Mystery Photo Explained.

        I am preparing a Powerpoint talk on Buddhism at the request of a book club that I attend at my current church in my home community. I do not claim to really know or practice Buddhism to an adequate degree, but I have also attended weekly meetings to a meditative and spiritually seeking group of folks of various religious backgrounds and traditions which does have some Buddhist leanings and which meets in a local Mindfulness center which is Buddhist. I therefore know enough that I want to try to give at least an idea of the basics belief system of Buddhism. Some of the more esoteric ideas about non-self and the lack of a belief in an actual personified deity seem quite alien to our Western patterns of religious thought. Yet Buddhism and at least one of its regular practices, that is various forms of meditation, have gained a foothold in Western practices. Meditation indeed has a multitude of benefits both for mental health, and even for physical health. Such a practice is easy to establish but perhaps somewhat difficult to stick to. The group I am giving this talk to is strongly Christian, actually the local equivalent of the Church I grew up in located in a small town in northern Illinois. The congregation of my new church is fairly intellectual and well educated and some of them are curious about Buddhist traditions. As I say, I don't know much, but I think I know more than my audience.

         Buddhism is older than Christianity, with the Buddha's life occurring at about 500 B.C.E. For 400 years, his teachings were not even written down because the Buddha himself discouraged recording them. For several centuries the sutras, ie the teachings, were memorized and orally transferred by monks dedicated to such an occupation. However, once their written recording occurred, another 2 millenium's passage has led to multiple lists of beliefs, many interpretations, and blosoming of numerous different sects of practice. It may take a lifetime of study to fully understand all these variations. Still there are some very basic beliefs mostly in numbered lists that pertain to all Buddhist beliefs. My plan in my talk is to present some of those basic belief systems.

         A significant resource for me has been Thich Nhat Hanh's book: "The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching: Transforming Suffering into Peace, Joy, and Liberation." Thich Nhat Hanh, affectionately called Thai or Thay, was a Vietnamese monk since age 16 who is credited with bringing what he called "Engaging Buddhism" to the West. He had to leave Vietnam during the 1970s due to the Vietnamese War and its aftermath. He established a retreat center in France called "Plum Village." He finally had a very disabling stroke, but was able to return to his home city of Hue, Vietnam and died there in 2022. He has written many books and his style of teaching is very approachable and very easy to read.

         Of course, during my many world travels, my husband and I visited several countries in East Asia where Buddhism is a significant if not the dominant religion. We visited several places in India important in the Buddha's life and saw the monuments there. In China, after supression of significant Buddhist presence during the Revolution, Buddhism is being allowed to return, though it is still heavily monitored and controlled by the Comunist Party. Buddhism has been historically and still is a strong presence in both Cambodia and in Thailand. And of course, Tibet is the source of one very large and prominent variety of Buddhist thought. I have a multitude of photos of all these places. Therefore, I plan to intersperse these photos amongst the lists of the Buddhist belief system numbered bullet points.

         Hence I came upon some photos of the Potala Palace in Lhasa, Tibet. This imposing structure on a hilltop in the middle of the capitol city of Tibet. It was the home of the Dalai Llama before he was exiled from Tibet to Dharamsala, India, by the Chinese takeover. It also was home to multiple monks, with multiple shrines and memorils and relics of many boddhisatvas throughout Tibetan Buddhist history. I have always said that after visiting Tibet, I understood the strong presence of spirituality there of whatever kind. At the altitude of Lhasa, oxygen is scarce. The landscape is harchnd austere. And it is so very different a culture from what we know in the West. Yet the people are so friendly and outgoing, that one can't help but feel an opening of the heart, and a sense of peace and wonder.

         So here is a photo, your Mystery Photo, of the Potala Palace in the center of Lhasa, Tibet.

Mystery Photo Reinstated

In my past as the author of this blog, I occasionally tried to stump you with a photo from somewhere in my husband's and my world travels. Well I am no longer making such long jaunts, and my husband has moved to another realm, but here is one of my husband's photos from a very famous city in the world. I really think that this one should be pretty easy. Watch for an upcoming blog with more photos from this great city.

Censorship in 2023: I am angry!

