Sunscreen Usage and What to Avoid →

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EWG has assessed more than 700 currently available beach and sport sunscreens and found that only about a quarter of the products offer adequate protection and don’t contain concerning ingredients. The six chemicals studied by the FDA are found in about half the products reviewed by EWG, which advises consumers to choose sunscreens made with zinc oxide or titanium dioxide.

Zinc Oxide and Titanium Oxide only or other mineral based sunscreens and make sure to avoid sunscreens that contain these chemicals: avobenzone, oxybenzone, octocrylene, homosalate, octisalate, and octinoxate. Choose natural type brans and be on the lookout for the 25% of products that are “healthier” alternatives. Also, you could just go full Asian and wear a long sleeve shirt and light pants and cover-up.

Here is the direct link to the FDA study and a non-paywalled article from Consumer Affairs.

California State University's Closed for the Fall →

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The 23-campus California State University system plans to all but cancel in-person classes in the fall and instead will offer instruction primarily online, Chancellor Timothy White announced Tuesday.

The vast majority of classes across the Cal State system will be taught online, White said, with some limited exceptions that allow for in-person activity. The decision comes as schools throughout the country grapple with how long to keep campuses closed amid the coronavirus crisis.

We are in for a new normal. And with Los Angeles announcing a shelter-in-place order until the end of summer, it’s going to be a very different West Coast experience or lack-thereof. At least the beaches are open?

California Seeing an Uptick in COVID-19 Cases as Mobility Increases

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Hopefully everyone continues to keep their distance as we start mobilizing a bit more. I know I’m getting antsy. In today's news (Monday, May 11, 2020), California is looking worse than expected and one family gathering at Easter has resulted in a cluster of 5 cases including an individual who was coughing and joking about possibly having it. Do everyone a favor and protect yourself. Wear a mask not only for yourself but for others as well. We should know this already! Thanks to contract tracing, it hopefully has been isolated.

Researchers are now predicting that California could see more than 6,000 COVID-19 deaths by the end of August, up about 1,420 from projections they released last Monday. It’s the fifth-largest increase in projected death tolls among U.S. states, after Pennsylvania, Illinois, Arizona and Florida.

The upward revisions “are a result of a combination of updated daily death and case data, recent actions to ease previously implemented social distancing measures and steadily rising levels of mobility in many places,” the researchers said in notes released with the data.

An Apple Watch for Health Proves It's a Valuable Tool →

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The development of smart technologies paves the way for new diagnostic possibilities. In the case of the Apple watch, after the mobile application is installed, the records an ECG when a finger is placed on the watch’s digital crown. A 30-s tracing is stored in a PDF file that can be retrieved from the application.

Thus, the Apple watch may be used not only to detect atrial fibrillation or atrioventricular-conduction disturbances but also to detect myocardial ischaemia.

An apple a day may keep myocardial infarction away.

Obviously, one isn’t supposed to take this and make it an end-all for the Apple Watch in detecting all heart conditions, but it does serve as a great example that wearables, particularly the Apple Watch, is proving to be more than a wrist decoration but more of a valuable tool for those that wear one. Here is the direct link to the European Heart Journal’s PDF.

COVID-19 Affecting the Brain →

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Her doctors diagnosed a dangerous condition called acute necrotizing hemorrhagic encephalopathy, or ANE, which they detailed in the journal Radiology last month. It’s a rare complication known to occasionally accompany influenza and other viral infections, though usually in children. With the flu, scientists believe such brain damage is caused not so much by the virus itself but by squalls of inflammation-inducing molecules called cytokines, which are sometimes produced in excess by the body’s immune system during an infection. Scientists are still trying to figure out if the same is true for Covid-19, or if the coronavirus called SARS-CoV-2 is actually invading the nervous system directly. It’s an open question, the answer to which could have wide-ranging implications for how doctors diagnose and treat Covid-19 patients.

We are all aware of the common symptoms of COVID-19 but other symptoms are starting to pop up more frequently leading to a whole slew of newer ailments some of which are already being documented to be long-lasting. JAMA Neurology just posted a paper on it last Friday as well.

BUT IF SARS-COV-2 turns out to be a brain-invader, it wouldn’t shock Stanley Perlman, a microbiologist and infectious disease physician at the University of Iowa. During the 2003 SARS epidemic that killed 774 people, only a few dozen autopsies were ever performed. But in at least eight of them, pathologists found bits of the virus and its genome in the brain, in addition to the lungs, kidneys, digestive tract, and spleen. Perlman wanted to understand how that might happen. So he zoomed in on a receptor called ACE2, which SARS-CoV—the coronavirus that causes SARS—uses to enter human cells. In a 2008 study, Perlman and his colleagues genetically engineered mice to express that human receptor and then squirted a small dose of SARS-CoV into their noses. Rather than descending into their lungs, the virus climbed out of the nasal cavity and into their brains using olfactory neurons like rungs on a ladder.

Eating Healthy During This Shelter in Place →

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Sometimes lists aren’t in perfect tens but Julia Belluz from Vox summed up how to “eat healthily.” I found this article particularly helpful during this shelter in place but I’ll let you be the judge.

