COVID-19 Virus/Immune System, Nutrition and Traveling During the Pandemic

Hosted by the Mid-Missouri Black Nurses Association

all right everyone welcome to our webinar we are going to be talking about the cover 19 virus and its relation to the immune system nutrition and traveling during the pandemic my name is joy i’m one of the members of the black nurses association and i am the secretary and i will be introducing our wonderful panelists today first we have dr mary amanda haskins an assistant professor of biology and health science program chair she received her bachelor’s in paralegal studies and masters of health education from the mississippi university for women the first state supported college for women in america she earned her phd from the university of mississippi in health with a concentration in health behavior and promotion with an area of support and nutrition courses that she has taught includes women’s health health psychology nutrition health behavior and health program planning and event evaluation she also oversees all internships in a professional development course for majors her research interests include osteoporosis knowledge awareness and prevention as well as other preventative health perceptions and behaviors and health disparities thank you for joining us today ms mary okay next we have kate am i pronouncing your last name correctly uh it’s janos janos okay i apologize for that she’s a registered dietitian she graduated from stephen college then went on to the university of central missouri and graduated with the bachelors in dietetics and nutrition in 2020 she’s currently at kaiser university completing a master of science and dietetic internship in nutrition all right our next panelist and i’m pronouncing this right dr lukman khan mr excuse me he is the owner and director of chase world travel yeah i’m not a doctor i’m a travel agent yeah sorry i read that incorrectly mister he’s a chase world travel that was established in 2009 operating as a leading business providing all aspects of travel and excellent customer service to clients from different backgrounds and they have more than 25 staff serving communities in various locations throughout the united states and around the world though travel has been very difficult during cover 19. chase world travel has been helping travelers regardless of where the tickets are purchased if you guys ever need any assistance with travel arrangements you can call the toll-free number at 1-855 asap chase or 1-855-272-7242 and lastly we have dr jessica epo farmer an assistant professor of agriculture and animal science research and extension at lincoln university she trained academically at texas a m university and cell culture and gamete handling oocyte maturation embryo culture pregnancy transplantation and immunology her reproductive research currently focuses on a new nanoparticle based semen evaluation technique her immunology background has her serving on coba task forces explaining epidemiology and viral biology she’s a lifelong teacher and taught classes in high school college and graduate levels such as biology health and anatomy and she has a certificate in college teaching from texas a m university and served five years as a teaching assistant training and evaluation program coordinator for the center of teaching excellence thank you for joining us today okay thank you all and welcome to the webinar i will let you um get started dr apple farmer the panelists will have five minutes at the beginning to share anything that they have to share with our audience and then they will we will open up um after each person has shared the first five minutes of anything they want to share with the audience and then we will open up for question and answer and at the end the panelists will have about three minutes to wrap up and uh summarize what they want our audience to take home from this webinar so welcome you all to this webinar and thank you dr apple farmer go on ahead okay let’s see [Music] and while she’s doing this joy will be monitoring our and q a session thank you all right are you seeing my presentation yes all right so i have put this presentation together and i’ve given it in several different locations what i’m going to do is felicia is going to go through and share this with the audience at a later date by email and i am just covering the highlights here there are embedded videos and other things that you can go through and take a look at thank you focusing on the coronavirus so a coronavirus as many of you know it’s got its name because it has it’s a virus that’s covered in spikes so it looks like a crown so latin for crown is corona now there are several well there’s lots of different coronaviruses out there there are seven of them that are known to infect humans four of them make up the common cold so you find them in the upper respiratory tract two of them that we’re familiar with are sars and mirrors these are very deadly and we’ve heard quite a bit about them because of the damage that they do to the lungs so this is the lower respiratory tract and then we are worried about now with sars kobe 2 or cobit 19 it affects both the upper respiratory tract as well as the lungs so these are best transmitted in confined spaces they have not had a single incidence where they have shown disease transmission from surface contact because you’re not getting a higher enough viral load yet even though they are concerned that it does survive different amounts of time on different surfaces um one of the characteristics of sars kobe 2 is that it’s in the middle for mutation rates so when you look at influenza it will go through and mutates very rapidly just like aids hiv goes through and mutates very rapidly your the virus for covid is very slow to the middle moderate side of how often they go through and will mutate which is good for us because once we go through and get the numbers down around the world we won’t have to worry as much about mutation not to the same extent that we go through and worry about say with the yearly influenza vaccine that