I am very disappointed, offended, insulted, angry. Well, I have gotten some of those feelings out into these words and feel very slightly better. As a physician I know that bottling up and burying feelings of anger and frustration are not good for our physical health. But I never thought I would be faced with such a cause for all this frustration in 2023 in the United States of America. I have been a user of Facebook for many many years. Most of my blogs here are informational and sometimes personal, but I like to think usually examples of fairly OK writing and my hope was always that they would provide some value to others by representing both educational topics and just topics about living life during the last 13 years of my postings. I wrote a blog here, the one previous to this one, dated May 2023, entitled Delinquency. In it I apologized for not having posted in a long while. I also like to use these blogs aa an oral history of a time that was very trying for our world with Covid 19 and the results of this epidemic and also justaposting these historical times with my own personal trials of the last several years. I tried to post a link to the blog of May 2023 just now and it was censored by Facebook. I invite you to read this previous blog. It is the one just prior to this one that I am writing right now. I don't feel that it was exceptionally political. In fact I think it was rather factual. I would suspect that at least 2/3 of our current population in the United States if not more would agree with my concerns. It was not judgmental, it was not derogatory. It was as far as I can tell not racist, or homophobic or any other type of ...phobic. But Facebook judged it not fit for public consumption and censored me. Until I erased it, I was not allowed to post anything further on Facebook. Any way that I tried to get the link into a post on Facebook as I had done in the past, was censored. Finally I entered an incomplete link asking readers to guess the rest of the link so that some might find their way to my blog. Just as an aside, in the past I have done this many times, and there has been no problem Also in the past when I posted very frequently on the blog, you could find that blog just by googling "Renaissance Woman Retired" and the link would come up. Now since I have not been posting very much, that is no longer the case. More importantly, I would like my current readers here to read that former post at blogspot, and tell me what needed censoring there. I am just curious what my readers think. What did the current AI of Facebook identify that was unfit for general consumption? Yes there is a fairly dismal look at some of the current affairs around the world. So are we not allowed to look at bad situations, or negative outcomes? Are we expected as writers to only state "apple pie in the sky" pollyannaish views now? Is it a fact that human beings can't take a critical look at what is happening around our country, in our cities, at our border, and indeed in the world? If that is so, I feel we all have a lot to worry about. This post is critical and negative and so I am sure that Facebook will not allow it to be posted, so I will not even try. Therefore, I am resorting to my old standby, blogspot, to allow me to vent my frustrations. I think we have a lot to worry about here.

Delinquency is My Middle Name.

