As the coronavirus continues to spread, a small medical device called a pulse oximeter has started to fly off the shelves. It's a small electronic device that estimates the saturation of oxygen in your blood. And demand for these devices has spiked to such an extraordinary degree that you may not be able to buy one right now in your local pharmacy or online.
What is the value of the device during this pandemic? Do you need to have one at home?
We're using screens more than ever now — Zoom staff meetings, FaceTime playdates, virtual workouts — not to mention endless push notifications with the latest coronavirus news. It's necessary to stay connected, but after so many weeks of quarantine, the burnout is real.
Journalist Catherine Price, the author of How To Break Up With Your Phone has some advice for how to get your life back in balance. She says the fix starts with self-awareness: get real with yourself about when using screens makes you feel good (like, talking to loved ones) and when it brings you down.
Testing for the coronavirus has been very much in the news. The first and most urgent focus is on increasing access to tests to diagnose people with current infections. Those are the ones where they stick a swab into your nostrils to collect a sample and send it to a lab for processing.
But now other tests are appearing as well. Antibody tests, which are done on a blood sample, can identify people with signs of past infection. And now a third type of test, antigen testing, is on the way.
Which of all these tests are widely available and which are most accurate?
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