we have to go through and get now the coven virus goes through and enters the cell most of you have heard that it enters the cell through the ace2 receptor this is why you don’t find it very prevalently in small children and young adults because they don’t have a lot of that stress receptor on the cells this is upregulated in people who have diabetes and those that have high blood pressure now viruses are all going to go through and use your cells internal machinery to make that virus which is kind of interesting because that’s one of the ways that we go through when we’re you when we’re using this mrna vaccine the new type of vaccine that’s out this is the pfizer biotech and the mederna vaccine it uses your cell’s machinery to go through and create the portions of the viral particles that you want your immune system to respond to that’s one of the reasons it was produced so fast and that’s also one of the reasons why we’re able to go through and we’ll be making the vex have made the vaccine and we’ll make boosters so fast to this form of virus now after we go through and we’re vaccinated we’re going to our bodies produce antibodies so that we can respond very quickly to the viral invasion a lot of times before we get sick but we do see out there that even after vaccines people are still coming down with cobin they’re just not as sick and they’ve not had any deaths yet from people who have had who have been vaccinated and have gone through and gotten code so there are lots of different variants that are out there now we’re we’ve heard all about the uk variant the south african variant the variant in brazil as a matter of fact a couple weeks ago the world health organization went through and changed the names of them so i’ll go through and kind of give you an update on those but variants happen mutations happen all of the time anything that’s dividing chances are there are some mutations that will randomly occur these mutations go through and will produce variants so both pfizer the pfizer vaccine as well as the moderna vaccine they are currently making boosters to account for the known variants that are out there right now your pfizer biotech and your mediana through some of the existing variants that are out there are between 50 and 80 80 percent effective according to antibody tests so they’re still really good some of the problems they’re having with the oxford asparsenica vaccine is that it’s only 10 percent effective against the south african variant now the world health organization like i said before has using the greek letters to go through and to delineate the names of some of the different variants for fear that some of the countries feel bad if there’s a variant that’s known for them um some of the variants of concerns that i found using the data that is as of this monday there are four variants that have been identified that are cons that are going through missouri right now so we have the uk variant also known as the alpha variant it makes up about 80 percent of the cases in missouri right now what i have here that you are seeing the plus 82 this alpha variant is about 82 percent more transmissible than the original coven variant that came around and it is about 61 more lethal than the original variant that was coming that came through originally now these south african variant also known as the beta variant it has a 50 it’s 50 more transmissible than the original strain that came through there is no data out there on the lethality the california variant makes up about one and a half percent just like the south african variant makes up about one and a half percent of the cases that we have in here in missouri it’s known as the epsilon variant and it’s about 20 percent more transmissible we don’t know about the lethality brazil is on the brazilian variant is almost 5 and it is known as the gamma variant it is 161 percent more transmissible and 50 percent more lethal than the original variant that came through and finally on my last slide talking about covid trends here in the united states as well as in the nation so here in missouri if you see here in coal county we are still at the transmission level that it’s very substantial up towards colombia you’re going through and it’s getting more to the moderate level so we are still seeing active transmission that’s taking place enough to be concerned about another thing that they are looking at is trying to go through and getting enough vaccines in people that we can get close to hurt immunity now the formula for her to immunity depends on the average number of people that one person that’s virally infected can go through an infect now some of these new variants we know are a much have a much higher transmission so while initially they were saying that we needed 50 to 67 population to be resistant before before herd immunity would kick in so needing to have those vaccines now we’re up to 70 or so because of how transmissible these new variants are now once we reach herd immunity there’s not enough of the variants that are being or the fat the virus that’s being transmitted from person to person so you have fewer mutations that are happening and fewer variants that are going through informing so right now the center for disease control is focusing on trying to trying to reach the hesitant population because as you can see up here on the top right hand corner we really rapidly ramped up to getting the vaccines out but after the middle of april we pretty much peaked and after that we’ve been dropping down this dropping down is not because we don’t have enough vaccines out there it’s because we don’t have enough arms to put those vaccines in there’s a lot of hesitancy out there for any number of reasons so now we’re focusing on trying to get people to overcome that hesitancy figure out why they might be hesitant and see if we can’t go through and encourage our neighbors to get vaccinated so we get closer to having herd immunity for those that cannot go through and get vaccinated themselves finally down here is looking at national ranking of our state based