The title of this missive would suggest that the Covid-19 nightmare is over.  Not at all.   Here is a statistical update.  Worldwide, as of March 1, 2021, there have been 2,650,000 deaths and 120,000,000 cases. In the United States, there have been 534,000 deaths and 2,940,000 cases.  To put this in perspective, in the six years of World War II, the United States lost 407,316 U.S. servicemen and women.

The coronavirus has been an unbelievable disaster throughout the world, but the American citizens have borne a disproportionate share of the pain.  Why?

There are probably many reasons, but two come to mind:

Citizen Response:  I have family members who say they would rather have the disease than the vaccine.  That is a quaint position.  The only problem with this position is that one of the side effects of the coronavirus is death.  Several days ago, I watched my beloved Pittsburgh Pirates in a Spring Training game at LECOM Field in Bradenton,  The television camera drifted into the outfield and focused on a bar and grill above the centerfield wall.   There were 25 patrons enjoying the game.  Only three were wearing essential protective masks.   What were they thinking about?  The coronavirus and the more recent variants are so lethal, particularly in Florida.   I love a good baseball game, but not enough to put my life and the lives of others in danger under the current circumstances.

Former Administration: I have no interest in politicizing this missive.  The fact is that the Former President had advanced knowledge that the coronavirus was coming to the United States and that it was lethal. In an interview which appears in Bob Woodward’s second book about President Trump, he is quoted as saying “I did not want to reveal this information to the American People because I did not want to set off a panic.”  

 Later, various arbitrary dates were selected when the disease would simply disappear.   It was also suggested we might inject into our bodies various chemical or biological agents.    

Where did the coronavirus come from?  The first known infections from SARS-CoV-2 were discovered in Wuhan, China.   Because many of the early infected patients were workers at the Huanan Seafood Market, it has been suggested that the virus might have originated from the market.  However, additional research revealed that the disease may have been introduced into the Huanan Seafood Market by anyone from any country.  The actual genesis of the coronavirus remains a mystery, but there is no proof the disease was manufactured as a biological weapon.

 Covid-19 or the coronavirus has inflicted incalculable mass destruction to the world economy, over $17T in the United States alone as well as extraordinary devastation to public health and citizen safety.

 We are now in a race to develop effective and safe vaccines for the mutations that are occurring in South America, South Africa, England, California, and other geographic areas as we work to immunize all willing citizens.   Why is this so important?   We only need to look back to the Flu of 1918 and 1920.   One pig in Iowa may have been responsible for 50,000,000 world-wide deaths.  In the United States, 20-30 percent of all citizens contracted the disease and 690,000 U.S. citizens died.  The only way America could achieve herd immunity was by so many of its citizens contracting the disease and surviving, and even then mask-wearing and social distancing was controversial. 

 Immunization for Covid-19 offers the hope that we might achieve herd immunity before the end of 2021.  It is by no means certain. 

I’ve been trying to get my head around mass-shootings for a long time. With more than 100 gun-related deaths every day in this country, and even when our children are being shot in their classrooms, we are still a country divided over the majority of gun laws.

In spite of the fact that 33 percent of mass shooters were individuals who were legally prohibited from owning or possessing a firearm, many of us remain steadfastly resolved that no gun law is a good gun law. Some believe politicians want to take away all of their guns and restricting gun rights in any way is not only unacceptable, it is un-American.

Well, guess what, I have no plans to say anything about the increased numbers of deaths that have occurred since military-style weapons and high-capacity magazines were legalized, and I’m not going to talk about the fact that 54 percent of mass shooting incidents were domestically related.  I’m also going to carefully avoid the data point that a large of number of the shooters are mentally ill young, white men.

Why? You might ask. Well, it’s because I have a bigger fish to fry. Actually, it’s not even a fish.  It’s a freakin’ whale.  We’re going once again to discuss masks. I know. Not again.

In my research I came across the description of the mind-set of those individuals who seek personal autonomy at all costs, those people who argue in favor of total civil liberties and a reduction or elimination of the power of the state. The magic phrase that seems to have recently been cut out of their philosophical conviction is a restricting clause that says, “Unless it damages or interferes with the public good, or the benefit or well-being of the public.”

That’s the whale, the elephant in the middle of the room, or the Babe Ruth candy bar in the swimming pool. “Unless it interferes with the public good.”

