Fighting quarantine fatigue with yet another newsletter. I love all of your emails, links and memes –you can find them in my  past newsletters . I’m also thrilled to hear that people are forwarding this along – if you’re new, join my  mailing list . And, as always, thanks for protecting yourself and others by staying home when you can, washing your hands slightly obsessively, and masking up !
 
I took a pause from this newsletter for a week, because other voices felt far more salient than my own. As cities filled with protestors, social media threads swelled with lessons about the past and dreams for the future, stories and notions that needed to be front and center and, frankly, must remain there until injustices are resolved. In the background, coronavirus seemed to pause, too, falling away from the headlines as cities began to open to shoppers, diners, and activists alike. But this is turning out to be a short-lived pause for both coronavirus and me: today we’re reappearing on your radar and, I fear, in a couple of weeks you’re going to hear more from both of us than you might wish. That’s because, between the re-openings and the shut-in fatigue and the very human inclination to put the past behind us and carry on, we clearly all want to be done with the dark pandemic chapter that was the first half of 2020. We’re not. Viruses multiply; it’s just what they do. And until we outsmart them, organically or with feats of scientific innovation, they will continue to spread. So just as there is much work to be done in order to right the wrongs of social inequity, it will be a long, hard slog to keep coronavirus at bay.
 
As so many have pointed out over the past couple of weeks, healthcare and social justice are inexorably linked, which is why  minority communities bear a disproportionate burden when it comes to COVID . Healthcare workers have long known about this intersection, and a growing group among them are getting vocal  #WhiteCoatsForBlackLives .
 
There is tremendous overlap at the  intersection of peaceful protest and coronavirus . Some of the symptoms of COVID-19 include: temporary loss of senses, hallucinations, and shortness of breath or difficulty breathing. The symptoms of racism can be strikingly similar. Black America has clearly articulated the pathology, manifestation, diagnosis, and antidotes for the malignant disease of racism, yet this social illness has remained largely unrecognized, undiagnosed, and untreated by white America. While scientists furiously scramble to develop vaccines and therapeutics for COVID-19, the same should be happening inside every government office, business, hospital, educational institution, and home across America with the goal of curing racism.
 
Looking beyond U.S. borders, Sweden was famously liberal in its shutdown policy when coronavirus first appeared there – it basically skipped lockdown altogether and decided to let the community get the infection and build herd immunity. Now the scientist behind that policy says it was  the wrong call  because the country’s death rate is among the highest in the world. As we move towards a second wave of pandemic in this country, let’s learn from others’ mistakes.
 
And looking down the road a couple of months, we’re all trying to wrap our heads around how to get our kids back to school in the fall, safely. Many of my doctor friends are working with our local schools to trouble shoot and problem solve. This article gave me hope, because it reports the results of a study in Switzerland showing that it is relatively  rare for kids to infect the adults  (and other kids) in their homes, making school a less likely vector of transmission. That said, I personally believe that everyone on a school campus should be wearing a mask – or maybe a shield if the data bears out – in order to protect the others, particularly the adults working to educate and support them.
 
Past issues haven’t disappeared during this pandemic, and in fact, several have magnified. Take the connection between  g un ownership and suicide . Researchers have long known that when there is a gun in the home, there is also a significantly higher likelihood of a suicide or suicide attempt in that home – I actually wrote about it in  Decoding Boys . This article puts that problem in the context of the coronavirus pandemic, a period during which gun sales have spiked.
 
There’s some heavy lifting in our future, both culturally and medically. Let’s all pull together to lift each other up – of course from a safe distance and while wearing a mask . Unlike this guy (whose  Instagram  thread is downright awesome).