  1. Keep your pantry stocked

  2. Consider the nutritional bang for your buck

  3. Meat should be a rare treat — and when you buy it, look for tough cuts

  4. Buy in bulk

  5. Cook in bulk

  6. Don't shy away from frozen fruits and vegetables

  7. Never buy salad dressing

  8. Make coffee or tea at home

  9. Season your food so that it actually tastes good

  10. Replace soda and juice with water

  11. Don't be scared of expiration dates or food that looks less than perfect

For those that prefer video, check out down below. I’ll say that I agree with the meat being a rare treat but if it is, I’m not in favor of the tough cuts and rather treat myself to some Prime Grade. And to dive even further into it, I’m not necessarily into cooking in bulk either since I tend to get tired of similar flavors over and over again but the rest, I’m all in! Oh, and don’t forget to add in a workout here and there. At least 3-4 times a week should help out those endorphins!

Lingering Long Term Effects of COVID-19 →

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In a study posted this week, scientists in China examined the blood test results of 34 COVID-19 patients over the course of their hospitalization. In those who survived mild and severe disease alike, the researchers found that many of the biological measures had “failed to return to normal.”

Chief among the worrisome test results were readings that suggested these apparently recovered patients continued to have impaired liver function. That was the case even after two tests for the live virus had come back negative and the patients were cleared to be discharged.

Needless to say, this isn’t looking great at all for those who have been survivors of mild to severe cases.

At the same time, as cardiologists are contending with the immediate effects of COVID-19 on the heart, they’re asking how much of the damage could be long-lasting. In an early study of COVID-19 patients in China, heart failure was seen in nearly 12% of those who survived, including in some who had shown no signs of respiratory distress.

Degradation in lung capacity and heart function! Twelve percent is unbelievable and to think of the actual effect this has on the longevity of life? For further reading, the actual link to the medical paper can be found here.

Apple and Google Collaborate on Contact Tracing App →

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I’m happy that both these amazing companies, that dominate the smartphone world, are finally collaborating for the great good of humanity but much bigger questions loom. Without a doubt, I’m happy that Apple is taking a lead in this project with their concerns for privacy as I hope that they will champion in protecting us more so than what we have seen from other corporations. You can find both Apple and Google’s Press Releases here with their images below on how the app will work. Privacy is the biggest issue here and really does seem like a big brother way of tracing but is there a better solution? If you want to read further into the technical documentation, click here!

Apple and Google will be launching a comprehensive solution that includes application programming interfaces (APIs) and operating system-level technology to assist in enabling contact tracing. Given the urgent need, the plan is to implement this solution in two steps while maintaining strong protections around user privacy

Techcrunch put it best in summary:

There is zero use of location data, which includes users who report positive. This tool is not about where affected people are but instead whether they have been around other people.

If you haven’t been able to stop by Google’s COVID-19 Community Mobility Papers, that’s something to definitely check out!

How Many Days is Enough? →

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The 14-day quarantine period put forward by WHO and the CDC was based on smaller studies of sicker hospitalized patients. But an estimated 80% of adult COVID-19 patients are not sick enough to be hospitalized, and people can be infectious with the new coronavirus well before they develop symptoms. The new study found that the median incubation period was seven days for adults and nine days for children, far longer than the mean of 5.2 days from an earlier study out of Wuhan.

So hopefully, 8 days is enough for me? But…

For that study, researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and two other universities analyzed 181 cases of COVID-19 in 25 countries, from early January to late February. They found that 97.5% of people who developed symptoms did so within 11.5 days of exposure.

However, the researchers extrapolated that for every 10,000 exposed individuals, 101 would develop symptoms after a 14-day quarantine. Reuters reported on one such case in late February, that of a 70-year-old man in China’s Hubei Province who did not show symptoms until 27 days after he was infected.

Maybe 11.5 days is better? I haven’t been around any known cases that I know of but like I mentioned, I did traverse quite a few areas while being out on Captain training and the journey back to where I am today.

Possible Herd Immunity in California →

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As of Tuesday, the state had 374 reported COVID-19 fatalities in a state of 40 million people, compared to New York which has seen 14 times as many fatalities and has a population half that of California. Social distancing could be playing a role but New York's stay-at-home order went into effect on March 22, three days after California implemented its order.

"Something is going on that we haven't quite found out yet," said Victor Davis Hanson a senior fellow with Stanford's Hoover Institute.

Hanson said he thinks it is possible COVID-19 has been spreading among Californians since the fall when doctors reported an early flu season in the state. During that same time, California was welcoming as many as 8,000 Chinese nationals daily into our airports. Some of those visitors even arriving on direct flights from Wuhan, the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak in China.

This would be great if this were true and we’ll know in a few weeks. For the sake of safety, science, and medicine, I hope that these serology and anti-body tests get carried out more rapidly as well as general testing for COVID-19. It’s great to see that ALL RESIDENTS of Los Angeles with symptoms can get tested now.

Hanson said through all of this the Chinese have been disingenuous about the timing of the initial outbreak of COVID-19.