on population to try to figure out who is fully vaccinated based on their percent missouri is down here on the lower 25 i would say and you can see that there are different counties around but we are we’re a lot closer to around 30 20 to 30 percent vaccinated on some of these different counties i think columbia is doing a little bit better but for the most part especially when you’re getting down towards the boot heel the the numbers are getting pretty low and that’s something that we’ve got to worry about thank you thank you dr april farmer now we’ll pass the torch to dr mary amanda haskins great bring my presentation up thank you for that wonderful presentation okay so i’ll be covering some of the basics and one of the things that i teach in all my classes i even have assignments where we find bad studies or retracted articles but something to think about is that we’re all consumers of information and probably one thing one of well look at a few other silver linings about the pandemic but i think we probably are better consumers of information we may be a bit more skeptical and if coming out of covid we are more healthy skeptics i think that’s one of the more positive outcomes that we could focus on and it can be quite confusing i think this is the time to with cobin we are living through science because if you go back and you even look at some of the articles that were initially published from really good reliable resources the recommendations have changed and i can’t think of another time in my lifetime where i’ve seen the science around something health related change so quickly so it’s probably understandable that people might have questions about what makes a resource valid and reliable and one of the things that i tell um my students and i tell myself too when i’m reading is i ask my question myself the question um is it a study or is it a story because often if we’re reading something in print maybe from a magazine or a blog or something that’s circulating on social media it could be that it’s a story that’s referring to a study that was that has recently been wrapped up and if it’s the actual study then you probably can put more stock into that information so articles that are in like the journal of the american medical association and information that the cdc tells us a tip is to recognize that anythingnetensen.org.edu or gov is probably a valid and reliable resource so one of the things that i’ve tried to do and share that you’ll have available to later to look at if you’d like are these health tips and resources and all of these are good go to’s to give yourself an overview of not only covet information but any health nutrition exercise mental health guidance and recommendations the nih or national institutes of health the centers for disease control and prevention the world health organization i’ve also included some top-tier medical schools so those are also good sources of information so i ask myself again is it a study or is it a story and if it is a study sometimes i go a bit deeper and then i ask myself well is this something that’s been published in a journal i trust a medical journal or is it just a study that’s completed that perhaps is not even being published and maybe this is a pr piece so i know i’ve become a much more skeptical reader as a result of covid and again i’m also making assignments for my students out of that too something that you can ask yourself is who is the author of this site what is possibly being sold what is the domain name um when was the last time that information was updated and again for some things they likely won’t change you know recommendations for how we can prevent ingrown toenails probably doesn’t need to be updated so quickly as uh infectious diseases during a pandemic where information changes by the month sometimes by the week and then you also want to ask yourself how is that site being managed um is it the purposes of being educational or is it to sell you something um and again that phrase buyer beware i think is also something that we can keep in mind again as we’re consumers of information you can get some really good information not only from national um agencies or health organizations but the state health department and more local or regional ones as well i know once i’ll share the missouri health department website at the end of this but they have really good um up-to-date um information one of the red flags is you know if something seems too good to be true if something is touted as a cure-all um you should definitely be wary of that information that’s being shared on that site so one of the good things that i read on this article from johns hopkins metal medicine from their medical school this was a recent article that has shared the lower rates of the common cold and seasonal flu being shared so that means these health behaviors and habits that we’ve started to form over the pandemic work so you know masking up when we’re ill being mindful when we have symptoms to consider other people’s health potentially those who may be more medically fragile or unable to engage in some of the preventative behaviors that we can also being i don’t want to say hyper vigilant but very vigilant about spreading germs keeping hand sanitizer washing your hands appropriately other things too that i’ve heard is now considered respiratory etiquette or respiratory hygiene like coughing or sneezing into your elbow and then washing your hands right after that so these things have been beneficial in not only preventing the spread of covid but other things that are not so fun and that take away our sick days and time from work and time with away from our family so those things have been beneficial for preventing other infectious diseases maybe two you’ve been having more conversations with your health care provider maybe as an incentive to visit with family or grandkids getting your vaccine met you also had an important conversation with your healthcare provider about getting your mammogram or also getting your seasonal flu vaccine maybe it’s been a reminder to check in