Dr Kurt Papenfus in 2020. He is CEO of Keefe Memorial Hospital in Cheyenne Wells, Colo.
Dr Kurt Papenfus
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Dr Kurt Papenfus
While we are marking five years after the start of the coronavirus pandemic this month, life has changed for many people, in a banal and deep way.
Dr. Kurt Papenfus is a person interviewed by the NPR in 2020. The CEO of a small Rural Colorado Hospital, Papenfus first took care of the styled patients, then he became one. He told us the story to behave in Denver – with an escort of sheriff deputies to make sure he did it – so that he could get the intensive care he knew for cocovid pneumonia.
“The ‘Rona Beast is a very nasty beast,” he said at the time. “He has a very mean temperament. He likes a fight, and he likes to continue to come after you.”
Papenfus now rents investment in research which, he believes, science put forward by decades in just a few years. Personally, he fought with the cerebral fog of Long Cavid, and he learned a lesson on the conservation of his energy.
“Covid was a hard reminder that” yeah, you would better take care of yourself. If you can’t take care of yourself, how are you going to take care of others? “,” Said Papenfus.
Here are five other examples of lessons we have learned And the cocovated things have changed permanently, although this is not an exhaustive list:
1. The video calls made the part larger, the distances shorter.
Did this happen to you? You look at something on Netflix de, let’s say, 2018. There is a video calling conference in history and it is presented as something strange, cool, unusual.
The pandemic has changed this for everyone.
Zoom and other video conference applications have become a common part of commercial and personal life.
Despite occasional frozen frozen screen problems and people who join calls in their shabby pajamas, there are advantages.
Beth Hendrix, executive director of the League of Women Voters of Colorado, said that the use of the distance conference led its group to become truly on a state scale. It allowed a more significant participation for people in the eastern plains at the west side of Colorado, called the Western slope.
Before, all their meetings were in person, which “prevented the people of the metro from really participating in leadership actions. It is therefore a positive thing”.
Michael Dougherty, BOULDER County district lawyersaw a similar silver lining: virtual legal proceedings have enabled many more people to participate.
“We also have victims who are afraid of being in the same room as a defendant or his loved ones,” he said. “They can now attend the courtyard practically without the defendant even knowing that they are there.”
2. The pandemic puppies also brought us friends on two legs.
Many people have become animal owners for the first time during the pandemic. Grace Markley, from Denver, said one of the surprising and beautiful things about the crisis was “we ended up adopting a miniature bernedoodle”.
She met neighbors who also adopted pandemic dogs. They dragged outside, socialized on the potlucks and the Happy Hours, connected to the dogs and formed what they called their Doodlefest. It has become a regular gathering, a vacation card with Doggos with a cast mix and a group conversation. “And to date, we are 22 on the cat,” said Markley.
A bernedoodle is a dog that is a cross between a poodle and a Bernese mountain dog.
CAVAN / ISTOCKPHOTO / GETTY Images images
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CAVAN / ISTOCKPHOTO / GETTY Images images
“This part of the city is just alive with pandemic puppies. It was therefore something that was really special for us. And five years old, we are still going strong,” said Markley.
3. Health inequalities have been exposed, as is vaccine hesitation.
Covid has exposed inequalities struck both in society and in the health system.
Julissa Soto, a Healthy shares consultantHelped both in light and approaching them in hundreds of colorado clinics.
One case was in Ascension Catholic Parish in the Denver district of Montbello, where in 2021 she told the masked congregation that COVVI-19 vaccines were safe, efficient and available.
“I am on a mission for my community to be vaccinated, and I will not stop as long as I do not be vaccinated Latin,” She said at the time.
During the pandemic, it helped around 60,000 people with vaccination, by its count, in more than 400 clinics of vaccines and events like that of the Catholic Church ascent.
A vaccination event in December 2021 in the Montbello de Denver district organized by Julissa Soto. She estimates that she helped 60,000 people get their coated shots.
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Hart Van Denburg / CPR News
Quick advance until 2025, and Soto says that it is important to remember how many people have been lost.
“Really sad, many, many people are dead,” she said in an interview.
In Colorado, the number of people deceased exceeded 16,000 people, according to figures reported by the CDC. Over 1.2 million people died across the country.
Most coloradans have been vaccinated, but the Latin American community, which was touched by the virus, has barely arrived at a Vaccination rate of 50%, said Soto. The low rate provided him “An opportunity to highlight inequalities. They have always existed in public health.”
During the 2024-2025 Respiratory virus seasonLess than 25% of Colorado adults have obtained the COVVI-19 COVVI-19 updated vaccine.
Among the lessons that Soto said that she had learned in the pandemic: pivot, reflect on her feet, remove the barriers, challenge the status quo.
“I think we are going to find solutions,” she said. “Remember each setback, it will be a return.”
4. The class has changed and the challenges are installed.
For some, the dark clouds of the pandemic still exist. Melanie Potyondy, public school psychologist in Fort Collins, says she noticed a disturbing trend with children: “A lack of resilience, a lack of this grain, which I think I saw in the previous cohorts of children before the pandemic.”
She says that they are now abandoning faster, faster to tidy up a teacher with whom they do not click. Add dependence on technology, which “worsens this diminished grain level in that it is so easy to hide behind a phone and not have to have difficult conversations with people in person.”
Schools have started to experiment with mobile phone prohibitions During lessons, but the jury is still on the question of whether it will resolve the learning challenges that teachers and students report since the disruption of the pandemic.
5. Long Cavid, too, appears here to stay.
“Difficult to believe, five years later. Still in a little recovery mode” is the way Clarence Troutman, resident of Denver, summed up his experience, both COVID-19, then LONG COVVID.
Troutman was a broadband technician with CenturyLink, a telecommunications company, for 37 years. He caught the virus at the start of the pandemic, was hospitalized and on a fan for a while and ended up staying in hospital for two months.
Five years later, life is a mixed bag for Troutman, which had to withdraw from his work because of his health.
Clarence Troutman had to retire because of the long coide, but he is grateful today that he feels good enough to enjoy visits with his grandchildren who live in Atlanta.
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“I don’t have the neuropathy I had,” he said, citing a light point. These are nerve lesions that cause pain, numbness or tingling.
“A kind of psychological scars of everything to be healed,” he said, noting The positive side of the big book.
But he is still struggling with chronic fatigue, a cerebral fog and a reduced pulmonary capacity. Troutman says that a long group of very cocoked patients he joined after he fell ill, always meets regularly, comparing their experiences, supporting each other.
“We are always a tight group and we improve,” he said.
He started working in his local leisure center, thanks to his improving health. And he said he was closer than ever to his son and two grandchildren in Atlanta.
“I really feel blessed every day when I think of people who could not go through this thing or have changed forever, even worse than me. I know that I am blessed,” he said. “I am a very lucky guy.”
Troutman said that another good thing was his discovery of an inner power.
“In a way, you use a strength or resilience that you did not even know that you had until it happened,” said Troutman. “So yes, it was completely the trip. Quite the trip.”