coronavirus – Usagi Medical Group

A Visit From Totoro

(with apologies to Clement Clarke Moore)

‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the con,
No anime stirring, no art was drawn;
COVID-19 hung over everyone there,
We dared not stir–too deadly to share;
Our people were nestled in costumes they made,
Disappointed pandemic had squashed what they played.

I was going to write out an entire poem like this called “A Visit From Totoro” about COVID avoidance tips for the holidays. But then I read a headline about the Yankee Candle company being bombarded with negative reviews because people are claiming their candles have no scent, and I just couldn’t do the poem thing, anymore. (Loss of the sense of smell is an early sign of COVID-19.)

Look, I know the holidays demand a certain kind of attention and energy. I know people expect that holiday gatherings should happen. That the whole gift-giving and food-sharing thing is a matter of strict tradition. And while I know that a lot of families out there played it safe, it seems clear that a lot of them did not. We should all find this frightening and saddening.

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Living Life and Staying Safe in the Time of COVID-19

We need to talk about the gorilla in the room… The same gorilla as before, but the guidelines, they keep changing. Why is that?

Because this is a novel disease, something we’ve never seen before. We’re pushing out information as soon as we think we have a handle on it, and then we get schooled by the virus again, and the information changes. Information flows faster now than it ever did before, so you get to see how science itself ebbs and flows. Science has always been this way, but we’ve never before had the ability to communicate it as fast as it happens.

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Sequestered Sanity: A How-To

by Jennifer Clark, LMSW, and Mickey Desai

So, here we are, social distancing. We are working from home. We are ordering take out. We are staying away from our favorite exhibits, restaurants, and events. If you’re like us, you miss people. And even if you’re just a massive introvert, social contact is still a part of healthy living.

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COVID-19 and You

We’re all concerned about COVID-19. Whether or not you’re one of the people who are buying out all the toilet paper on the eastern seaboard, we here at Usagi Medical Group would urge everyone to try to put their anxieties in check when it comes to COVID-19 and what it might do to the local convention scene. Panic seems almost reasonable these days, but panic creates more trouble than it solves.

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COVID-19 for Anime/Fandom Convention-Organizers

By Laura Block, PharmD, NREMT

The only thing that we can predict about COVID-19 is that we can’t predict much. This is a novel virus, and while the scientific community is discovering an amazing amount of information very rapidly, our society and this virus move even faster.

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