Sorta Donburi

For lunch today I heated up some leftover shoyu pork from dinner last night. When it was nice and hot I cracked a raw egg in to it like a donburi. But I forgot the most important thing about making donburi ... let the raw egg come to room temperature before cracking it open! So I ended up having to heat it up in the microwave to cook the cold egg.

I added the cold egg to the hot shoyu pork. Nothing.

After 1 minute it only did this.

So I put it in the microwave for 1 minute on medium high & it looked like this. I ate it.

Sorry about the weird spacing on yesterday's post. I figured out how to revert back to the old version of Blogpost today but do not want to take a chance on fixing the problems in case it shifts back to the new version and I have to do everything all over again. For the 5th time! I really dislike the new version!

On Hawaiʻi Island there has been a COVID-19 outbreak at the veterans home in Hilo; 8 people have died already and another 55 residents and 18 staff have also contracted SAR-CoV-2. The good news is 5 have recovered. Senator Schatz is asking the Veterans Administration for assistance in providing infection control experts and medical care to get things back under control.




There was also an article about the hotel quarantine & isolation program set up by the health department; it's about time they let people know about this. It is unfortunate that the union is pushing for information on which hotels are being used since it is sometimes contractually not allowed by some of the participating hotels. And I know I had problems with providing support services for one of the people I had on my list; they would not answer their phone. If they won't talk to me, I can't know what to provide; I sent that one up the line to my supervisor.


I think the woman who was in isolation that was interviewed did have a valid point about needing an interpreter. So far, we have not been given a list of resources for when a person needs language services; I think it might be something in the works. Her need for interpretation might be a source of some of her complaints; her tracer may not have been able to properly explain the isolation requirements versus quarantine requirements or the greatly increased demand on volunteers for grocery delivery services or how to self-monitor her health status and when she should be calling 911. Moving people in isolation who are not medically fragile into hospitals so a nurse can monitor their vital signs will totally overwhelm the health care system and lead to more deaths among those who are truly medically fragile & cannot be left alone at a hotel. The health department needs to figure out how to get more interpreters to help with this need.

One thing the article could have expanded on is the difference between isolation and quarantine and that magic 14 day number. Isolation is used when a person tests positive for COVID-19 & has the disease (or whatever communicable disease is being investigated). For COVID-19, the period of isolation is based on when the person first becomes symptomatic and ends 10 full days after that, provided the person's symptoms have improved and they have been fever-free without the use of medication for at least 24 hours. If your symptoms do not improve or you continue to have a fever, you will need to wait until your symptoms improve and you are fever-free for at least 24 hours.

Quarantine is used when a person has been a close contact of the person who was found to be positive for COVID-19; so they have only been exposed & are now in the incubation period to see if they will develop the disease. Testing is not done unless there are symptoms because a negative test does not mean that you do not have the disease; it just means at the moment they stuck the swab up your nose your body was not releasing enough virus particles to show up on the test. (This is not a false negative; a false negative is when you are shedding enough virus but the test does not indicate that.) You won't be released early because of a negative test, you could easily test positive the very next day. About 95% of people who become symptomatic will do so within 14 days, hence the quarantine period is 14 full days after the last contact with the COVID-19 positive person. This is the 14 days the woman in the article was most likely talking about; which did not apply to her since she had the disease. It is a misconception many people have because the media tends to use the 2 terms interchangeably.

To further complicate matters, if you are in quarantine and begin to show symptoms and you then test positive for COVID-19, you must then go in to isolation. As I mentioned earlier, your isolation period is based on when you first become symptomatic and ends 10 full days after that provided your symptoms have improved and you have been fever-free without the use of anything to bring the fever down for at least 24 hours. If your symptoms do not improve or you continue to have a fever, you could be in that hotel for a lot more than 14 days!

I read an article that a reporter wrote after doing the Johns Hopkins on-line contact tracer training. One thing I did not know about contact tracing is that before the pandemic, there were only about 2200 contact tracers in the US according to the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials; they say 100,000 to 200,000 are now needed nationwide before we can safely open. (One of the modules of my contact tracing training included going through their quick course.) I can tell you both the ASTHO and Johns Hopkins on-line trainings give you a lot of information, but they pale in comparison to the UH training I went through. The article says New York was hiring people after they completed only the Johns Hopkins training: I guess you have to do that when people are dropping like flies. I'm glad I got the more thorough training from the UH.


I also read an article on the latest theory of how the SARS-CoV-2 jumped from bats to humans and where they believe the bat colony is that this all happened in. And how long ago it happened. It was a very interesting article.


And I read an article on how masks appear to help by lower the virus load, which researchers suspect leads to a milder illness including more asymptomatic cases. So wear your mask!

I also read an interesting article on a possible quick way to determine whether someone might have influenza or COVID-19. This is relevant news since flu season is starting up soon. The public health recommendation is for people to get the flu vaccine in order to keep people out of the hospital for the flu; also being ill with the flu might make you more susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 since your body would be in a weakened state.

There were 105 new cases of COVID-19 reported today, the lowest since early August. The total number of known cases is now 9959 with 6845 active cases. There was 1 new death reported bringing the total fatalities up to 86.




Apparently the health department is looking at using a new dashboard for COVID-19 data presentation. I think it is worse than what they have now; it is too cluttered making it difficult to read. They are also missing some key information that is currently available (number of like deaths). They also give data on the number of contact tracers but not relevant data like what percent of newly tested positive people (cases) are contacted within the first 24 hours after the test comes back and what percent of the close contacts of the sick person are contacted within the first 48 hours when contact tracing is the most beneficial.

This is a portion of the dashboard. Can you easily tell where one set of data ends and the next begins?

This is the whole dashboard.

Hauʻoli lā Hānau e Leno, Charlene, & Grey! For her birthday, Charlene shared the post below.