and see if it’s time for your shingle shot or your pneumonia vaccine either possibly if you’ve had a new grandchild it might be time that you’re rethinking a booster for for your measles mumps and rubella before you’re around the babies so they’ve been these have been some of the good things some of the bad ones is the misinformation so i wanted to go few a few of these misperceptions and also maybe write some wrongs this is a myth about taking vitamin c supplements to prevent the common cold so the research shows from the national institutes of health that it does not significantly decrease your risk of getting the common cold by taking um vitamin c supplements there are also some side effects that you want to be aware of when taking any side a supplement and vitamin c is one of those that does have some side effects that you’d want to be careful with now what you can do what is a fact is that you can get enough vitamin c from your diet and it’s beneficial for so many reasons to get a lot of fruits and vegetables um not only are you getting vitamin c you’re getting other vitamins minerals and fiber too so you are boosting your immune system when you choose an orange over maybe a less healthy snack and that would be a really good behavior to continue okay i saw this one and it’s a myth about nasal wash being effective at preventing covid if that’s something that helps your allergy symptoms certainly enjoy that but it does not prevent against covid um neither do other myths like antibiotics that but that’s not possible neither do garlic supplements uh nor alcohol so the mayo clinic was my source for that so last one you can enjoy protection against some of the covet variants as we learned after your vaccine yes so depending on the variant and the vaccine that you received you can rest probably a little bit easier knowing that you’re preventing the mutation of other potential variants you can also reduce the complications in case you do by very slim chance do get covered after your vaccine it would be less severe and so all of those things can should make you feel good about getting your coven vaccine and this great resource from harvard health publishing reminds us that there are things that we can do that don’t cost us any money to make sure our immune systems are able to fight not only covid but other illnesses too and that has to do with physical activity making sure again we’re getting a healthy diet when we maintain a healthy weight when we get enough sleep when we manage our stress and healthy ways make sure we’re keeping alcohol in moderation and not smoke those things promote a very healthy immune system for us too so i think now is probably the time that i can stop and i look forward to answering your questions later okay thank you and we’ll have um miss kate jennings introduce herself and then what she has for the audience thank you hi um i’m kate i also have a presentation um okay um so i wanted to talk a little bit about um my experience with covid um i’m currently completing my rotations to become a dietician so i’m not quite there yet i just started studying for my boards on monday so through my rotations i have to go to different sites and one of those was lake regional hospital so i worked with a lot of covid patients there making sure that they ate because they lose a lot of their energy to do that um or they just don’t have the lung capacity it’s hard to to eat when you can’t really breathe um so giving them supplements um like a boost shake or something like that just so they can keep nutrition up um that was some of my experience with that i also worked in the icu there um and then i spent about two months at rusk it’s in colombia i don’t know if everyone here is from columbia but it’s um a rehabilitation hospital so they worked a lot with um covid patients after they had had covet and they weren’t contagious anymore it really wreaks havoc on your body function so i worked with a lot of patients that were learning how to walk again just getting back to their normal daily activities so that they can function around the house at rusk they also took a lot of vitamin d tests when you came in so they tested your vitamin d levels and i noticed that with a lot of the covid patients they were low in vitamin d i know that there’s been a lot of information about how vitamin d affects covid severity and a low level can be more severe i haven’t read up on it as much as i would like to um but i did know that that was a correlation that i saw personally and then i had a friend that had cobid in january and she still hasn’t gotten her sense of smell and taste back so that affects nutrition a lot it’s hard to eat when nothing tastes good so that’s just some of my personal experience um so my recommendations to help boost immunity is first of all get vaccinated um i would also recommend staying active that would be any kind of physical activity every day even if it’s just 30 minutes of walking that can really help boost immunity and then like dr haskins said eating from the rainbow is a great way to get nutrients so i listed a little bit of the differences um because mother nature kind of coordinates what nutrients are in what foods based on what color they are so if you eat from a variety of different colored fruits and vegetables you’re going to get a variety of nutrients so just making sure that your plates stay colorful is a great way to get more nutrients in and then i also wanted to talk about community resources in colombia to help get some of that food i know that a lot of people faced food insecurity through losing jobs through covent in general it was just a tough year so the main one that i know about is the food bank they have pantries and congregates that they serve throughout 32 counties so it’s not just here in columbia or in boone county so all of those pantries you can go you don’t have to approve income you just have to prove residents in that area and you can get food for free they are working to make things more nutritional but they do have a wide variety of options they have a ton of fresh