Here’s a question for you. Why is it a problem to drive impaired? Why is it illegal to yell fire in an auditorium where there is no fire?  I think I know. It’s because it interferes with the public good. Any one of those things could result in someone else being negatively impacted because of a decision to drive drunk or cause a panic in a crowded room.

If you live in Pennsylvania and want to ride your motorcycle without a helmet, the state says that’s okay, but if you are severely injured and live, there’s a chance the state might have to provide medical care, financial support, and public assistance for you for the rest of your life. In other words, if you do it only to you, the state will pay for that, but don’t do it to other people, the public good.

Back to the whale. So, when did it become acceptable to defy “the public well-being” by refusing to wear a mask during a pandemic? When HIV/AIDS was first recognized, people were arrested for spitting on other people and charged with attempted murder, but if you don’t wear a mask, that’s somehow supposed to express your independence, your freedom, your libertarianism?  Instead, it allows COVID and now its mutations to spread. And guess what? That spread has killed nearly 514,000 Americans and continues to kill every day. WTH? Is it machismo? Or machisma?

When did knowingly potentially infecting someone that results in their illness or death become acceptable? When did freedom to kill become part of the public good? What if we just called it what it is, not selfishness or stubbornness, or independence, but attempted murder?

Only about 33,000 people die from guns in the U.S. in a year. That’s 6 percent of those killed by COVID this year. I’m sorry. Logic is not part of either equation, but sociopathic attempted murder might be.

In 1999 as the relatively new CEO of Windber Medial Center, I was invited to have dinner at the home of one of our physicians.

I was seated beside Congressman, John Murtha.  As I began to elaborate on my dreams  for the hospital, Mr. Murtha said, “Nick, why don’t you check to see if you can find someone who will work with Windber from Bethesda or Walter Reed? Then, maybe I can help.”

Although I knew he was a U.S. Representative, I had no idea he oversaw the Appropriations Subcommittee which funded the Department of Defense.

My board chair, Judge David Klementik and I visited the then Bethesda Naval Hospital where the liaison officer we met with diplomatically explained the Navy was not interested in working on research projects.

A few months later, I decided to cold-call the former Walter Reed Hospital. It’s important to interject that I was not a Veteran and had never been there  before.  Consequently, I had no knowledge about protocols, chain-of-command, or even who to contact.

Pre-9-11, things were still pretty informal for visitors at Walter Reed. So, I cautiously walked into the ground floor of the hospital. As I entered the building, the realities of military medicine hit me. The place was packed.

Almost immediately, I saw a white coat in front of me with the letters M.D. embroidered at the end of the name. It was one Colonel David G. McLeod, MD.

Considering how many doctors worked in that building and how many would not have acknowledged me, the next few moments positively changed not only my life but possibly the lives of thousands and maybe someday millions of people forever.

I said, “Hello, doctor, my name is Nick Jacobs, and I am the President of a hospital in South Central Pennsylvania. Our Congressman had recommended that I come to Walter Reed to see if there was anyone here who might be interested in working with us.” 

Dr. McLeod replied, “What’s your Congressman’s name?” I said, “Jack Murtha.” He looked at me and said, “Follow me.”

Little did I know that saying Mr. Murtha’s name would get that type of reaction from the first doctor I ran into at Walter Reed.

Of course, I also did not know this amazing Vietnam War Veteran, attorney, researcher, and physician had founded the Center for Prostate Disease Research at the Uniformed Services University. There was also no way for me to have known that he knew exactly what to do for both Windber and Congressman Murtha.

Most importantly, I didn’t realize he would go on to guide another young physician, Craig Shriver, to assist in forming the Clinical Breast Care Project, a Congressional initiative which would collect over 100,000 plus breast tissue samples used in part by the National Cancer Institute to map the Human Breast Cancer Genome.

It was about a year later when I first met Dr. Shriver. He came to formally ask me what I wanted to do with the grant that our hospital was about to receive for the study of breast cancer. 

Having been a candidate for the CEO position at a research hospital where I had seen my very first genetic analysis laboratory seven-years earlier, I looked at him and said, “I want Windber to partner with Walter Reed to become the genetic breast cancer research center for the Department of Defense.” 

He looked very thoughtfully at me and said, “As long as we’re researching genetics, there’s a new science called proteomics that we should study, too.”  My reply was, “Yes, we should. I don’t really know what either of them are, so you be the doctor, and I’ll be the administrator.”  

