Francisco a couple weeks before and news had just arrived that a couple attendees had contracted the virus, one of whom was gravely ill (he has since recovered, thank God). I was just shy of the two-week mark of returning home but didn’t want to chance becoming a risk to co-workers. In doing so, I was making a choice to hunker down for the long haul.

Act: Since then, I’ve done my damndest to stay healthy physically and mentally. I walk each morning and take afternoon drives. I’ve strived to do my job in the best ways possible, focusing on clear, step-by-step guidance to help clients protect the platforms and tools they currently rely on as everyone works from home — VPNs, videoconferencing, messaging — and I’ve used this blog to help keep the public discourse rational and hopeful while making note of coping mechanisms for those predisposed to mental disorders. I’ve stayed connected to friends through Zoom “happy hours.” I wear a mask and gloves when I have to go out.

When the constraints of being homebound make my temper boil over (I’m ashamed to admit I yelled and angrily slammed my iPhone down one night because a restaurant left something out of our takeout order — not my finest hour when dealing with a trivial, first-world problem) I’ve sought ways to release the pressure.

I’ve always favored hard rock music but in recent weeks my choices have veered to the heaviest end of the spectrum — including battle music from different TV shows and films. Today’s mood music is one example.

And I’ve found a simple, fun way to grind out feelings of angst. Erin got me a manual coffee bean grinder for Easter and I’ve found it’s good, aggressive fun to pace around the house while grinding beans.

I guess we’re never too old to learn new coping mechanisms, especially when sanity depends upon it.

Though I’m not at all certain I’m using the OODA Loop as intended, it has at least given me another way to keep fighting. I’m grateful.

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Day 23: How I Try to Stay Sane

It has now been three solid weeks since I’ve been in my office. I miss:

  • Leaving the house every day to go somewhere before dawn
  • Walking Boston’s North End, wharves, markets and common
  • Having face-to-face interaction with colleagues

But I’m fighting the good fight. Here are some things getting me through the doldrums.

Mood Music (in memory of Adam Schlesinger, dead of COVID-19):

  • Keeping my health program going, maintaining weight loss and taking daily walks around the neighborhood and wooded hills behind our house.
  • Drinking lots of coffee to stay alert (the house is well stocked with my beloved Death Wish blend).
  • Reading print and audio books. In a possibly ill-advised move, I spent a free Audible credit on John Barry’s The Great Influenza. I’m trying to learn ways forward by studying our history.
  • Taking naps, which has become an important tool for breaking up the days, which can get intense between work and the claustrophobic feelings that come with distancing.
  • Keeping in touch with friends via video hangouts, including last weekend’s session with these nutjobs:
  • Being with my family. Though we frequently drive each other crazy, I’m grateful to be together with Erin and the kids and am amazed at how the boys have been able to keep up with their classwork by video.
  • Streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime and BritBox have been a godsend. We’re watching a lot of Star Trek, Battlestar Gallactica, Call the Midwife and Midsommer Murders.
  • Sleeping more. Though I continue to be an early riser, I’m taking advantage of the lack of commute to sleep an extra hour each night.

What are you doing to stave off the crazies?

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3 Thoughts for 30 Days

The past three weeks have been surreal, like existing inside Salvadore Dali’s “The Persistence of Memory” painting. If the U.S. government’s plan holds, we’ll live in this world for another 30 days at least.

How do we get through it?

I have three thoughts on that.

Mood Music:

1. Leave Predictions to the Experts

Peruse Facebook and you’ll see a lot of people clutching straws, slicing and dicing numbers for signs that the COVID-19 death rate will be low, and sharing charts that predict when cases will peak and drop. I’ve done it, too. It’s not helpful.

All we can control is the present. All we can do is be there for family and friends, get some exercise and do our work (if we can). To do that, we have to…

2. Accept Reality and Adapt

The government estimates that 100,000–240,000 people will die. The lower number happens only if we do everything perfectly, but either way there will be many deaths. We don’t know who will die. We don’t know how long we’ll shelter in place. If we fixate on how unreal all this seems, our despair will build.

My approach is admittedly fatalistic on the surface: I’m just assuming we’ll be in this fight for a long time. I take nothing for granted — my job, my health, my ability to avoid episodes of depression. Losing ground in these areas is all within the realm of possibility.