produce i know that colombia in particular partnered with ccua which plants a garden at the farmers market so they supply a lot of fresh produce it really looks fantastic so they also have the summer feeding program which helps feed um children between uh when school lets out for the summer and summer school ends so or summer school begins um so they’re trying to fill that gap of when you’re not getting breakfast and lunch at school for those kids and they also have buddy packs so those are um little packages of food that have a couple meals to go home with the kids on the weekends when they’re also not getting that food from schools and then they have a commodity supplemental food program so that’s for seniors in the community you sign up you get a box of dry goods um i don’t know like dry milk canned goods things like that monthly and you can pick that up from i know the pantries in colombia most of them are part of that program there’s also wic in colombia so that’s for pregnant and pregnant mothers a year after pregnancy if they’re breastfeeding six months if they’re not and then children up to the age of five so they get a lot of nutrition education there which is incredibly important because i think this country lacks a little bit on nutrition education so that can be really valuable to help new parents navigate how to feed their children and then another great resource in columbia is the voluntary action center they are fantastic they offer a lot of nutrition services health care services and then they have a ton of additional programs they have a huge website that’s really extensive and goes through everything that they do but they are a great resource for colombia that is all i have thank you miss siennas and now i’ll pass it over to mr khan to talk to us about traveling during the pandemic i’m very honored that i’m here with intellectual people thank you very much you invited her invited me so everybody knows that travel industry was the first one who affected badly in a pandemic time so i want to tell you my experience how we work with the people with the airline and how we survived until now it was a very difficult time when the first cancellation we received on the 27th february 2020 when the saudi arabia said no more entry in saudi arabia and people were there in in the flight at dubai in the transit and some people reached there but they all returned so that was a big mess so that time we got to know what covet is and i’m telling you my story that i was very much worried about because we were we are the highest retail agency in usa and we were very much scared about our business in the month of march then april i was very much you know scared uh about how i can retain my people like 25 people are working how can i retain that then in the month of may i forgot everything at that time i was more worried about myself how i can live in the coffee time and save my family so the situation was so tough that travel business from february 27 until i would say like december we survived even though now we are surviving in the month of january and february we got a good news from back a few countries that they open the borders and they allow people to come in but airline was reluctant they were not ready to take people down there because they don’t want to be the part of the covet carrier even though like they opened at january february march the flight was operating but you saw what happened in india so india when there is a covet uh came just because of the uh you know there were so many people were positive in covet like in millions of people and they were dying in every day 5000 all the airline they stopped operation again there was no flight going only a couple of flights are going who they are taking the necessary people from india and back so what why i’m telling you this because everybody has a concern how they’re going to travel in a coffee time before the corbett i always assume that travel is a luxury but in a core time i realize travel is not a luxury it’s a necessity because people want to go away people want to travel and meet their families wherever they come from people want to travel and enjoy their life and want a freedom but they got stuck at one place like we are right now so one thing i would say that the first thing was the good news we received from pakistan and they started a rt pcr test and nobody knows in our travel industry what rt pcr test is maybe all the doctor panels knows very well at that time it was rt pcr we don’t know other than that what rdpcr is and we ask people okay go ahead and do the rtpcr test because it’s required for the country of pakistan before you’re going to enter there so at the same time we have the kit like rapid test kit so people were taking the results from the rapid test they consider that is the rtpcr test whenever it’s not so people offload it from the plane and they were not able to travel so then we realized okay how are we gonna you teach people or how we’re gonna help to our people to travel and especially the people who bought the ticket online they all suffered very much why number one they bought the ticket so i’m giving example from the airline xyz uh directly there in my view that 80 percent people are visual and 20 20 person people are readers right so hardly people read and book the ticket what i mean to say they do read the flight of uh fly dates flight timing and all that but they don’t read all terms in the condition because it’s a long page but at the same time what was the difference between the online and physical travel agent like people calling one to one they call us and we were summarized that in helping them out but online people they were very much confused where they gonna call when they were calling to the airline they were not picking up the phone they were not returning the call no email everything jammed right so chase world travel really helped them out even they purchased the ticket with us or not even until now we are helping them we are a big support line for the passenger whoever contacted with us either they were our client