What can I write here? An apology to any of my readers that are still out there? Some excuses. Annoying affirmations. I don't know. I guess I will just stick to the facts: I have not posted here in over 3 years. So I will just deal in hard on facts! The fact is that we are now beginning the 4th year in Covid. Certainly things have improved a great deal. We are not only no longer in a lock down. We are no longer wearing masks. And most of us are now not consciously trying to avoid people, or trying to stay six feet away from others when out and about. I just returned from a trip from my home in Wisconsin to visit my younger son's family in San Clemente, CA. Flights are very crowded now, ie full planes on almost every route. Rarely do you see someone wearing a mask in the airport and I saw no one else on my flight wearing a mask of any kind, regular cheap around the ear kinds, or N 95 masks. There just are none. I did wear a mask on the way out because I didn't want to get there for my several day visit and then start to get sick. The one time that I got Covid in August of 2022, I came down with symptoms 24 hours after the known exposure so I knew it could happen rapidly. And I wore the mask on the return trip from CA just because it wasn't a significant discomfort on the way out so why change on the way back. And getting Covid is still an annoying discomfort. You need to isolate still. I as a physician do not feel I can go out to public places and be close to others unless I have turned from positive on the home testing devices to negative. The one time I got Covid, I just had maybe 4 days of significant symptoms but it took 11 days for me to turn negative. That is very annoying because I just felt I had to stay home. Covid is still around. Every few days one hears of someone we know that has been ill. Yet when I ask my surgeon son about the situation in the hospital, he answers that it is normal. Everything is running as smoothly as before Covid, though there are still some precautions being taken. Elective surgery is still precluded in the presence of Covid positivity in the patient. And there are still some cases of severe SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) in the ICU, but mostly in patients with other compromising illnesses. Visitors to outpatient care now often see a posted notice that wearing a mask is optional and there is no longer a greeter asking every person entering the clinic a group of questions about recent possible symptoms of any Covid like illness. Our society as a whole still shows signs of what we have gone through. Many businesses and restaurants in particular have closed. People now have discovered multiple different ways to go shopping, to do business online, even to seek medical consultation online, and certainly there is evidence that the long shutdown of schools have left our young people at least a year behind in their schooling if not more. We still do not know the social scars that the absence from school has caused. Our society seems still somehow anxious, fearful, angry, lacking civility, and common decency, and crime rates have skyrocketed. There is dramatic inflation that is slowing the economy. In person retail has been irreparably damaged in many ways. Small colleges are closing because of multiple effects: smaller enrollment, inflation of costs, and who knows what else. There have been a tiny number of bank closings, but these have been explained away as caused by poor management, and the government has extended FDIC coverage to all patrons of those couple banks. Our country is engaged in a proxy war in Ukraine and our enemies around the world seem emboldened. The causes of all of these crises and others are multifactorial and can not be entirely blamed on Covid though it no doubt has had some effect everywhere. How do we individually and societally deal with all of these changes and our current collective malaise? There is no easy answer. But I think that we need to return to some of our former values. Church attendance is reduced. Small kindnesses and politeness, and deeper compassion seem hard to practice. There are occurrances of road rage, of airline passengers just totally losing control of their emotions and striking out at others, of course, the crime waves in cities, and other examples demonstrate our collective anxiety and even despair. So we need to return to what could be called "Church" practices, no matter what the exact spiritual tradition or belief system. Almost all world religions have practices and rituals that reach beyond the individual and express caring, compassion and concern for others. We need to start practicing those traditions again. After 50 years of my life, while educating myself, raising a family, maintaining a household while working fulltime as a physician, I had ceased going to church. I always had an active spiritual practice but it was irregular and not based in collective society. I meditated, attending a spiritual seeking group weekly, and read a lot. But I was not a participating member of a large traditionally practicing religion. Within the last year I have returned to a church similar to the one in which I grew up...a Protestant sect, called Congregationalists, which is mostly baed on Calvinistic thought, but has not succumbed to mergers with other Protestant denominations. I have found a very accepting and welcoming community in that church and have become significantly more involved in the activities there. I think that has helped me with some of my pessimism about the current state of affairs around the world. It is good to have at least weekly attempts to find goodness in people and to find hope that the current cycle is a passing phase of humanity's existance and to return to acts of kindness and good deeds for our fellows that hopefully will turn us all around. For me at least, this has helped. I don't have any other magic ideas. I think everyone has to find their own best pathway but I think that many of the traditional ones used in the past would work for each of us. We must remember that the causes of our current societal malaise is multifactorial and very complex. No single solution will work to solve the ills but I think that small steps that are familiar to each of us individually, especially those with which we grew up, will help us cross the bridge to some sort of world change that is better. We must hope and build faith that this will happen. I myself plan to continue to update this old fashioned blog with some new posts that hopefully will be worth reading. A lot has changed in my life in the past 3 years and maybe just reading about some of my experiences and how I handled them will be of some help to my readers. I hope so.

Synchronicity

           As I wrote in a previous post, Covid 19 isolation has me cleaning out closets. I found a clipped article from Shambhala Sun, a Buddhist magazine, from November, 2000, written by Rachel Naomi Remen, MD, who in the 2000 magazine is listed as a clinical professor at UCSF School of Medicine and medical director of the Commonweal Cancer Help Program. She has written a very entertaining book called "My Grandfather's Blessings: Stories of Strength, Refuge and Belonging, published by Riverhead. In this article she talks about the strange coincidences that occur in our lives that seem as though they have some outside guiding hand and often serve to awaken us or guide us in some fashion. In this time of great travail, I was moved again by rereading this article. I especially found her opening moving and reproduce it here for your edification.

     "Glimpse of a Deeper Order:  According to the Buddhist understanding of auspicious coincidence, all circumstances can be brought to the spiritual path.  Everything that happens in our lives, whether positive or negative, can serve to awaken us to the nature of the world. But occasionally, events cluster in particular ways that give us a glimpse of the deeper structures of reality, and suggest that time and linear causality may not be the ultimate way in which the world is ordered..

     "There are many possible responses to such happenings, which Jung called synchronicity. Some people give them a highly individualized meaning, finding guidance in a personal decision they are facing or confirmation of a direction they have already chosen. But perhaps the real meaning of synchronicity is more universal than personal, with every instance simply pointing to the possibility of a hidden pattern underlying the events of this world. 

     "Either way, these events offer us a certain reassurance, and they also have the power to awaken us. A common response to such an acausal happening is a sharpening of attention, a sense of the closeness of something unseen. Startled awake, we may listen for the direction in which the universe is moving, and discover a wish to participate in it.

     "Synchronicity often takes us unaware and may restore us to ourselves."