It was Dr. McLeod who then helped Dr Shriver operationalize the Clinical Breast Care Project. 

Thank you, Colonel McLeod. “You continue to make lives better every day.”

Discovering knowledge on bookcases

Nick Jacobs

Published Tue Mar 02, 2021 8:23 PM EST

Want Better Health? Look Around You

By Nick Jacobs

As individuals look for ways to improve their healthy, most often the focus is inward: on what we eat, how we breath, what vitamins or supplements to take or by tracking our heart rate, blood pressure or other vital signs.

That’s all good. But when we concentrate only on our bodies for health, we often forget to look outward, at our environment, and what it may be contributing—or detracting—from our overall wellbeing.

One of my first AHA! moments on the impact of environment on health came early in my adult life while I watched my father lose his battle with lung cancer at the young age of 58. For me, one of the most profound outcomes from the experience of watching dad die in the hospital was my repulsion at the surroundings. Rather than being warm and comforting, they were cold and foreboding. There was nothing healing about the environment, and I knew some of my feelings of helplessness were caused by my realization that even then, in 1975, it simply didn’t have to be that way.

A dozen years later, as CEO of a Convention and Visitors Bureau, I saw up close and personal true hospitality and client-centered attention to detail. I marveled at the attention each guest received. I helped train employees on the art—and it is an art—of caring for our guests, who we immersed in an attentive, beautiful, soothing and nurturing atmosphere.

When I entered hospital administration, I immediately tried to create such a healing environment. Unfortunately, my first three CEOs vetoed my efforts, preferring instead to retain institutional green walls and white sheets, curtains, towels and uniforms. None of which were soothing to our patients.

When I became a CEO at Windber Medical Center, I finally was able to create a healing environment unlike any other at least in our region. I drew on my experience, which also included as a musician and former executive director of an art organization, to take a “plain, white canvass” and make it “as close to home as they could get.” In many ways we mimicked a fine hotel, with healing colors, beautiful artwork and music surrounding our patients and their families.

Our palliative care unit looked like the Ritz Carlton, with balconies, a family area in each room to sleep four, a private kitchen, soft lighting, art and wall hangings. Even roving musicians.

Our lobbies, exam and waiting rooms were decorated by the former hotel manager we hired to oversee housekeeping, dietary and maintenance. We had green spaces indoors and out, elaborate fish tanks, more music, soothing aroma diffusers and fountains everywhere. Tranquility was the order of the day. Each piece of brass glistened and our floors had the warm look and texture of highly polished hardwood.

Our waiting rooms had popcorn or bread-baking machines and herbal tea or coffee services. Our breast cancer center offered dark chocolate and tea and featured a fireplace and decorative wall fountain. Each patient received a specially designed Velcro-clad mammography gown that only exposed one side at a time; dressing rooms featured beautiful, hand-painted privacy screens, mirrored lockers and even deodorant for use post-exam. A private elevator for patients took them from the exam room to their physician’s office without the need to change clothes.

About two years after initiating these changes, something unexpected happened: we had the lowest length of stay, lowest restraint and lowest infection rates of any of our 13 peer hospitals. Even with a hospice, we also had the lowest death rates.

The point of all this is that the environment in which you function can have a profound affect on your well-being. This is true not just in a hospital, but at home, at work and really, anywhere you are. Not long ago, it seemed like everyone was talking about feng shui, which has been defined as a way to live in harmony with the principles of the natural world. In his book, “Make the Impossible Possible,” Bill Strickland, CEO of Manchester Bidwell, a jobs training center and community arts program in Pittsburgh, credits the layout and design of his center as essential to the success he has had in changing the lives of literally thousands of individuals, most from disadvantaged neighborhoods.

“The beauty we’ve designed into our center isn’t window dressing; it’s an essential part of our success,” Strickland wrote. “It nourishes the spirit, and until you reach that part of the spirit that isn’t touched by cynicism or despair, no change can begin. You can’t show a person how to build a better life if they feel no pleasure in the simple act of being alive.”

One more example: For almost 20 years, spanning two careers, I used to drive through a five-block city area littered with some dilapidated houses that it was hard to imagine anyone living there. And yet, in the midst of such despair, sat one house that from early spring to late fall was encircled by a garden of wildflowers so brilliant that the rest of the neighborhood seemed trapped in a 1950s black & white television show. During an otherwise depressing drive, that house provided me with moment, however brief, of pure pleasure and appreciation. It just made me feel good.

