Rhia's Kitchen

Wednesday, April 29, 2020

Swedish couple opening 'COVID-19-safe restaurant' featuring 1 chair, 1 table in a field without wait staff

Swedish couple opening 'COVID-19-safe restaurant' featuring 1 chair, 1 table in a field without wait staff

The one-of-a-kind restaurant will serve the food via a basket from the kitchen window and a pulley system.

Coronavirus fallout: McDonald's Canada to start using imported beef due to supply chain issues

Coronavirus fallout: McDonald's Canada to start using imported beef due to supply chain issues

McDonald’s in Canada announced a big change to its burgers.

New story in Health from Time: I Thought I Could Handle Anything. Then My Husband Got Sick

When my husband began to show symptoms of COVID-19, about a week after we found out one of his coworkers on a building site in New York City had a positive test, I wasn’t particularly worried. He’s a middle-aged, athletic, healthy guy. Our kids live elsewhere. We would just hunker down for a few days and get through it together.

After all, the pandemic has forced many people to do work that they have traditionally outsourced. Families are homeschooling, cleaning their own homes, cooking more meals, doing their own home repairs. Even if nobody in their home has fallen ill, people have had to behave more like health workers, by maintaining a hygienic environment, avoiding contamination and wearing protective garb. So, big deal, I would get to be a nurse for a while. (I had symptoms too, but they were much milder.)

Admittedly, the talents nursing requires—compassion, patience, the ability to offer comfort—are not my strong suits. My skillset lies more in pestering people and being prepared to make them uncomfortable. The only medical skill I’ve ever mastered is making a bed with hospital corners. But I knew it would be impossible to get a test in New York City; only hospitals were administering them at the time and overwhelmed medical staff didn’t want anyone there unless they were having difficulty breathing. I knew going to see a doctor was out of the question. Going to the pharmacy was also out of the question. In fact, for probable coronavirus carriers, stepping outside the front door was out of the question. I felt we could manage on our own.

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I was wrong. I soon discovered our many shortcomings, which included maintaining a home without a working thermometer. And failing to keep the supply lines of Tylenol intact. I didn’t really even have a personal physician, because we just used the local clinic. In normal times, these were small oversights, easily addressed within 24 hours. During a pandemic, they were disastrous.

Despite these deficiencies, I didn’t want to let anybody know too many details of my situation. I felt a little ashamed of catching the virus, even though my husband probably got it before the lockdown. Part of it was a fear of ostracism. But mostly, there was pride. We were immigrants to New York City who had done O.K. We were people who offered assistance, not people who needed it.

One particularly grim night, I awoke to find my husband walking our home in misery, his forehead burning. He was exhausted and couldn’t sleep. He hadn’t had food in days but didn’t want to eat. No identifiable body part hurt, but he felt awful. There was nothing to do but just share the misery. I rubbed his back. We sat in silence. Eventually I figured I might as well remake the bed. That finally helped him get some rest. (Let’s hear it for hospital corners!)

It took me a lot longer to accept my fate than it should have. I needed to ask for help. Actually, I didn’t even need to ask, I just needed to accept the help that was offered. When a colleague gently insisted, against my protests that we were fine, on dropping by with her own thermometer and acetaminophen, and threw in some lemons, bread, vitamin drinks, chocolate and latex gloves, the floodgates broke. She left a bag at the door, waved through the glass, walked away and I realized being alone was not the same thing as going it alone.

This was confirmed when the thermometer read 104.

Here is the skill set that is useful in both journalism and the caregiving professions: a willingness to relentlessly pursue people for information. All the telemedicine lines I tried had very long wait times. So I texted a nurse in Tennessee we had once house-swapped with, but whom I’ve never met. In the wee hours of the morning, I called a high school friend from Australia, where it was mid-afternoon. I emailed a kidney specialist neighbor three floors up, even though the only correspondence we’d had previously was when I “accidentally” took her newspaper.

Mostly what these friends and strangers told me was that I was doing what could be done: Keeping up the fluids, trying to keep the fever in check, monitoring the breathing. They helped me make a plan for what to do if things got worse. While my husband slept I occasionally counted his breaths—one doctor told me that more than 25 a minute meant he may be struggling to get enough oxygen. I made a record of his temperature and noticed when it seemed to rage (evenings). The panic subsided and was replaced by a routine. And eventually, after about 10 days, he began to get better.

Possibly, we would have come through it without help, but I wouldn’t have wanted to. One of the most indelible lessons of this scary time is that you can survive alone, but you need others to flourish. The most dangerous pre-existing condition my husband and I had for fighting the virus was our devotion to self-sufficiency. Independence can be its own kind of social isolation.

Please send any tips, leads, and stories to virus@time.com.

Distillery helps struggling industry by turning stale beer into whiskey amid coronavirus pandemic

Distillery helps struggling industry by turning stale beer into whiskey amid coronavirus pandemic

There’s no use crying over stale beer.

Costco to start requiring face masks for all shoppers

Costco to start requiring face masks for all shoppers

Costco customers will be required to wear a face mask or facial covering while in store beginning May 4.

