Masks, Misinformation, and Making Do
Masks, Misinformation, and Making Do

Author: Wendy Welch

Publisher: Ohio University Press

Published: 2023-01-24

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 0821447866

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The firsthand pandemic experiences of rural health-care providers—who were already burdened when COVID-19 hit—raise questions about the future of public health and health-care delivery. This volume comprises the COVID-19 pandemic experiences of Appalachian health-care workers, including frontline providers, administrators, and educators. The combined narrative reveals how governmental and corporate policies exacerbated the region’s injustices, stymied response efforts, and increased the death toll. Beginning with an overview of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and its impact on the body, the essays in the book’s first section provide background material and contextualize the subsequent explosion of telemedicine, the pandemic’s impact on medical education, and its relationship to systemic racism and related disparities in mental health treatment. Next, first-person narratives from diverse perspectives recount the pandemic’s layered stresses, including the scramble for ventilators, masks, and other personal protective equipment the neighbors, friends, and family members who flouted public-health mandates, convinced that COVID-19 was a hoax the added burden the virus leveled on patients whose health was already compromised by cancer, diabetes, or addiction the acute ways the pandemic’s arrival exacerbated interpersonal and systemic racism that Black and other health-care workers of color bear not only the battle against the virus but also the growing suspicion and even physical abuse from patients convinced that doctors and nurses were trying to kill them These visceral, personal experiences of how Appalachian health-care workers responded to the pandemic amid the nation’s deeply polarized political discourse will shape the historical record of this “unprecedented time” and provide a glimpse into the future of rural medicine. Contributors: Lucas Aidukaitis, Clay Anderson, Tammy Bannister, Alli Delp, Lynn Elliott, Monika Holbein, Laura Hungerford, Nikki King, Brittany Landore, Jeffrey J. LeBoeuf, Sojourner Nightingale, Beth O’Connor, Rakesh Patel, Mildred E. Perreault, Melanie B. Richards, Tara Smith, Kathy Osborne Still, Darla Timbo, Kathy Hsu Wibberly

The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap
The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap

Author: Wendy Welch

Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Published: 2012-10-02

Total Pages: 239

ISBN-13: 1250010640

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

An inspiring true story about losing your place, finding your purpose, and building a community one book at a time. Wendy Welch and her husband had always dreamed of owning a bookstore, so when they left their high-octane jobs for a simpler life in an Appalachian coal town, they seized an unexpected opportunity to pursue thier dream. The only problems? A declining U.S. economy, a small town with no industry, and the advent of the e-book. They also had no idea how to run a bookstore. Against all odds, but with optimism, the help of their Virginian mountain community, and an abiding love for books, they succeeded in establishing more than a thriving business - they built a community. The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap is the little bookstore that could: how two people, two cats, two dogs, and thirty-eight thousand books helped a small town find its heart. It is a story about people and books, and how together they create community.

Masks, Misinformation, and Making Do
Masks, Misinformation, and Making Do

Author: Wendy Welch

Publisher:

Published: 2023-01-03

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 9780821425015

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The firsthand pandemic experiences of rural health-care providers--who were already burdened when COVID-19 hit--raise questions about the future of public health and health-care delivery. This volume comprises the COVID-19 pandemic experiences of Appalachian health-care workers, including frontline providers, administrators, and educators. The combined narrative reveals how governmental and corporate policies exacerbated the region's injustices, stymied response efforts, and increased the death toll. Beginning with an overview of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and its impact on the body, the essays in the book's first section provide background material and contextualize the subsequent explosion of telemedicine, the pandemic's impact on medical education, and its relationship to systemic racism and related disparities in mental health treatment. Next, first-person narratives from diverse perspectives recount the pandemic's layered stresses, including the scramble for ventilators, masks, and other personal protective equipment the neighbors, friends, and family members who flouted public-health mandates, convinced that COVID-19 was a hoax the added burden the virus leveled on patients whose health was already compromised by cancer, diabetes, or addiction the acute ways the pandemic's arrival exacerbated interpersonal and systemic racism that Black and other health-care workers of color bear not only the battle against the virus but also the growing suspicion and even physical abuse from patients convinced that doctors and nurses were trying to kill them These visceral, personal experiences of how Appalachian health-care workers responded to the pandemic amid the nation's deeply polarized political discourse will shape the historical record of this "unprecedented time" and provide a glimpse into the future of rural medicine. Contributors: Lucas Aidukaitis, Clay Anderson, Tammy Bannister, Alli Delp, Lynn Elliott, Monika Holbein, Laura Hungerford, Nikki King, Brittany Landore, Jeffrey J. LeBoeuf, Sojourner Nightingale, Beth O'Connor, Rakesh Patel, Mildred E. Perreault, Melanie B. Richards, Tara Smith, Kathy Osborne Still, Darla Timbo, Kathy Hsu Wibberly

