Countering Covid - home medication tips, What to do and what to avoid ..

When the deaths globally due to Covid has reached 7,50,000 (0.75 million) and infections aound 21 million, as of 13 August 2020, this writing points out the symptoms to look out for, the things to do and the things to avoid. I got this piece of advice from Dr. Danish Salim, from PNR Memorial hospital, Trivandrum, Kerala, India. I found it very sensible, useful and effective, that is why I thought of writing it down as a blog to be shared among people of the world.

As of 13 August 2020, of the 21 million infections globally from January 2020 (ie. about 0.27% of global population of 7800 million), approximately 14 million have recovered globally from this infection (66% recovery rate), 6.4 million are undergoing treatment and 64,000 in critical condition (app 1%), all the indications point out that infections are not going to abate any soon.

The Indian government has stopped admitting Covid patients in hospitals as the hospital facilities are getting overwhelmed and has requested them to undergo home isolation and home treatment if the situation is not severe. They have been asked to go to hospitals only if the situation is critical and serious.  

Tips on home medication

1. Daily temp check, if it is > 101 deg Fahrenheit, take 600 mg Paracetamol every 6 hours.

        For children it can be around 15 mg per kg of body weight.    

2. If one experiences diarrhoea, take an Oral Rehydration Solution (ORS) pack and mix it in a litre of water, take as many times, even once every 4 hours.

3. If one experiences dry cough, steam inhalation is advised, again every four hours or may be even more frequently.

 

When to go to hospital

1. if one has productive cough, ie. phlegm comes out

2. check heart pulse, if it is more than 120 beats per minute

3. while lying on bed, if the stomach rises and falls more than 30 times in a minute

4. if on pressing the skin on your fingers, on releasing if the blood does not flow back to the pressed area in less than 2 seconds

5. losing consciousness 

6. if skin turns blue around the hands, legs, tongue, nose and ear

 

At home, what all are the activities to cary out - To-Do list

1. take 3-4 litres of water daily

2. eat balanced diet with 65% carbohydrates, 15% fat and 35% proteins

3. take fruits with enough of Vit C, papaya, orange, berries, guava

4. for Vitamin A - take enough of carrot, beetroot, milk, curd, eggs

5. for vitamin D - get enough of sunlight, before 11 AM and after 3 PM, have high fat fish like sardines

6. exercise daily or do yoga exercises daily for good blood circulation

7. practice meditation to bring down stress levels

8. have minimum of 8 hrs sleep so that the body produces enough of cytokines that improves body immunity to foreign agents entering the body

 

At home. - What to avoid

1. smoking cigarettes

2. drinking liquor (click here for a WHO doc on why you need to abstain from alchohol, especially during this period)

3. junk foods like burgers, and Maida based food like parotta etc

4. stressful talk and actions, as the Cortisol released lowers the body immunity

5. sweetened soft drinks

These tips and directions can help us tide over this Covid season with confidence and renewed energy, optimism and enthusiasm.

Good Luck everybody ..

George ..

GOA MRF days ..

Really good time with friends ... 33 years back ..

 

Those industry days were good, the camaderie among the colleagues was so strong and good. When this photo was clicked all of us were bachelors.

 

Sitting L - R : Sajan Cherian, Narendran, Dasharathi, Babu Joseph

Standing L - R : George Easaw, Eapen Mathew, Balachandran, Sathaiah, Narayanan

George..

New Education Policy, India, 2020 ..

Implications of NEP - far reaching..

New Education Policy 2020 is announced

1. 10+2 board structure is   dropped

2. New school structure will be 5+3+3+4

3. Upto 5 pre school, 6 to 8 Mid School, 8 to 11 High School , 12 onwards Graduation

4. Any Degree will be 4 years

5. 6th std onwards vocational courses available

6. From 8th to 11 students can choose subjects 

7. All graduation course will have major and minor

Example - science student can have Physics as Major and Music as minor also. Any combination he can choose

8. All higher education will be governed by only one authority. 

9. UGC AICTE will be merged.

10. All University government, private, Open, Deemed, Vocational etc will have same grading and other rules.

11. New Teacher Training board will be setup for all kinds of teachers in country, no state can change

12. Same level of Accreditation to any collage , based on its rating collage will get autonomous rights and funds.

13. New Basic learning program will be created by government for parents to teach children upto 3 years in home and for pre school 3 to 6

14. Multiple entry and exit from any course 

15. Credit system for graduation for each year student will get some credits which he can utilize if he takes break in course and come back again to complete course

16. All schools exams will be semester wise twise a year

17. The syllabus will be reduced to core knowledge of any subject only

18. More focus on student practical and application knowledge

19. For any graduation course if student complete only one year he will get a basic certificate, if he complete two years then he will get Diploma certificate and if he complete full course then he will get degree certificate. So no year of any student will be wasted if he break the course in between.