McDonald's employee on TikTok shares reason behind McFlurry spoon shape

McDonald's employee on TikTok shares reason behind McFlurry spoon shape

Oh, so that’s what it’s for.

New story in Health from Time: In a Time of Pandemic, TV Doctors Wield Growing Influence. Is That A Good Thing?

When the history of the coronavirus pandemic is written, people will remember the rubbish as much as the real. We’ll remember President Trump musing aloud about injecting Americans with disinfectant; psychologist Phil McGraw—TV’s Dr. Phil—arguing against the nationwide lockdown on the grounds that people die from cigarettes, automobile accidents and drownings and yet we don’t shut the country down for those; and Dr. Mehmet Oz seeming to advocate that a two or three percentage point increase in mortality rates (which would be the equivalent of some 8-9 million Americans lives lost) wouldn’t be such a bad trade off for reopening schools.

But we will remember too the people who have gotten it mostly right: the doctor-journalists who usually play a supporting role in network and cable newscasts and have now become the leading performers. For the better part of two months, both the evening news programs and round-the-clock cable fare have become all coronavirus all the time, and reporters with M.D.s have effectively become bedside physicians to a nation, ministering to 328 million Americans.

The phenomenon has been its own strange form of telemedicine—not the one-on-one Zoom sessions that homebound Americans are having with their GPs and specialists and psychologists, but national group therapy, live-streamed daily, from TV studios, from the field, from the rostrum of the White House press room. The doctors, like it or not, now have a waiting room that’s filled with the population of a nation—and their job is a commensurately complicated one.

“I understand that people are out there listening to me, and I’m the doctor,” says Dr. John Torres, emergency medicine specialist and NBC medical correspondent. “I very much try to understand that this is not just the physical manifestation of the coronavirus that I’m working with. There’s a mental manifestation too.”

“The truth is really important right now,” says Dr. Sanjay Gupta, neurosurgeon and the chief medical correspondent for CNN. “I feel like as a doctor there are times you really have to give people bad news but you want to do it in a very empathetic way. I like borrowing from the old Maya Angelou idea: it’s not always what you say, it’s how you make people feel.”

But questions have been raised about the very different imperatives that drive the three different professions at play: physician, journalist, TV personality. About the power of a single comment gone sideways that can mislead audiences, sometimes into taking chances they oughtn’t take. Even about whether TV doctors should be in the business of bucking up the nation’s mood at all, or should instead just stick to serving the facts, without any additional morale-boosting or comforting.

“Walter Cronkite was considered the most trusted American when he was an anchor and he would always end with ‘And that’s the way it is,'” says Thomas Cooper, professor of Media Ethics at Emerson College in Boston. “There’s that almost pontifical pronouncement that people want in an age of uncertainty. All of that is what audiences are looking for from TV doctors now.”

But can TV doctors do that—and should they even try?

Hippocratic hierarchy

The American Medical Association (AMA) does not fool around when it comes to doctors crossing the line from the examining room to the green room. While the organization tolerates TV moonlighting, its constitution and bylaws include an extensive section setting forth the ethical standards their members are supposed to meet when they go in front of a camera. Some of the guidance is anodyne stuff: strive for accuracy; include both benefits and risks in discussions of treatments; refrain from making clinical diagnoses of public figures; and always remember you are a doctor first and journalist second.

But the AMA gets more specific too, offering guidance tailored to the different ways different kinds of doctors interact with the media—the head of the federal agency who delivers occasional press conferences; the university researcher who is regularly approached by the media for comment and quotes; the doctor who is also a daytime talk show host.

In the current pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator, are both firmly in the first of the AMA’s three categories. They have become among the most conspicuous faces of the pandemic response.

Fauci in particular, says Cooper, is “the household name type of personality who [Americans] would most want to spend an evening with over the dinner table.”

“I truly believe he is a hero,” says Dan Fagin, professor of science journalism at New York University and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book Toms River.

But heroes have their kryptonite, and in the cases of Fauci and Birx, that comes in the form of serving at the pleasure of the president—a president who does not tolerate contradiction well. When Trump recommended disinfectant and ultraviolet light as treatments for COVID-19 at an April 23 press conference, the camera caught Birx on the side of the press room looking down, as if she hoped the floor would swallow her up. Fauci has not rejected Trump’s suggestions in any full-throated way, though he certainly has not endorsed them. But TV doctors, who serve at the pleasure of their networks and within the embrace of the First Amendment are freer to say what they choose about governmental policy.

That cuts both ways. TV networks have their ideological biases, and what counts as fact on one network is often seen as fiction by viewers of another—especially in the cable news wars. On the other hand, robust debate has always been a central pillar of American journalism. Either way, TV doctors benefit.

“I think sometimes the [doctors] who are in the public service part of this get a little stuck,” says Gupta. “They find themselves hedging on this and I feel for them. But I don’t have to hedge. So when something is wrong, when someone says we should study whether a disinfectant that works on a surface would work in the body, [I can] say it clearly, ‘No. We don’t need to study this. We know the answer to this.'”