Unmasked
Unmasked

Author: Ian Miller

Publisher: Post Hill Press

Published: 2022-02-11

Total Pages: 173

ISBN-13: 163758377X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Masks have been a ubiquitous and oft-politicized aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic. Years of painstakingly organized pre-pandemic planning documents led public health experts to initially discourage the use of masks, or even insinuate that they could lead to increased rates of spread. Yet seemingly in a matter of days in spring 2020, leading infectious disease scientists and organizations reversed their previous positions and recommended masking as the key tool to slow the spread of COVID and dramatically reduce infections. Unmasked tells the story of how effective or ineffective masks and mask mandate policies were in impacting the trajectory of the pandemic throughout the world. Author Ian Miller covers the earliest days of the pandemic, from experts such as Dr. Anthony Fauci contradicting their previous statements and recommending masks as the most important policy intervention against the spread of COVID, to the months afterward as many locations around the globe mandated masks in nearly all public settings. With easy-to-understand charts and visual aids, along with detailed, clear explanations of the dramatic shift in policy and expectations, Unmasked makes the data-driven case that masks might not have achieved the goals that Fauci and other public health experts created.

An American Sickness
An American Sickness

Author: Elisabeth Rosenthal

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2017-04-11

Total Pages: 434

ISBN-13: 0698407180

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A New York Times bestseller/Washington Post Notable Book of 2017/NPR Best Books of 2017/Wall Street Journal Best Books of 2017 "This book will serve as the definitive guide to the past and future of health care in America.”—Siddhartha Mukherjee, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies and The Gene At a moment of drastic political upheaval, An American Sickness is a shocking investigation into our dysfunctional healthcare system - and offers practical solutions to its myriad problems. In these troubled times, perhaps no institution has unraveled more quickly and more completely than American medicine. In only a few decades, the medical system has been overrun by organizations seeking to exploit for profit the trust that vulnerable and sick Americans place in their healthcare. Our politicians have proven themselves either unwilling or incapable of reining in the increasingly outrageous costs faced by patients, and market-based solutions only seem to funnel larger and larger sums of our money into the hands of corporations. Impossibly high insurance premiums and inexplicably large bills have become facts of life; fatalism has set in. Very quickly Americans have been made to accept paying more for less. How did things get so bad so fast? Breaking down this monolithic business into the individual industries—the hospitals, doctors, insurance companies, and drug manufacturers—that together constitute our healthcare system, Rosenthal exposes the recent evolution of American medicine as never before. How did healthcare, the caring endeavor, become healthcare, the highly profitable industry? Hospital systems, which are managed by business executives, behave like predatory lenders, hounding patients and seizing their homes. Research charities are in bed with big pharmaceutical companies, which surreptitiously profit from the donations made by working people. Patients receive bills in code, from entrepreneurial doctors they never even saw. The system is in tatters, but we can fight back. Dr. Elisabeth Rosenthal doesn't just explain the symptoms, she diagnoses and treats the disease itself. In clear and practical terms, she spells out exactly how to decode medical doublespeak, avoid the pitfalls of the pharmaceuticals racket, and get the care you and your family deserve. She takes you inside the doctor-patient relationship and to hospital C-suites, explaining step-by-step the workings of a system badly lacking transparency. This is about what we can do, as individual patients, both to navigate the maze that is American healthcare and also to demand far-reaching reform. An American Sickness is the frontline defense against a healthcare system that no longer has our well-being at heart.