That sounds bleak, but there is a positive: By accepting that things are and will remain bad for some time and that anything can happen, I can adapt and focus on what’s in front of me — and what’s in front of me is pretty good.

In the face of the current crisis, we are already seeing humanity’s ability to adapt: we’re keeping business and learning running remotely, repurposing plant operations to churn out medical gear and moving from lost hospitality jobs to those that are in demand — grocery stores and medical facilities, for example.

To adapt is to survive and thrive.

3. Learn from History

This is the craziest thing many of us have experienced in our lifetimes, and the memes telling us that we have it easy — that all we have to do is sit on the couch and watch TV — ring hollow. We have to keep our families, jobs and finances going, after all. But there are shreds of truth in those memes, particularly on two points:

  • Our parents and grandparents lived through The Great Depression and WWII. They emerged stronger.
  • People survived the Spanish Flu a hundred years ago, at a time when there were no antibiotics, no 24-hour news to keep us informed and none of the comforts we take for granted today.

History gives us perspective. In fact, we’re already drawing on what our elders did to get through the present.

As we stock our pantries with enough food to last a few months, it’s hard not to think about our grandparents and how they struggled to keep well stocked.

It’s hard to look around us and not think of black-and-white images from the Spanish Flu — people in masks, keeping their distance.

This will only get harder as the weeks pass. We’re going to hear a lot of bad news along the way.

What we do now can make us stronger and heal some older societal wounds. Call me a naive optimist, but I believe it because I’m a history buff who has studied the past.

I’ll end with this wisdom from CNBC’s Ron Insana:

It seems extremely important to remember that there are things that are truly unprecedented and new and those that are, however tragically, new to us.

Yes, of course, there are elements of this tragedy, now playing out, that are truly unprecedented. The speed of the economic shutdown, the emptiness of major cities and a few other realities with which we must come to terms.

Other aspects are just new to us. The 1918 flu required “social distancing”…. 

For our parents, or grandparents, World War II, by itself, raged on for four long years.

We haven’t yet sat still for four weeks.

We’re being asked to sit on a couch and watch TV. Come on America. We got this.

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5 Positive COVID-19 Developments

Today, five news items to boost hope out there.

The Coronavirus Is Mutating Relatively Slowly

Some viruses, like flu, change quickly, making them harder to prevent through vaccines. So far, though, the coronavirus seems to be picking up only about two mutations each month. Flu makes changes about two or three times faster. This bodes well for efforts to make a vaccine that will be effective.

NPR

Coronavirus Slowdown in Seattle Suggests Restrictions Are Working

The coronavirus first appeared in the United States in the Seattle area and claimed 37 of its first 50 victims. But Seattle’s strict containment strategies, which put in place almost immediately, are having an effect. “Hospitals have so far not been overwhelmed. And preliminary statistical models provided to public officials in Washington State suggest that the spread of the virus has slowed in the Seattle area in recent days,” the New York Times reported.

NYT

Some Insurers Waive Patients’ Share Of Costs For COVID-19 Treatment

According to NPR, “insurers Cigna and Humana announced Monday that they would waive consumer costs associated with COVID-19 treatment. Last week, CVS Health announced a more limited change — that Aetna would waive costs to patients for hospital admissions related to the coronavirus.”

NPR

In Under a Week, Formula One Created a Breathing Aid That Can Help Keep Coronavirus Patients Out of ICU

University College London and Mercedes F1 have made a breathing aid for coronavirus patients that sends oxygen to the lungs, reducing the need for a ventilator. It was created in less than a week, and 40 of them have already been delivered to several London hospitals. Other companies, including Rolls-Royce, BAE systems and Ford, have pledged to produce ventilators for the UK’s NHS.

BBC

Wuhan Partly Reopens After Lockdown

“The city in China where the coronavirus pandemic began, Wuhan, has partially re-opened after more than two months of isolation,” said the BBC.

“Crowds of passengers were pictured arriving at Wuhan train station on Saturday.

“People are being allowed to enter but not leave, according to reports.

“Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province, saw more than 50,000 coronavirus cases. At least 3,000 people in Hubei died from the disease.

“But numbers have fallen dramatically, according to China’s figures.”

I’ll post more stories like these as I find them.

BBC