Threading the needle

One of the trickiest parts of the television doctor’s job is managing not only the information that they have to deliver, but the impact it has on viewers. Early in the coronavirus epidemic, Jon LaPook, gastroenterologist and chief medical correspondent for CBS, conducted an interview with an infectious disease specialist from Johns Hopkins University. LaPook mentioned the need to offer the public some words comfort or encouragement during a scary time. His guest responded that that was not his role, that he represented departments of public health, not departments of public reassurance. Yet, LaPook and others maintain that it’s important to strike a balance between cold reality and cautious optimism, between making an audience feel better and scaring the daylights out of them. Journalists may not have to answer to a temperamental president, but they do have to answer to viewers who have plenty of other channels to choose if the TV doctor they’re watching leaves them depressed.

“You want to tell people, ‘Look, I know we’re all worried, but this will have a beginning, middle and end,'” says LaPook. The key in those cases is often giving people actionable information—ways they can seize back a bit of agency from the virus. “Nobody likes to feel out of control, so then you talk about things people can do—social distancing and sneezing into the crook of their arm, for example.”

For Torres, the sequence in which news and advice are offered makes the difference. “One of the things that we’re taught [in medical school] is that once [we] say that word ‘cancer,’ patients are not going to listen to a single thing we have to say. So you give all the information up front and then you tell them the reason you’re giving them that information,” he says. “To a certain extent it’s the same thing here. It’s like, ‘Hey, I’m going to give you some information and here’s how you can use it.’ Then you tell them the repercussions if they don’t.”

Fagin, a journalist first, last and always, doesn’t agree with such a blunt-the-edges approach to bad news. “Sometimes reality is really awful and our job is to depict its awfulness,” he says. “The best health journalists should be saying to themselves, ‘What is the closest depiction of reality I can get? And if it happens to be hopeful, great. If it happens to be horribly bleak, well, I’m sorry but that’s just the way it is.'”

That’s exactly the message that ought to be taught in journalism schools, but as with so many other things, what ought to be—and is—taught in schools often runs smack into a messier outside reality. A television doctor will never be precisely the same thing as a pure television journalist, and that’s not necessarily bad. In this pandemic, hard truths served up without a side dish of hope would be too much to ask most Americans to bear. There is a penalty to be paid for getting things wrong—as Drs. Oz and Phil learned. But there is a penalty too for not remembering that audiences are humans and humans need help to navigate bad times.

“I always try to mention that we are going to get through this,” Gupta says. “But for the next period of time that’s going to require a different way of life.” It’s also going to require a little national hand-holding from the doctors in a position to offer it.

New story in Health from Time: 52 People Who Took Part in Wisconsin’s Primary Have Tested Positive for Coronavirus

(MADISON, Wis.) — There are no plans to postpone or otherwise alter a special congressional election in Wisconsin that is less than two weeks away, even though more than 50 people who voted in person or worked the polls during the state’s presidential primary this month have tested positive for COVID-19.

Democratic Gov. Tony Evers tried to change the April 7 election so that it would be conducted entirely by mail, but he was blocked by the Republican-led Legislature and conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court. Evers and others had warned that allowing in-person voting would cause a spike in coronavirus cases, but so far the impact appears to be limited.

Several of the 52 people who have tested positive and were at the polls on April 7 also reported other ways they may have been exposed to the virus, the Wisconsin Department of Health Services said Tuesday. Because of that, it’s unclear if those people contracted the virus at the polls.

The 52 positive cases were in people who tested positive in the two weeks after the election, so by April 21. Most people show symptoms within 14 days of exposure, though some people who have the virus don’t show symptoms.

After next week, the state will no longer ask people who test positive for the virus whether they were at the polls on April 7 because of how much time has passed, said Julie Willems Van Dijk, who heads the state health agency.

“We’re getting to the point where the door will be closing on those,” she said.

Most of the positive cases were in Milwaukee County. The city’s health commissioner has said the data was being analyzed and an update was expected next week.

Statewide, there have been more than 6,200 confirmed cases and 300 deaths since the outbreak began.

Although voters had to wait in long lines on April 7, primarily in Milwaukee, that likely won’t happen with the May 12 special congressional election, where the largest city in the 7th Congressional District is Wausau, which is home to about 40,000 people. That House race is the only one on the ballot, unlike in this month’s election, which featured the presidential primary and a state Supreme Court race.

Election clerks in the district have said they’re ready for the election after they managed to make it through this month’s election despite the difficulties posed by the pandemic. There’s also a push to encourage absentee voting. About 71% of all voters in the April 7 election cast absentee ballots.

Evers has made no move to alter the special election even though as it currently stands, it would occur while his stay-at-home order is still in effect. The order is scheduled to run until May 26, but Republicans have asked the state Supreme Court to block it.

The 7th Congressional District covers all or parts of 26 northern and northwestern Wisconsin counties and is the state’s largest congressional district, geographically.

The race pits Democrat Tricia Zunker, president of the Wausau school board, against Republican state Sen. Tom Tiffany, who has been endorsed by President Donald Trump. Trump carried the heavily Republican district by 20 percentage points in 2016.