“Having a PFO is not a risk factor for stroke in general,” John Carroll, a cardiologist and a professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, told me. “In most people,” he said, “it’s an innocent remnant of the fetal circulation. You could close a quarter of the U.S. population and probably bring benefit to a very small number of those people.”
Sean O’Leary, a pediatrician and a professor at the University of Colorado [School of Medicine], told me that families that include both kids under 12 and people who can’t be vaccinated or are at high risk for severe COVID-19 might want to be extra mindful of their kids’ exposure, because they could pass it to someone who’s not protected. He also cautioned that “we don’t really have good data yet” on how severe the Delta variant of the coronavirus, which is on track to quickly become dominant in the U.S., is in children, though it does seem to be more transmissible among people of all ages.
Remember that even when it’s chilly, basic safety measures still apply, and they’re even more crucial now, when hundreds of thousands of Americans are getting sick every day. Maintain your distance. Wear a mask. Avoid any situations that increase your risk. “It would defeat the purpose to travel in a car with someone outside your household to get to a place to do an outdoor activity,” says Lisa Miller, an epidemiology professor at the University of Colorado School of Public Health.
Over the past month, Jennifer Leiferman, a researcher at the Colorado School of Public Health, has documented a tidal wave of depressive symptoms in the U.S. “The rates we’re seeing are just so much higher than normal,” she says.
That said, many (but not all) parts of the country have at least gotten out of an “acute emergency phase” for the time being, according to Elizabeth Carlton, a professor at the Colorado School of Public Health. She now sees “a shift towards trying to come up with strategies that allow people to resume some parts of their old lives that are the least risky … We need to find a way to slow the spread of the virus that also allows us to maintain our mental and financial health.”
Without the support of the rest of the profession and much of society, aid-in-dying research methods don’t fit the model of good medical research, says Matthew Wynia, the director of the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. There’s no standard protocol, no standardized data collection or independent group that monitors data and safety—all of which are intended to protect patients and help ensure the quality of the research.