I eventually got to meet the woman who tended and nurtured that garden for more than 50 years. Her name was Twyla, a lovely woman in her 80s. I asked her how she found the resolve over all those years to produce such beautiful flowers. What I didn’t add to my question was, “ … in such otherwise depressing surroundings.”

Twyla’s answer was as simple as it was profound.

“I can’t change how my neighbors choose to live their lives,” she said. “I can’t reverse the employment levels in this city. I can’t erase the pain, hopelessness or sadness brewing in people’s hearts. But what I can do is demonstrate each and every day that a positive outlook, a commitment to excellence wherever you live and a desire to make things even just a little better for anyone who drives by or lives near me is possible.”

She paused, then added, “I just try to give them a little hope through the beauty of my gardens.”

It’s undeniable that there exists a link between body, mind and spirit. The more we nurture one, the greater the positive impact on the other two. You don’t have to wait until your sick and hope you end up in a hospital designed for healing, visit the Manchester Bidwell Training Center (although Mr. Strickland has always welcomed guests) or drive through a blighted neighborhood in hopes of finding a mini-Garden of Eden.

All you need do is examine your own surroundings, those you have the power to change, and make an effort to bring more beauty in your life, through art, music and anything else that just makes you feel good in a positive way.

In an article by Chico Harlan and Stefano Pitrelli titled “Medieval Europeans didn’t understand how the plague spread. The response of the citizens of Florence, Italy wasn’t so different than ours,” I learned what I had thought I’d learn.

Not much in human nature has changed.

One of the worst plagues hit Florence in 1348 some 672 years ago, and when Harlan and Pitrelli recently went there to study it, what they found were the incredible similarities between that ancient, less medically informed time and now.

They discovered that borders were closed, strict rules were put in place —“but only some people paid attention.” They also discovered “there was a proliferation of conspiracy theories where outsiders and minorities were blamed.”

Inns and workshops were closed and some people shut themselves in while others ventured out with herbs, spices, and masks. As the plague continued and death counts went higher, others held fearless denial dinner parties that were attended by fewer and fewer people.

Ironically, the only thing that seemed to work in 1348 was to flee the cities and go to the countryside. We’ve seen exactly the same exodus occurring from our major cities.

One of the challenges of escaping to rural Western Pennsylvania is the proliferation of nonbelievers. It seems their personal philosophy is, “Don’t wear a mask.”  Sure, they still buckle their seat belts, threw away their cigarettes, and are avoiding those 200 calorie cans of soda, but now they walk smugly into public gatherings and say, “I don’t believe in masks. This is just the flu, and it would go away by November 4.”

?They also boldly look at those people scowling at them and say, “America is a free country, and you sheep can do whatever you want.” Then they go on to say, “I’m not wearing a mask, and I’m not going to socially distance myself from anyone.”

Several of these nonbelievers have gone into work and powered their way through what they thought was a little touch of the flu. At work, they spent the day close-talking with everyone and kept their required masks either firmly below their chin or at least below their noses like a bad pair of tighty whities.

?Some of them have held parties for their twenty closest friends to watch football games together while serving finger food and drinks that their unwashed fingers prepared.

?When their cough got very deep and they began feeling like the hydraulic lift at the local Mack truck garage, they went to the doctor without a mask and were quarantined in the parking lot until someone in a hazmat suit came to their car and stuck a Q-tip-type device all the way through their nose and practically up to their brain.  Not long after they found out they have COVID, but they still believed it would be long gone by November 4 because those nearly 220,000 dead are just skewed statistics.

?They then are told the place where they work had to close for business because everyone was exposed to COVID.  Oh, and that party they held? It’s turned into a super spreader event.

?So, now the school district has had to close, too because of one misnformed decision to take no precautions.

?If this were a true story, we would be outraged. Well, guess what?  It is a true story.?

?Here’s the worst part. We don’t know if some of those folks infected by Mr. Super Spreader are even going to live. Did you read that?

?Grandad’s Malibu, the Weber grill and his house might truly be “passed along” to those who survive, but the lives and treasure we’ve lost from collateral damage is a hell of a price to pay for more things.

?Wear your mask.  Seriously. Surgeons, RNs and techs do all day every day.