Silver linings to start your 2023
Pandemic Minute: Two far-reaching innovations which emerged from turmoil.
“There is no great loss without some small gain.” – Caroline Ingalls, tenacious and resilient mother of pioneer writer Laura Ingalls Wilder.
Happy 2023! To start your year, I wanted to share two far-reaching beneficial medical innovations that emerged from our time of turmoil.
Gotten a flu test lately? (hand sadly raised...) How? Probably time on a phone to an office, making room in your schedule, and enduring some muzak waiting for the doctor. Besides being annoying and using a lot of your time, this waiting period potentially exposed others to infection. The ability to self-test for COVID-19 was a great innovation by removing this visit. Now, this benefit is finally becoming available for other infectious diseases. A home test kit by Fluorecare tests COVID-19, both flu A and B, and RSV all at once. Another by Roche tests COVID-19 and both flus.
A second silver lining are cheap, accessible pulse oximeters. Hospitals have long tracked blood oxygen saturation as a key vital sign and this measure was particularly important those infected with coronavirus. Since then, home oxygen monitoring devices, called pulse oximeters, have become widely available and inexpensive. For example, the best pick from NYT’s Wirecutter in 2022 was only $30 on Amazon.[1] Making these devices cheap and accessible means they can be used in many settings beyond COVID-19, such as pneumonia or lung conditions, monitoring the stress of increased activity levels, or overnight to measure breathing for sleep apnea.
Wishing you an innovative and bright 2023!
[1] Lee, Ellen. “The Best Pulse Oximeter for Home Use” Wirecutter, New York Times. October 4, 2022.