Last night we learned that a California patient is the first person in the US to come down with the coronavirus where the origin is unknown. It’s what public health officials call “community spread.” This important news hasn’t made it to the CDC website yet. But CNN and other news outlets reported it liberally last night. I heard it from Chris […]
My 91 year old Mother is scheduled to go on a 6 day cruise in the Caribbean with her friends and all their walkers. Clearly, Coronavirus has changed the nature of the small talk from best-buffet-items to “what type of mask should I take.” My mom at 90 is the new 75 – active, sharp […]
Last night we learned that a California patient is the first person in the US to come down with the coronavirus where the origin is unknown. It’s what public health officials call “community spread.” This important news hasn’t made it to the CDC website yet. But CNN and other news outlets reported it liberally last night. I heard it […]
The thread running through my last few posts about how CDC is communicating (or not,) the Coronavirus is that medical experts are using their familiar medical terms, like “novel virus” that stand for, or signify specific important information (semantics). And, importantly, that there is little reason to assume that the general non-scientific public understands these […]
–> Novel Virus Since every description of the “COVID-19” Coronavirus I’ve found uses the term “novel” I spent the afternoon searching for even one source easily available to the public online that explains what novel means and why it’s important for people to understand it. (This is what happens to a linguist with time on her […]
Woke up.No change. So I’ll stay on topic – the utter incomprehensibility of current CDC communications about Coronavirus. Today on risk assessment————————Risk AssessmentOutbreaks of novel virus infections among people are always of public health concern. The risk from these outbreaks depends on characteristics of the virus, including how well it spreads between people, the severity of […]
If you’re like me you keep track. And you see something predictable and maddening. Each time we’re faced with the outbreak of a poorly understood or new virus ( H1N1, SARS, Zika, Ebola) you can count on trusted sources of information to be writing/speaking to anyone but the average public. Here’s the first descriptive information […]
–> We’ve all heard it – Trump’s language is so simple, so, so simple. We snicker when we hear linguists say he talks like an 8 year old, – words have few syllables, and short repetitive sentences “I’ve got the hottest brand in the world.” “I’m a very stable genius…like really smart.” “The conversation was […]
This week I was reading a thread on the IHA Health Literacy Discussion List and once again, contributors were talking about what tools they would use to assess a person’s health literacy in clinical settings. Should it be the NVS, TOFHLA, REALM and BRIEF. My reaction, and thankfully some of the contributors as well, was – OH […]
Federal officials have approved work requirement proposals in seven states — Arizona, Arkansas, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, New Hampshire and Wisconsin. And the more I clicked on the links for the painfully disguised Medicaid work requirement in Kentucky, what they mysteriously obfuscated as the Path Community Engagement Requirement, the more I concluded that this rebranding of a work requirement has 2 big downsides:#1 As I […]
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