     The author goes on to tell about an experience during the Christmas season when she was so busy with her work that she had no time to prepare for the holiday and especially to do one thing she always did which was add an angel to her many years of collecting angels to honor those who had died that year in her medical practice. She dealt with End of Life care and thus was often placed inside another human being's crossing into whatever lies beyond. She met a lady on an airplane who sensed her troubled state of mind and gave her an angel which that fellow traveler's grandmother had just given to her. What a coincidence or was this occurance the definition of a synchronicity?

     Dr. Remen writes further "I suppose one might call this coincidence and perhaps it is. But it felt as if whatever it is that we really serve when we serve others had reached out and shaken me awake, saying 'You get on with the work...I'l take care of the small stuff.'

     "This is the sort of event which Jung meant by synchronicity, a meaningful coincidence which thumbs its nose at linear causality. At a certain level, synchronicity suggests there is more to life than we realize, and that we and all others may not be alone, I regard such a happening as a blessing. Such things may happen at any time, but in the years I have worked with people facing death and those who survive them I have heard many such stories. Perhaps such things are either more frequent at these times, or perhaps in some way every death is a bridge between worlds, and allows us to see things differently for a little while.

     "Synchronicity is always an experience of the unknown. Events such as these do not really prove anything. They are simply a reminder to wake up and pay attention because the mystery at the heart of life can speak to you at any time."

     When I reread this little article, I felt a few moments of expansiveness which some people of the Buddhist bent have called "kensho."  As a physician, I have certainly experienced what Dr. Remen is talking about and these episodes certainly do seem to occur around death. Many of my patients have told me stories of "coincidences" or "synchronicity" that happened around the time of a death in their family. Some of these stories also seem to involve a "ghost" or "seeing" the deceased again in a very life like way. I will tell a little story about just such an experience in a later post.

 Curious about synchronicity. Here's a starting reference:

 https://lonerwolf.com/synchronicity/https://lonerwolf.com/synchronicity/

Closets, Crocus, and helebores

          This elderly couple is about 3 weeks into our "Safer at Home" policy in Wisconsin. the pandemic surges on. In Wisconsin seems somewhat behind many other regions. Of course, this means that we will probably be at this isolation longer than other places because we started earlier and we will still have to go through the peak and the trough before may people are able to return to work. And then there is, of course, our age and our comorbid conditions that I think means we will have to continue at home even after many populations can return to work.

        The first thing I did was to clean a closet. I missed an opportunity in that I should have taken a before and an after photo of my hall linen closet. This is a large double door closet with 5 very deep and long shelves. I can only describe to you the mess that it was. heeps of unnecessary and unused linens which still sit packed in bags to take to the Goodwill Store as a donation when it reopens. Mixed in with all these linens were very non linen type items such as photo albums from a couple of our trips. I think they got put there because it was handy and other closets were full. There were some automatic plant watering systems consisting of beautiful glass bulbs that you fill with water and put in the plant's soil.  They never worked very well for long trips. I found several nice children's gifts that never got gifted. At 13 and 10 years old, the two older grandsons have outgrown them. But I now have a 2 year old grand daughter and will soon have a baby grandson. I saved those gifts. They may still find a child's home. Of course, there is always my own antique toy collection if I save these long enough. One real itme of interest that made my younger son laugh: a paper grocery bag full of one particular sample drug, folders with 4 small diamond shaped blue pills in each. I am known in my family and among friends as a prepper. Well, these were certainly prepping for a different situation. In case you are having trouble guessing what these pills are, there is a photo at the end of this particular blog.

 

Crocus

We had a couple of nice days and of course, gardener that I am, I had to get my hands in the dirt. I had ordered 12 new hellebores before this whole isolation process began, so on the first nice day I got out and stuck them in the ground, most of them near the house and the rest out in my woods where there are more that have grown over the years. Hellebores are also called the lenten rose because they are certainly among the first flowers to bloom in spring, around Lent. They like shade and are just about indestructible. The blooms lasts for about 3 months and after that the foliage is quite attractive. I wanted some up near the house where I could see them easier since you can't always depend on April weather for a walk in the woods. Here are some photos of the first blooms timed right along with an early crocus near the house.

     Now of course since I was cleaning off some beds near the house, I had to arrange some of my fairy scenes.

