Tag Archives: Pandemic

Science & Health

How to Prevent Foggy Glasses While Wearing a Face Mask | AARP

Solutions for when your specs fog up include special lenses, wipes, sprays and a better-fitting mask

by Peter Urban and Barbara Stepko, AARP, February 26, 2021 | Comments: 163

From site…

En español | Masks are a crucial way to decrease the spread of COVID-19, but these mouth-and-nose coverings cause a few nuisances, including fogged-up eyeglasses.

When it’s cold, your breath puffing up through the top of the mask clouds the lenses, especially when you go from the chilly outside to the warmer indoors and the mask isn’t tight around your face.

The effect is similar to how a hot shower’s steam fogs up a cool bathroom mirror. The easiest, and least expensive, way to ensure that your glasses don’t fog is to wear a snug-fitting mask with a tight seal across the top that prevents your breath from escaping, says Moran Roni Levin, M.D., assistant professor of ophthalmology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

But there are other options, including antifog lens coatings, sprays and wipes.

Source: How to Prevent Foggy Glasses While Wearing a Face Mask

Science & Health, Times They Are A-Changing

After the Year of No Bras, Things Are Looking Up | Vanity Fair

Photo Illustration by Vanity Fair; Photo by Nina Leen/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images.

When the shutdown left us stranded at home, some women clamored for a tangible sense of freedom. A year later, one writer reassesses the bra with help from an O.G. expert, an Instagram-savvy start-up, and Seinfeld.

By Laura Regensdorf, March 10, 2021

It took me 351 days to take off my shirt for a stranger on the internet. Somehow I had made it this far into the pandemic without partaking in the talked-about extracurriculars: an OnlyFans side-hustle; a virtual boyfriend (I have a real one at home). Instead, here I was, at a little past noon on a recent Thursday, making small talk over Zoom in a who-knows-how-old lacy bralette.

Tania Garcia, director of fit at the lingerie brand Cuup, was about to guide me through a size assessment. I apologized for having only baker’s twine and a handyman’s tape measure. “We’ve gotten very crafty in our fittings,” she said, describing the MacGyver-like setups she has witnessed since the company launched in late 2018. (Without a brick-and-mortar presence, remote fittings were baked into the business plan from the beginning, unexpectedly teeing up Garcia’s team for the Zoom-all-day era.) “I did a fitting once with floss, so we’re okay,” she said, her voice reassuring in ways that transcended the subject at hand. “Let me tell you, we’re fine.” 

Source: https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2021/03/the-year-of-no-bras-pandemic-anniversary

Web & Technology

Doomscrolling Is Slowly Eroding Your Mental Health | WIRED

Photograph: Joel Sorrell/Getty Images

Checking your phone for an extra two hours every night won’t stop the apocalypse—but it could stop you from being psychologically prepared for it.

It’s 11:37 pm and the pattern shows no signs of shifting. At 1:12 am, it’s more of the same. Thumb down, thumb up. Twitter, Instagram, and—if you’re feeling particularly wrought/masochistic—Facebook. Ever since the Covid-19 pandemic left a great many people locked down in their homes in early March, the evening ritual has been codifying: Each night ends the way the day began, with an endless scroll through social media in a desperate search for clarity.

To those who have become purveyors of the perverse exercise, like The New York Times’ Kevin Roose, this habit has become known as doomsurfing, or “falling into deep, morbid rabbit holes filled with coronavirus content, agitating myself to the point of physical discomfort, erasing any hope of a good night’s sleep.” For those who prefer their despair be portable, the term is doomscrolling, and as protests over racial injustice and police brutality following the death of George Floyd have joined the Covid-19 crisis in the news cycle, it’s only gotten more intense. The constant stream of news and social media never ends.

Source: Doomscrolling Is Slowly Eroding Your Mental Health | WIRED

Current Affairs, Memories & History, Politics, Religion & Spirit, Science & Health

The Lost Year: What the Pandemic Cost Teenagers — ProPublica

Heather Davis comforts Madasyn Culver after a youth church service in Hobbs, New Mexico in late February. Credit: Celeste Sloman for ProPublica

by Alec MacGillis

In Hobbs, New Mexico, the high school closed and football was cancelled, while just across the state line in Texas, students seemed to be living nearly normal lives. Here’s how pandemic school closures exact their emotional toll on young people.

Source: The Lost Year: What the Pandemic Cost Teenagers — ProPublica

Current Affairs, Memories & History, Religion & Spirit, Science & Health

What it felt like to live through a year of the coronavirus pandemic – Washington Post

Stories of what it felt like to live through the shutdown. Dancing alone, canceling weddings, missing touch, missing one another and feeling alone together.

The coronavirus pandemic brought out stories of profound grief and heroic resolve.

These are not those stories.

Instead, at this one-year mark, Style reporters set out to note some of the other, countless emotions and personal losses: The almost-9-year-old who never felt like she got to be 8. The 102-year-old who lives in mandated isolation. The massage therapist and her customers who simply crave touch.

The couple who postponed their big wedding — and may have to postpone it again. The single person losing her last sense of social contact. The DJ who spins for an empty room. The college freshman who has never set foot on campus.

Shutdowns, lockdowns, quarantines — whatever you called this long and lost time, these stories acknowledge the persistent disconnect, all that absence, and what it feels like to live in a suspended state of mind.

Source: What it felt like to live through a year of the coronavirus pandemic – Washington Post

Current Affairs, Science & Health

A Year of U.S. Public Opinion on the Coronavirus Pandemic | Pew Research Center

White House coronavirus task force coordinator Deborah Birx briefs journalists on March 31, 2020. (Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)

By Claudia Deane, Kim Parker and John Gramlich, March 5, 2021

About a year ago, state and local governments in the United States began urging residents to adjust their work, school and social lives in response to the spread of a novel coronavirus first identified in China.

Americans could agree on a few things at that early stage of the U.S. outbreak. With restaurants, stores and other public spaces around the country closing their doors, most saw COVID-19 as a serious economic threat to the nation.

Most approved of their state and local officials’ initial responses to the outbreak. And they generally had confidence in hospitals and medical centers to handle the needs of those stricken with the virus.

Source: A Year of U.S. Public Opinion on the Coronavirus Pandemic | Pew Research Center