To sleep, perchance to dream…
– a line from Hamlet by William Shakespeare
YES, I KNOW Christmas is done and dusted but just to set the record straight, for us Ilonggos it’s Misa de Gallo, not Simbang Gabi.
So “lets smile for all the good times be glad for all that’s done”.
***
Department of Health (DOH) secretary Francisco Duque said travel ban will be considered only once community transmission of the new variant of COVID-19 has been recorded in the country.
This just confirms that Duque is just being himself – a wishy washy politician that time and time again has shown to be out of touch with what’s going on. This also confirms that as supposedly a doctor, he does not believe that prevention is better than the cure.
In effect, DOH secretary Duque is saying we should only lock our doors once the thief is inside our house.
I have this nagging suspicion that the so-called new mutated strain of COVID-19 is already in all the countries currently infected. It’s just the original strain mutating depending on the environment i.e. the weather is getting colder.
On the other hand, contrary to reports that there is still no travel ban here in the Philippines, DOH clarifies that a ban for travellers from the UK or those with history of travel from the UK has been in effect since Dec. 24, 2020.
***
“I don’t care” has replaced “My Way” as a life-threatening phrase.
Speaking of which, missing from the wake and funeral of Sonya and Frank Gregorio – the mother and son shot to death by Junel Nuezca, an off-duty policeman – were the usual suspects i.e. Leni Robredo, Rissa Hontiveros and the rest of the “devotees to the cult of the yellow ribbon”.
It seems that after finding out they could not use the corpses as props in their signature necropolitics, they started making themselves scarce. Even the usually loud “wokes” and mainstream media seemed to have abandoned the Gregorios.
***
And we segue to “sleep” and it’s relation to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Excerpts from a Dec. 22, 2020 article on www.theatlantic.com by James Hamblin:
The Mysterious Link Between COVID-19 and Sleep
The coronavirus can cause insomnia and long-term changes in our nervous systems. But sleep could also be a key to ending the pandemic.
The newly discovered coronavirus had killed only a few dozen people when Feixiong Cheng started looking for a treatment. He knew time was of the essence.
Cheng, a data analyst at the Cleveland Clinic, had seen similar coronaviruses tear through China and Saudi Arabia before, sickening thousands and shaking the global economy. So, in January, his lab used artificial intelligence to search for hidden clues in the structure of the virus to predict how it invaded human cells, and what might stop it. One observation stood out: The virus could potentially be blocked by melatonin.
Melatonin, best known as the sleep hormone, wasn’t an obvious factor in halting a pandemic. Its most familiar role is in the regulation of our circadian rhythms. Each night, as darkness falls, it shoots out of our brain’s pineal glands and into our blood, inducing sleep.
Cheng took the finding as a curiosity. “It was very preliminary,” he told me recently — a small study in the early days before COVID-19 even had a name, when anything that might help was deemed worth sharing.
After he published his research, though, Cheng heard from scientists around the world who thought there might be something to it. They noted that, in addition to melatonin’s well-known effects on sleep, it plays a part in calibrating the immune system.
Essentially, it acts as a moderator to help keep our self-protective responses from going haywire — which happens to be the basic problem that can quickly turn a mild case of COVID-19 into a life-threatening scenario.
Cheng decided to dig deeper. For months, he and colleagues pieced together data from thousands of patients who were seen at his medical center. In results published last month, melatonin continued to stand out. People taking it had significantly lower odds of developing COVID-19, much less dying of it. Other researchers noticed similar patterns.
In October, a study at Columbia University found that intubated patients had better rates of survival if they received melatonin. When President Donald Trump was flown to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for COVID-19 treatment, his doctors prescribed — in addition to a plethora of other experimental therapies — melatonin.
So just go quietly into the night and sleep like your life depends on it. Hopefully it won’t./PN