20.All the graduation course feed of all Universities will be governed by single authority with capping on each course.

Now we can hope our education system will be at par with modern countries and future of our children will be bright.

FAQ on sound recording from a home studio

An FAQ on sound recording from a home studio..

Background music - Karaoke of all major songs are available on the Internet. On a google search, you can get it.

Hardware and software - I play the instrument background Karaoke music through my samsung A4 tab. I sing along in a closed, quiet room and record it using a free high quality Philip's sound recording android software app, single track, from Google playstore, on my Samsung M30S mobile phone. 

Takes and re-takes - From my experience, it  takes on an average about 5-6 retakes before a recording is complete.. Yesterday I spent almost 2 hours with 7-8 retakes and still could not complete another Chemmeen song, Pennaale Pennaale ..

Throat clarity and hygiene - Your throat also should be clear. Drinking hotwater, hotwater gargling can help.

Recording room specs - A quiet sound insulated room with no fan noise, no ac noise, no disturbance, at the same time giving less trouble for other family members is very essential.

Avoid External Disturbance - Frequent planes flying overhead and shrieking mobile vegetable fruit vendors necessitate compulsory occasional breaks ..

Plan fixed recording time slot to improve effectiveness of process ..

-end of FAQ-

Is One big solution possible for Covid ?

I was going though an engaging article by Prof. Gary Pisano of HBS in the May '20 issue of Harvard Business Review (click here for the paper) where he makes a point by saying that many small hygienic practices like wearing masks, hand washing, social distancing and innovations during this Covid time would actually be better than one large innovation, ie. the vaccine.

During the Spanish flu pandemic from Jan 1918 to December 1920, the world saw almost 50 - 70 million deaths. That was a time when medial care was sparse, limited and expensive, many of the medical innovations had not been developed. Even to this day, the world has not found ways to kill a virus - we are in square one as we were in January 1918. Aleander Fleming's anti-bacterial antibiotic, Penicillin G discovered three years after the Spanish flu virus subsided, in 1923 is no good or the world now. Should we wait for the big vaccine toi be discovered o start with many small innovations now itself ?

Can we deploy Lean Healthcare to solve this Covid pandemic ?

 

In any lean system, the first and most important point is to 

1. identify value and map it

2. Ensuring a flowing setup and 

3. Ensuing a system of Continuous Improvement. 

1. Identify Value : We should think of having an inexpensive means of handling the Covid virus. The existing Eastern systems of medicine like Ayurveda, Homeo, Sidha, Unani etc should be explored to address this issue. These systems of medicine are effective in some cases and at the same time very cost effective. Every medical system of the world has evolved over centuries and has been effective in some part of the world, that explains the reason for its popularity in that area. There are some situations where each medical system has been effective. 

These ancient medical systems have got their strong and weak points. In India presently a huge movement is on to see that people are administered doses of a popular Homeo medication by name Arsalb 30, 4 medicines taken twice daily for three days before the virus enters the body. This is to be repeated after a month. These medications are preventive in nature and not curative. It has to be administered before one catches the infection, it builds up antibodies in the human body that can prevent a recurrence. 

2. Ensuring a flowing setup : The healthcare has to be in a flowing mode, ie. there should be no delay either in health care or health delivery, no queueing and batching, each patient is handled on a unit by unit basis. 

3. System of Continuous Improvement : The Japanese Toyota system hinges on their Kaizen (Continuous Improvement) setup, which relies on incremental innovation. Small definite, quantifiable improvements over time leads to large cost-effective, measurable, lasting innovations. Even if the Covid vaccine does not become a reality in the next 12 months or is ineffective to different strains of Covid 19, following the small innovations religiously like effective hand washing, wearing masks and social distancing will be the only effective solution in the long run. 

The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 lasted for thee years and even to this day, no effective solution to attack a virus has been developed by modern western medicine, after exactly 100 years. Can we expect a similar repeat of the same this time too ?  

Will finally hand washing, social distancing and mask wearing be a social practice for the next many years ?

George

The only Marine Cemetery of the world ..

Uru ..

Beypore town in Calicut is famous from time immemorial, almost 2000 years back, for the boats that were built there which sailed the seas of the world - the Uru .. An Uru is a wooden dhow, mainly made of Malabar teak, probably the biggest handicraft in the world.

To add to the glory of Beypore, the world's first and only marine cemetery has been built on Beypore beach in 2019.

What is a marine cemetery ?