   
          During this stay at home time, some of our neighbors started a nice little email group. And I joined another group also that stretches further along the Lake Michigan shoreline, down into Bayside and maybe even up into the next community north. One neighbor got the idea that since this email group has been so active with advise, grocery shopping, and other helpful ideas, she wanted to drink a toast to the organizer. She and her husband left bottles of wine out front and invited people to come up their driveway and drink a toast and then take the bottle home with them.  Since we have some new neighbors with younger children, the next week this same couple put out boxes of animal crackers and invited strollers to come up and take a box. This stimulated the organizer to suggest that since the real zoo was closed, that we create our own neighborhood zoo by putting small toy animals, stuffed or otherwise in the window for the families to walk around the neighborhood and find the different animals. Almost everyone participated, and there was quite a menagerie.

     I have a very large stuffed animal in my toy collection. It is not really a zoo animal but I thought it would work. My oldest son won this at the Wisconsin State Fair when he was a sophomore in high school. He remembers it well. It was a very hot day and he was lucky very early in the day and had to carry this huge animal around his neck for the entire day at the fair. Since he left home, this creature has been sitting in a corner of my toy room. I thought it would fit very well with zoo animals. It is a 4 foot tall stuffed blue performing horse with white mane and tail, and a saddle and golden bridle. He is stuffed tightly with straw, but over the years, he can't stand anymore but sits as though ordered by his trainer into that position. I heard some interesting stories about the horse as the neighbors passed. One neighbor was walking her two dogs and they would not pass the horse. They put up such a barking fuss that she had to turn around and go back toward their home. Another neighbor told of walking her great dane, who also was terrified of the big blue horse. Finally when slowly allowed the length of his leash, he made friends and immediately went around to stiff around the white tail, just as dogs do.  The owner of the dog was seen to absolutely crack up with laughter. So my blue performing horse was a big hit even with the adults and some of the dogs.
   

     Have you figured out what the tresure chest of medical drugs I found in my linen closet? Well here is a big hint. 

April 1, 2020 Some Scientific and Technical Info about Covid 19.

     I previously promised some information about the COVID 19 virus itself. The following website is an excellent source of rather detailed information about this virus and what we have learned since its discovery in December of 2019. For those who want to delve into this science, this is an excellent source of information. Since my undergraduate major was microbiology, I felt I should be able to at least refer you to a good microbiology source.

theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/03/ and find the article called biographynewcoronavirus.

Your can access this article by going to the above site and type biography (dash) new (dash) coronavirus. My computer's dash is broken so I cannot type that in here. Otherwise you can google Science of Coronavirus and pick The Atlantic article.

I would like to just summarize some of this scientific information here in case you do not want to delve deeply.

     The Coronaviruses are a widespread group of RNA viruses. Most are spherical and have spikes on the spherical surface that have what look like small crowns on the end of the spikes; hence the name Coronavirus. Coronaviruses exist rampantly in bats, pangolins, and have been found in civets and camels. Four of the Coronaviruses are human viruses only and cause relatively mild colds much like the common Rhinoviruses. It is thought that they cause up to 1/3 of  common colds.  They have been named OC43, HKU1, NL63, and 229E.  Research on these viruses, both the cold viruses, and the animal Coronaviruses in the past has been few and far between.  Such research has been regarded as sort of boring and backward.  But we have faced two other Coronaviruses in the past which are nothing like the common cold virus. The first of these was called COV1 and caused the first epidemic of SARS Cov in 2003. SARS stands for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome. This Coronavirus also rose in China again from animals and then moved to humans. This particular Coronavirus did not transfer very effectively from human to human but it did do this well enough to move to 26 different countries. Fortunately it was not so communicable because its death rate was very high at 15% overall and 50% for those over 64 years old. The second famous Coronavirus to cross into humans was the MERS Cov 2 virus which caused as the name implies, Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome which broke out in Saudi Arabia. But again this virus did not transfer well between humans and stayed mostly in the Middle East. The camel was thought to be at least an intermediary vector. However, this virus also had quite a high death rate. So now we have reached the feared point where a deadly Coronavirus has gained the ability to rapidly and easily transfer from person to person. It is also thought that its origin was in bats in China but it is suspected that there was some intermediary animal between bats and humans, possibly an animal that was sold at the wild animal bushmeat markets of China. This virus is fortunately not as deadly as either SARS COV, or MERS COV, but on the other hand it has very effectively evolved to be able to infect humans very easily.

     Just to clear up some confusions, this virus has several names. Some people in the beginning it called it a novel Coronavirus. Then people began to call it COVID 19 based on its origin in ;ate 2019. The Chinese scientists were able to sequence its RNA very early and did indeed supply that information to the world research community. Since this virus acts very much like the original SARS COV1, it is technically now called SARS COV2. But still the acronym COVID 19 is used both to refer to the disease it causes and to the virus itself.