Fall Or Fly
Fall Or Fly

Author: Wendy Welch

Publisher:

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780821423028

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Chaos. Frustration. Compassion. Desperation. Hope. These are the five words that author Wendy Welch says best summarize the state of foster care in the coalfields of Appalachia. Her assessment is based on interviews with more than sixty social workers, parents, and children who have gone through "the system." The riveting stories in Fall or Fly tell what foster care is like, from the inside out. In depictions of foster care and adoption, stories tend to cluster at the dark or light ends of the spectrum, rather than telling the day-to-day successes and failures of families working to create themselves. Who raises other people's children? Why? What's money got to do with it when the love on offer feels so real? And how does the particular setting of Appalachia--itself so frequently oversimplified or stereotyped--influence the way these questions play out? In Fall or Fly, Welch invites people bound by a code of silence to open up and to share their experiences. Less inspiration than a call to caring awareness, this pioneering work of storytelling journalism explores how love, compassion, money, and fear intermingle in what can only be described as a marketplace for our nation's greatest asset.

Social Q's
Social Q's

Author: Philip Galanes

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2012-11-27

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 145160579X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A series of whimsical essays by the New York Times "Social Q's" columnist provides modern advice on navigating today's murky moral waters, sharing recommendations for such everyday situations as texting on the bus to splitting a dinner check.

How to Prevent the Next Pandemic
How to Prevent the Next Pandemic

Author: Bill Gates

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2022-05-03

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 0593534492

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Governments, businesses, and individuals around the world are thinking about what happens after the COVID-19 pandemic. Can we hope to not only ward off another COVID-like disaster but also eliminate all respiratory diseases, including the flu? Bill Gates, one of our greatest and most effective thinkers and activists, believes the answer is yes. The author of the #1 New York Times best seller How to Avoid a Climate Disaster lays out clearly and convincingly what the world should have learned from COVID-19 and what all of us can do to ward off another catastrophe like it. Relying on the shared knowledge of the world’s foremost experts and on his own experience of combating fatal diseases through the Gates Foundation, Gates first helps us understand the science of infectious diseases. Then he shows us how the nations of the world, working in conjunction with one another and with the private sector, how we can prevent a new pandemic from killing millions of people and devastating the global economy. Here is a clarion call—strong, comprehensive, and of the gravest importance.

The Plague Year
The Plague Year

Author: Lawrence Wright

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2021-06-08

Total Pages: 417

ISBN-13: 0593320735

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Looming Tower, and the pandemic novel The End of October: an unprecedented, momentous account of Covid-19—its origins, its wide-ranging repercussions, and the ongoing global fight to contain it "A book of panoramic breadth ... managing to surprise us about even those episodes we … thought we knew well … [With] lively exchanges about spike proteins and nonpharmaceutical interventions and disease waves, Wright’s storytelling dexterity makes all this come alive.” —The New York Times Book Review From the fateful first moments of the outbreak in China to the storming of the U.S. Capitol to the extraordinary vaccine rollout, Lawrence Wright’s The Plague Year tells the story of Covid-19 in authoritative, galvanizing detail and with the full drama of events on both a global and intimate scale, illuminating the medical, economic, political, and social ramifications of the pandemic. Wright takes us inside the CDC, where a first round of faulty test kits lost America precious time . . . inside the halls of the White House, where Deputy National Security Adviser Matthew Pottinger’s early alarm about the virus was met with confounding and drastically costly skepticism . . . into a Covid ward in a Charlottesville hospital, with an idealistic young woman doctor from the town of Little Africa, South Carolina . . . into the precincts of prediction specialists at Goldman Sachs . . . into Broadway’s darkened theaters and Austin’s struggling music venues . . . inside the human body, diving deep into the science of how the virus and vaccines function—with an eye-opening detour into the history of vaccination and of the modern anti-vaccination movement. And in this full accounting, Wright makes clear that the medical professionals around the country who’ve risked their lives to fight the virus reveal and embody an America in all its vulnerability, courage, and potential. In turns steely-eyed, sympathetic, infuriated, unexpectedly comical, and always precise, Lawrence Wright is a formidable guide, slicing through the dense fog of misinformation to give us a 360-degree portrait of the catastrophe we thought we knew.