Health Sciences In The Media

As bad as COVID is in California, Arizona has actually topped it in cases per resident. "We are at about 118 cases per 100,000 per day right now, which is extremely alarming," said Kacey Ernst of the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of Arizona.

One of the scariest elements of COVID-19 is that even among those who survive the disease, damage to the lungs can linger afterward, and it's unclear whether that tissue will fully recover with time. "It is very concerning because we haven't seen this degree of fibrosis in any other disease in the past, even with the original SARS," said Sachin Chaudhary, MD, director of the Interstital Lung Disease Program at the University of Arizona College of Medicine – Tucson.

Pain is a subjective response with multiple features and components, said Frank Porreca, PhD, professor of pharmacology and anesthesiology at the University of Arizona College of Medicine – Tucson.

The pandemic has disrupted almost everything in our lives, including the quality of our sleep. Michael Grandner, PhD, the director of the Sleep & Health Research Program at the University of Arizona, talks about what his expertise can tell us about sleeping and dreaming during a global crisis, and tips for better "sleep hygiene."

As each month passes amid this ongoing coronavirus pandemic, the daily number of infections has continued to march in one direction only—steadily upward. Dr. Joe K. Gerald, associate professor of Public Health Policy and Management at the University of Arizona, said, “For most states, (the data indicate) that viral transmission is broadly increasing. Reporting national estimates only has limited utility because each state is fighting its own COVID-19 battle. The U.S. figures then reflect in a rough sense the average win/loss ratio among the fifty states weighted by population."

Los Angeles County has been so overwhelmed it is running out of oxygen, with ambulance crews instructed to use oxygen only for their worst-case patients. Arizona, once heralded for turning the corner after a summer surge, now has 69 of every 100,000 residents hospitalized with the virus — the highest rate in the country. "The virus is just basically transmitting almost uninhibited through our population,” said Dr. Joe Gerald, who has been tracking the spread of the virus and was among those urging a shelter-in-place order.

Scott Sherman, MD, PhD, and Torsten Falk, PhD, both associate professors in the University of Arizona College of Medicine – Tucson, have developed a method of using ketamine in the treatment of Parkinson’s disease. The university has entered into an exclusive licensing agreement with Pharmather Inc., a subsidiary of Newscope Capital Corporation, for the development and commercialization of the method.

Mind controlling microchips and permanently altered DNA are two widely shared conspiracy theories about what the COVID-19 vaccine might do to anyone who takes it. Dr. Elizabeth Connick, an infectious disease expert at the University of Arizona says neither one of those things are true. She's so confident, in fact, that she already took the first dose of Pfizer's vaccine.

According to the Arizona Department of Health Services, more than 17,000 positive COVID-19 cases were reported Sunday. Those are numbers that experts say are likely to increase after an estimated 84 million Americans traveled in recent weeks. "They just don't think it's them. 'I'm not the cause, I'm not the case, it's not going to happen to me,'" said Dr. Purnima Madhivanan, an associate professor at the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health.

Arizona has the highest rate of new COVID-19 cases in the United States, data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says. Arizona's rate of positive new coronavirus cases over the past seven days was 121.8 cases per 100,000 people, which was higher than any other state in the country. "We have now all but locked in a major humanitarian crisis during the Christmas–New Year holiday with hundreds of preventable deaths per week," Dr. Joe Gerald, of the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health, wrote in a Dec. 18 report.