What Is COVID-19?

Our guest speaker today was Dr. Jourdan McMillan, who was assisted by Dr. Susan Chang. They spoke both in the morning and after lunch; here are both parts of their presentation. From them we began learning about the most current understanding of COVID-19 today. If you want to learn more about the organism, the disease, transmission, etc.; read on. Their lecture will wrap up tomorrow. As I have said before, I am really glad I have had a lot of background prior to this.



We started with a pre-test to see how much we knew; there will also be a post-test to find out whether they were successful in teaching us what we did not know.



This time line shows when the virus was 1st noticed, the dates that the World Health Organization responded, and the dates that the US responded. It ends about 4 months ago.












This is the general progression of an infectious disease.














The One Health concept looks at the relationship between human, animal, and environmental health.





This is an amazing time lapse showing the number of positive cases as well as deaths in the US beginning on January 20th when COVID-19 was first diagnosed in the US; it ends on May 7th so it has changed considerably since then. It's a few minutes long and worth watching.





Dr. Ric started out this morning warning us that this course goes at warp speed and assignments are soon coming due. Our team's first presentation is tomorrow morning!








As we were closing, someone announced that the Governor was starting a press conference shortly so I switched over to that to find out what is happening due to the surge. The interisland quarantine will be back in place in 5 days. Dr. Anderson talked about the surge and what people need to do to flatten the curve again. Mayor Caldwell announced that starting Saturday all beaches and parks will be closed again to keep people from congregating in large groups and ignoring the social distancing and mask wearing protocols. Chief Ballard announced the formation of a COVID enforcement team and a COVID hotline number for reporting COVID protocol violators; she said they are done issuing warnings and will now be issuing citations and/or arresting people.

Dr. Bruce Anderson.

Mayor Kirk Caldwell.

Chief Ballard.

Before the press conference the department of health website showed only about 50 new COVID-19 cases today; but during the press conference Dr. Anderson indicated there was another problem with automatic reports from one of the private labs and that the total was closer to 200 new cases. Once things were straightened out it turns out there were 152 new cases, bringing the total up to 2914 known positive cases. There were also 2 new deaths bringing that total up to 29.








Hauʻoli lā Hānau e Mary & Brianna!