Tag Archives: Health

Military service academies plan for students’ return in fall | Military Times

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“We cannot develop leaders for our nation’s military online”. Vice Admiral Sean Buck, USN, Superintendent, U.S. Naval Academy, Class of 1982.

The U.S. Naval Academy is planning to have its 4,400 midshipmen return to campus in Annapolis, Maryland, for the fall, after students completed the last semester with online learning from their homes around the nation due to the coronavirus, academy officials said Monday.

Vice Adm. Sean Buck, the superintendent, told the academy’s Board of Visitors he has been communicating with the leaders of the nation’s other service academies, and they also plan to have their students on campus in the fall.

“I can tell you, as of this morning, every single military service academy in this country is opening in the fall,” Buck told the board in an online meeting. “We all are developing very detailed plans with regards to health, safety and the protocols that we need to put in place to manage risk.”

While academics can be done online, Buck said the other two pillars of the academy’s mission statement are developing midshipmen morally and physically, and those goals require hands-on experiences on campus.

Read more: https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2020/06/01/military-service-academies-plan-for-students-return-in-fall/?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=Socialflow+MIL&utm_medium=social

Nearly All NYC COVID-19 Patients Hospitalized had Chronic Health Issues

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Study finds Nearly All Patients Hospitalized With Covid-19 Had Chronic Health Issues

A new Journal of American Medical Assoication study of thousands of hospitalized coronavirus patients in the New York City area has found that nearly all of them had at least one major chronic health condition, and most — 88 percent — had at least two.

Though earlier research has shown chronic conditions like obesity, high blood pressure and diabetes are common risk factors for severe Covid-19, the ubiquity of serious medical conditions in these patients was striking: Only 6 percent of them had no underlying health conditions.

The researchers reported that when patients first came to the hospital and were triaged, 17 percent had an abnormal respiratory rate of more than 24 breaths per minute, and 28 percent received supplemental oxygen.

But fewer than one third of the patients had a fever, even though they were sick enough to be hospitalized, a similar observation to one noted by a large Chinese study.

This indicates that taking people’s temperatures in order to screen them for the coronavirus is likely to miss many people who are not only asymptomatic but also acutely ill.

Nearly 60 percent of those hospitalized at the Northwell facilities had high blood pressure, 40 percent were obese, and about one-third had diabetes. Smaller numbers of patients suffered from other chronic illnesses, such as heart disease, kidney disease and chronic respiratory illnesses.

The study included 5,700 patients hospitalized with COVID-19 in the New York City area, the most common comorbidities [simultaneous presence of two chronic diseases or conditions in a patient] were hypertension, obesity, and diabetes. Among patients who were discharged or died (sample size (n) = 2,634 patients), 14.2% were treated in the intensive care unit, 12.2% received invasive mechanical ventilation, 3.2% were treated with kidney replacement therapy, and 21% died.

References:

  1. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/23/health/coronavirus-patients-risk.html?referringSource=articleShare
  2. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2765184

Financial Life Planning

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“People have the potential to live longer than any other time in history. This gift of extra time requires that we fundamentally redefine retirement and our life journeys leading up to it.” What is “Retirement’?  Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies

Financial Life Planning connects the dots between our financial realities, our values and the lives we long to live. It helps both pre-retirees and retirees identify their core values and connect them with their financial decisions and life goals. It is an financial planning and investing approach which helps people manage their portfolio.

Financial life plan focuses on the human side of financial planning, including people’s anxiety, habits, behaviors and other emotions (e.g., fear and greed) tied to investing money and accumulating wealth. People struggling with retirement and other finances really need a plan that helps them manage their attitudes, habits, goals and resources.

George Kinder, known to most as the “father” of the life planning, is the founder of Kinder Institute. He views life planning as “a way of holistically delivering financial planning that focuses on delving into people’s real goals, beyond just their financial concerns, in an effort to help them use their money to deliver freedom into their lives”.

Financial Life Planning combines personal finance and wellness. It spends time to discussing life planning and to building an intentional life. There is more to living a life of freedom and purpose than money and wealth. To live a life of freedom and purpose, people are encouraged to consider George Kinder’s famous Three Questions, which are:

Question 1: Design Your Life

“I want you to imagine that you are financially secure, that you have enough money to take care of your needs, now and in the future. The question is, how would you live your life? What would you do with the money? Would you change anything? Let yourself go. Don’t hold back your dreams. Describe a life that is complete, that is richly yours.”

Question 2: You have less time

“This time, you visit your doctor who tells you that you have five to ten years left to live. The good part is that you won’t ever feel sick. The bad news is that you will have no notice of the moment of your death. What will you do in the time you have remaining to live? Will you change your life, and how will you do it?”

Question 3: Today’s the day

“This time, your doctor shocks you with the news that you have only one day left to live. Notice what feelings arise as you confront your very real mortality. Ask yourself: What dreams will be left unfulfilled? What do I wish I had finished or had been? What do I wish I had done? ”

Society tends to attribute personal and professional success to the acquisition of material things and the accumulation of wealth. Most of us find ourselves inextricably caught in a cycle of earning, spending, and investing often induced by societal and peer pressures to fit into a perceived definition of success.