"They originally said it was in early January, then it got backdated to December and then early December and now they are saying as early as November 17," said Hanson.

China’s continuance of hiding the truth from the world has only hurt us as a human race. I really hope that when this is all over that something gets done about this. Victor Davis Hanson points out that with 8,000 Chinese Nationals / passengers landing at San Francisco Airport and Los Angeles Airport daily as well as direct flights from Wuhan that it would be naïve to think that we weren’t already being exposed to it back in late 2019.

How It Spread Early and Quickly →

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While the flight was in midair, the results of some American passengers who'd been tested in Marseille came back. Three had tested positive for coronavirus and 13 others had symptoms, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told CNN.

Over 350 people who'd been in the confined space of a cruise ship continued with their journey in the even more confined space of a transatlantic flight.

"We were covered with virus from head to toe. We should not have been in the airport," said Harrell Catron.

There was no mitigation and complete disregard for how dangerous and quiet this virus could be. Now with reports saying that some were asymptomatic for up to 40 days… this is not looking good for any type of “shelter in home” / self quarantining.

For the sake of self contact tracing and history, I boarded a plane from SAN-MCO direct with only 8 people on Alaska Airlines 760 on Monday the 30th of March. I took the shuttle to our training center in Orlando, and stayed there until we received our cancellation notice on Thursday night. I did one more session to finish up our current “phase” of training on Friday night and then charted my way back to San Diego on Saturday the 4th of April via MCO-ATL-SAN.

Shuttle, train to plane DL 418 MCO-ATL, then terminal to train to terminal, Willie’s for a naked burrito then plane DL 1951 ATL-SAN, then terminal to Uber to Hilton Torrey Pines and have stayed in the room mostly except for the coffee grab in the morning. I have been here since Saturday night at around 20:30 when I checked it.

There were hardly any persons in the airports as noted on my instagram story, and I only had to use the facilities once at each airport. Maybe once on the plane too if I think about it. I was spaced out on all my flights but did have a cat that was taken out of its carrier on the ATL-SAN leg and I could see hairs flying around in front of me. I did use my mask the entire way while walking around everywhere even on the entire flight.

Originally, I was going to stay until Monday or Tuesday, but then my wife and I felt like 5 days or more just in case would be smarter, so that brings us to Friday, and now, with newer reports saying 14 days isn’t enough, we’re thinking at least until Sunday which would bring it to just over 7 days + 14 hours. I’ll be pissed if I get sick and it was all for naught. Follow the thread below from twitter user Eric Feigl-Ding who is currently the #1 CoronaVirus Authority on twitter and Harvard Epidemiologist / Health Economist and John Hopkins alumni.



40 Push-Ups in a Minute →

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Data suggest that, at least for Data suggest that, at least for men, the ability to do push-ups in large quantities is correlated with good cardiovascular health, according to a new study led by researchers from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and published in JAMA Network Open, a journal of the American Medical Association.

Men in the study who could complete more than 40 push-ups had 96 percent fewer issues related to cardiovascular disease, compared with those who finished fewer than 10.

There’s also an awesome app on iOS called Hundred Push-ups but that one is no longer available so, just search “100 push-ups” and there are many to try out.

The Country Club Barbershop - Rancho Bernardo

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When it comes to a barbershop, it's all about leaving happy. The Country Club Barber Shop takes it to a whole new level of precision and care. Besides the amazing feel and design of the shop, they offer beard trims, clean cuts and shaves; providing complimentary refreshments to all age groups is just another plus. The comfortable couches and atmosphere make it a great place to hang back as well. It's very inviting and I would highly recommend it.

Sidenote: I will admit, making an appointment using their online system on either my laptop or mobile phone is a drag. Far too many drop downs and extra screens. Just my $0.02 but design should be as simple as time, date, service. When you come upon Step 5 ( yes, there are seven total , you type in your name, phone number (should be automatic recogniztion and not necessary to put in the country), and e-mail, you then get to select three preferred barbers. If I have one, and one only, it doesn't let me proceed since all fields are "Required." I can select the same barber all three times and still get to the next step, but once again tedious. Payment screen can be omitted since you're paying locally anyways and that is the only option there at least when proceeding through the Rancho Bernardo location.

Maybe an updated system would entail: If the "preferred" barber isn't on the date you chose, then maybe it shouldn't be on the dropdown. In all honesty, maybe just clicking the barber you want, up pops up their availability and you click go.

With a multitude of barbers in San Diego, many are priced at the $12 - $15 mark. The Country Club starts at $26! Coming in twice a month can really add up but once again, the precision of a straight blade for detail, the abbreviated machined shoulder massage and not to forget the complimentary drink might just make the extra $13 worth it.

All in all, I had a great experience and was cut at my slotted appointment. I was happy with the results and and have already booked my second visit. Here are the before and after. Be prepared though as it's not your quick 15-30 minute cut but more around 60 minutes!

Except for the before and after photos, which were taken from my iPhone 7 Plus Front Facing Camera, all images were shot using my newly acquired Sony A7RII paired with the Sony FE Carl Zeiss Sonnar T* 55mm F1.8 ZA. Check out what DxOMark said about it!