     Microscopically the crown at the end of the spike is really a couple of pincers held together by a lipid and protein bridge. In order for it to hook onto human cells and hold on long enough to break through the cell wall, this bridge has to break letting the pincer action allow the virus to stick to the cell. This virus has accomplished this mechanism. Actually it has adopted to use a small enzyme that the human cells themselves produce called furin. This protein is readily available throughout the human body and it accomplishes that break of the bond between claws on the crown allowing the grabbing of the human cell by a pincer like action.

     Apparently it has evolved to utilize the ACE 2 receptor which is found on many cells in the human body. It seems that pincer actually grabs the ACE 2 receptor protein. The lungs have a particularly high concentration of these receptors as do the walls of blood vessels, and the gut. You may recognize the acronym, ACE. It stands for Angiotensin Converting Enzyme. Some of those of you with hypertension may recognize that you are on a drug called an ACE inhibitor. Such drugs block the protein, angiotensin and its tendency to raise blood pressure in our bodies. So does being on such a drug have any bad or good effects on this virus or the disease that it causes? Well we don't really know. There are anecdotal ideas, some held even among doctors, that one of the reasons that older individuals with underlying conditions often die from the disease is because they are on ACE inhibitors for their high blood pressure, or heart disease. Doctors have noticed this fact among their ICU patients on ventilators. But there are no studies that would prove this or disprove this idea. Since ACE inhibitors are so commonly used in these conditions that affect older people, it is more probable that this is just a coincidental presence of severe COVID 19 disease and the use of these drugs, and there is not a cause and effect relationship. In fact there is one small study that seems to postulate that being on ACE inhibitors may actually protect against the severe disease. We just don't know at this time. At any rate, we know that the virus uses the ACE2 receptor to stick to the cell wall and eventually get into the cell.

     Many respiratory viruses tend to either cause mostly an upper respiratory illness or an infection of the lower respiratory tract. This virus seems to be able to do both. It first enters human cells probably in the upper respiratory tract and is able to infect cells there and proliferate without a lot of symptoms. This may be why people can seem almost or totally asymptomatic. But then once the virus has multiplied more it seems to in some people move down to the lower respiratory system and cause a viral pneumonia. At this stage several mechanisms can lead to worsening of the patient's condition. One problem seems to be that the secretions are very dry and hard to clear with coughing and this leads to portions of the lungs being closed off to good air movement for proper oxygenation. The body tries to mount an inflammatory response to kill this virus but sometimes that response seems to go berserk especially in compromised people such as the old, or those with other severe underlying conditions. This inflammatory over response does a couple things. First there is something called a cytokine storm where the inflammatory response produces a lot of these inflammatory proteins which in smaller amounts attract the white blood cells that produce killing antibodies and help fight off the invader. But if too much of these proteins are produced they make the blood vessels leaky and lots of fluid leaks out of the blood vessels into the lungs adding more difficulty to the breathing and oxygenation, essentially drowning the person microscopically. Also all of these conditions make the lungs open for invasion by bacteria as well and a bacterial pneumonia may occur. Sepsis is the cause of death in many of these patients which causes shut down of many other organs, such as the kidneys and liver.

     There are a number of ways to attack this virus. Corticosteroids are used to suppress this immune over reaction called the cytokine storm. Now plasma from persons that have been infected and now recovered is being used in the very ill. There is one study from France with a relatively small group of patients who were given the antimalarial drug, hydroxychloroquine, and there seemed to be a good response that was statistically significant. But this was just one study. Currently studies are being done and this drug along with zithromycin are being used actively in the field against this virus, as long as the results are part of an organized study.  Antivirals that have been used for influenza, HIV and other diseases are being tried. Various labs around the country now have live virus and are using those live virus to infect cell colonies and then measuring what various drugs do when added to these small human cell colonies. All of this work is done by robots and is observed microscopically. One drug seems to hold some promise so far, called remdesivir. This drug has been used to fight another very lethal respiratory virus called the Nipah virus which has caused outbreaks in Bangladesh and in Kerala, Inda. Studies are ongoing for this drug. There maybe new drugs that could be effective and perhaps are being safely used for totally different diseases. If any of these drugs have benefit in the lab, they could be introduced to human populations with COVID 19 fairly quickly because their general safety is already known.  Such is the case for hydroxychloroquine and thus it is already being employed to some degree.