And in spite of this, how many times have we heard from even well-to-do friends, acquaintances and relatives that they are not exactly happy with how their lives have shaped up, how they don’t enjoy what they are doing, how they are drowning in debt or living paycheck to paycheck, or how they don’t have any time to pursue their dreams and interests?

If you look closely, there is a common undercurrent running across all these statements that we find ourselves ‘enslaved’ to a script or lifestyle broadcast by social media which was not exactly aligned to our values and innermost dreams.

No one ever wanted to spend more time in the office

“No one ever said on their deathbed ‘I wish I’d spent more time at the office.’ ” Harold Kushner

Having read many anecdotal reports regarding end of life issues, it is important what truly matters to most people in the end. Typically, people do not say that they wish they had earned more money, spent more time at work, or had one more side hustle.

Most often instead, they wish they had spent more time with family and friends. They had more experiences with those that they love. They had taken better care of their health and bodies over the decades. They had saved more and planned better for their retirement. And finally, they wanted to make sure that those they left behind would be taken care of once they were gone.

References:

  1. https://www.kiplinger.com/article/retirement/T023-C000-S004-retirees-build-a-financial-plan-based-on-you.html
  2. https://www.kinderinstitute.com
  3. https://www.kitces.com/blog/george-kinder-institute-life-planning-podcast-seven-stages-maturity/
  4. Podcast: #FASuccess Ep 015: Why Life Planning Is Simply Financial Planning Done Right With George Kinder

Coronavirus is less deadly than SARS — but that also explains why it’s so contagious – MarketWatch

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Two months into the epidemic, the coronavirus has not proven to be as deadly as the SARS virus. That, however, may also help explain why it’s spreading so quickly. It has an incubation period of up to two weeks, which enables the virus to spread through person-to-person contact.

The coronavirus, a highly contagious, pneumonia-causing illness that infects the respiratory tract, is now responsible for 213 deaths in China as of late Thursday and 9,692 infections worldwide, according to Chinese officials and official figures from the World Health Organization.

SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome, infected 8,096 people worldwide with approximately 774 official SARS-related deaths; most of those infections occured during a nine-month period from 2002 to 2003. Even with 43 new fatalities reported over 24 hours, the fatality rate remains steady.

SARS had a fatality rate of 9.6% compared to the fatality rate of 2.2% for the coronavirus.

SARS had a fatality rate of 9.6% compared to the fatality rate of 2% for the coronavirus. However, that death toll could rise as the weeks progress, and drug companies scramble to come up with a vaccine for the virus. Whether the fatality rate remains steady has yet to be determined.

— Read on www.marketwatch.com/story/coronavirus-is-less-deadly-than-sars-but-that-may-explain-why-its-so-contagious-2020-01-30

Buy the dip in stocks and then sell the rip higher – Bank of America

That’s the strategy that strategists at Bank of America Securities appears to be espousing for investors, amid swings in U.S. stock benchmarks that have become increasingly gut-wrenching in the aftermath of a coronavirus outbreak in China that appears to be giving bullish investors at least a momentary pause after a record-setting rally.

For the week, the S&P 500 index and Dow are on track for a more than 1% loss, and the Nasdaq is on pace for a 1.2% drop, after Chinese authorities on Thursday said that more than 7,700 people have been infected with the Asian influenza, with at least 170 dead. Moreover, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed the first case of person-to-person spread of coronavirus in Illinois. There are now six confirmed cases of coronavirus in the U.S., two of which are in Illinois

The Beginner’s Guide to Intermittent Fasting

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The quote below from Dr. Michael Eades, who has tried intermittent fasting himself, on the difference between trying a diet and trying intermittent fasting.

“Diets are easy in the contemplation, difficult in the execution. Intermittent fasting is just the opposite — it’s difficult in the contemplation but easy in the execution.

Most of us have contemplated going on a diet. When we find a diet that appeals to us, it seems as if it will be a breeze to do. But when we get into the nitty gritty of it, it becomes tough. For example, I stay on a low–carb diet almost all the time. But if I think about going on a low–fat diet, it looks easy. I think about bagels, whole wheat bread and jelly, mashed potatoes, corn, bananas by the dozen, etc. — all of which sound appealing. But were I to embark on such a low–fat diet I would soon tire of it and wish I could have meat and eggs. So a diet is easy in contemplation, but not so easy in the long–term execution.

Intermittent fasting is hard in the contemplation, of that there is no doubt. “You go without food for 24 hours?” people would ask, incredulously when we explained what we were doing. “I could never do that.” But once started, it’s a snap. No worries about what and where to eat for one or two out of the three meals per day. It’s a great liberation. Your food expenditures plummet. And you’re not particularly hungry. … Although it’s tough to overcome the idea of going without food, once you begin the regimen, nothing could be easier.”

— Dr. Michael Eades

— Read on jamesclear.com/the-beginners-guide-to-intermittent-fasting