The Marine Cemetery is dedicated to marine and riverine species which are endangered due to plastic waste, water pollution, climate change, and overexploitation. 

Aerial view of the cemetery

The monument has nine markers, each dedicated to an endangered marine and riverine species, built with plastic bottles encased in gravestone-shaped iron frames. 

The cemetery is jutting into the Arabian sea and is built on a rock foundation, probably to make sure these iron frames will stand for generations to come and will withstand heavy ocean waves and sea winds.

Eight of these markers are 4 feet (1.2 m) in height, and are dedicated to the 

1. seahorse

The epitaph

2. parrotfish 

3. leatherback sea turtles

4. eagle rays

5. sawfish

6. dugong

7. zebra shark and 

8. hammerhead shark

One of the markers is 6 feet (1.8 m) in height, and is dedicated to the endangered native freshwater fish species 

9. Miss Kerala

The monument is an awareness initiative.

In November 2019, a team of about 80 volunteers cleaned up Beypore beach, and collected over 800 kg (1,800 lb) of plastic waste which they handed over to Kozhikode Municipal Corporation for recycling.

2,000 plastic bottles were left behind which were later used for building the monument.

The monument was initiated by Jellyfish Watersports in collaboration with the Beypore Port administration, the authorities of Kozhikode district, and under the Clean Beach Mission of the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change. 

Climate change activist Aakash Ranison and his team built the structure. 

It was opened on 4 December 2019, the World Wildlife Conservation Day.  

Source : www.wikipedia.org

Cotabato Prison, Philippines, one of world's toughest prisons..

The other day I was going through a documentary from Free Documentary on the Internet. I have never closely understood how prisons work or what goes through the prisoner's minds.

This is the story of Cotabato prison in Philippines. In a space of 2 buildings designed to accommodate just 600 prisoners, these are not hard core convicted ones, they are standing trial for crime, yet to be punished, about 1600 prisoners cram.

Cotabato prison, Philippines, Free Documentary

Click here to watch the 45 min documentary ..

In any prison we are likely to find many innocents too who get caught in the cross fire and get arrested by the Police just on suspicion. If we take about 30% are of that category and the rest are yet to be charged, without understanding the motive, the injustice being meted out tio these people is indeed beyond words.

The sad part is to understand that almost all of them are in their thirties or forties,, barley few in their fifties or more. The best productive part of their lives is being spent in these horrible conditions.

My first experience of prison life happened just once when as a young student in the Govt. College of Engineering, Trivandrum, from the church, as a youngster group during Christmas time, we got permission to visit the Poojapura jail, on the outskirts of Trivandrum city, where we went to spread the cheer of New year during the New Year of 1985. A rare experience, which most of my colleagues and friends have never had and would never wish to. Kerala prisons do not have the issue of overcrowding. Imagine having to share the prison room with 6 - 8 other criminals or suspects ..

It was Kiran Bedi, IPS, now Governor of Pondicherry who is credited with bringing great jail rreorms or changes in the country's top and notorious Tihar jail in Delhi around the nineties. It was remarkable and commendable. She was awarde the Magsaysay prize for that. 

Overcrowding at prisons .. Aljazeera

Most of the freedom fighters during the Indian freedom struggle have been jailed and the most important of it I would say is Jawaharlala Nehru who unfortunately was jailed for almost ten years. But not losing hope, Nehru went into writing inside the prison and some of this best writings have come out of his prison stay, like Letters to a Daughter, Discovery of India and so on.

Being jailed for protesting against injustice meted out to the people in the name of racism, for just protesting and for no fault , even for upto 29 years, like in the case of Nelson mandela is the other sad part of jail stay.

Besides losing hope, the psychological strain on the human mind is very shocking,. Drug related crime, I find, is responsible for maximum prison sentences around the world. Impoverished upbringing without love and care is responsible for making many of the convicts to turn to hard-core criminals. 

Creatively using the inmates and their energy within the prison to produce creative things is a creative way of using the time of the prison inmates. The revenue from the work is returned to the inmates at the time of their finishing their prison sentences. Poojapura jail inmates in Trivandrum make chappathies and sell to the city hotels, they also make Covid PPE in the jail and sell the medical shops and hiospitals across the state.

Kiran Bedi, 1994, Magsaysay award

The Psychological distress these prisoners bear is very heart breaking. Due to the gravity of the crime they have committed, it is not safe for society to allow them to get back to mainstream soon enough, they are a constant threat to society.

In my opinion, political prisoners should be treated differently from other prisoners.

Lets hope in the coming days we get to respect the human rights and offer them to prisoners in prison, even though they have infringed upon the human rights of someone else that has brought them to jail.

Prison reforms are needed.

George..