Guard Against Pandemic Weariness

For months now, the news has been dominated — understandably — by four events: the COVID-19 pandemic, the imminent presidential election, Black Lives Matter, and the wildfires. Here are some other news items from this period: a Nobel Prize was awarded for the discovery of Hepatitis C virus; Russian President Putin’s opposition leader Navalny was poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok and recovered; gravitational wave detectors identified three new black hole mergers and one neutron star merger; the Lakers won the National Basketball Association championship; and here at Apollo, we completed PreCODE for prevention of cognitive decline, and the new protocol training for practitioners (with training for caretakers on the way).

Unfortunately, 2020 has been dominated by the pandemic, and everything seems to come back to that — as the old complaint goes, “Cheer up, they said, things could be worse — so I did, and they were.” And indeed, COVID-19 has now clearly entered its third wave, which is likely to affect more of us than the previous two did. To make matters worse, the WHO found in a large study that remdesivir is ineffective in COVID-19. Effective anti-virals are coming, as are vaccines, but likely will not be available for another year. So please, everyone, despite our collective weariness, we must continue with masking and distancing, and support resilience. For additional prevention and treatment ideas, see The Three Phases of COVID-19. We can all play a key role in reducing not only the global burden of dementia but also the spread of SARS-CoV-2.