or not we are still helping them so that is one of the good things we did and i would say that is the blessing we have and we are still a travel agent until now and we are praying to the god we’re still going to be travel agent in future so what i mean um that why you know a travel agent live travel agent is important for the traveler whenever the hurricane come or covered type of things come if you book the travel you must have your personal uh phone number for the agent who you booked for that you can talk one to one like you have alicia your own experience with us so you know better than anybody else yes i do thank you thank you what she was sorry what mr khan was referring to was when i traveled to nigeria in december they really helped me a lot nigeria was one of the countries that required that you do a posit a kobe test before and have the result with you before you travel and i i wasn’t aware of that they were the ones who alerted me and i was able to register and try to get it done and got it done within 72 hours before my travel and got the results but when i i got to nigeria the um flight my original flight returning was cancelled because of the airport was closed so they were the ones who reached me to rebook and that was why i was able to return the date i was actually booked to return without their help and direction i would have been stuck in nigeria or i would have not been let in into the country because i wouldn’t know that i have to have i had to have the test before i traveled so thank you mr khan for that and thank you very much felicia one thing i want to add that whenever because we have we have a tons of experience like um there is a doctor uh sitting there if a patient uh cannot cure with one medicine so they advise the second one so the same thing like we have experienced if the person is stuck traveling to somewhere so we change their route airline because we have experience so we guide them with our experience how they gonna travel when they’re going to travel and how they can save their money and time as well thank you thank you joy do we have questions to ask the audience at the panelists there are no questions at this time okay i have um one right here um [Music] from stephenie she said she asked can we take the binax kobe text for by about before flying is this acceptable for travel to some countries the answer is no you required rt pcr test period rt pcr test is the only authentic test required suppose if you’re traveling from usa to anywhere you can go any lab and do the testing suppose you’re traveling to nigeria or you’re traveling to uh pakistan or you’re traveling to india or any other countries airline will give you the list of the laboratories where you’re going to go and test it because they will not accept it i’m giving it the recent example that is a bad example which was happened in india that 41 passenger were boarded with the negative test of covet and landed in hong kong and they all come out to be a positive test so they banned right away and amnesty line was the first one who suspended their flight from india immediately because they do not trust their test now they required a qr important because there is a bar code in it so they have to scan it airline will get all the information from the laboratory because they’re going to be authentic and the countries like india and other so what they were doing before there was some people they think they are very smart they were changing the tests on the pdf wow wow thank you for that okay another question here thank you for that mr khan another question is um are there any travel tips this is from ann maxwen absolutely any other travel tips that you can give to our audience please first of all you have to have your travel agent who has a knowledge do not book your ticket online even my own website because if you have an interaction you have a good uh travel agent they will guide you step by step like i said mostly people we found like 80 percent traveler they do not read everything maybe 20. but i’m not sure even 20 percent they do read everything so there is so many so many changes going on in the recovery time while traveling we got an information like a day before that okay no more flight for pakistan what are we gonna do if you book the ticket online can you change from amnesty line to qatar airways no the answer is no you don’t have that much knowledge available but we know the art how that will work so i must say number one you have to have a good travel agent number two you must prepare a couple of things that book in advance that is very important rtpcr test is required some of the countries required like 72-hour when you are coming back from any country to usa they required 48 hours it’s not that you’re going 72 hour and coming back 72 hour so that is a very important information you must have that so the other thing that the that is very common do not do not please carry other people’s stuff while coming back or before going so that is very important because we can see people they uh try to help but they bring so many stuff which is unknown and they got stuck somewhere and after that we are receiving the call and the other thing is um which is uh other than the comment i’m talking about do whenever you’re carrying more than ten thousand dollars must if informed to the authority they are not saying you cannot take it you can take it must inform the authority authorities because i can see a lot of people are calling okay what happened first they try to hide i always ask to the client please tell us the exact story you will save our time and we will find the solution right so he when they are carrying more than 10 000 they hide it and they got in trouble they miss the flight they cannot put you on on the next flight so then you have to contact with us you end up paying a lot of money for that please avoid those kind of mistakes thank you so much okay another um question from anonymous person and the question is please discuss how people can travel safely in kobe time as simple as that put the mask on take the vaccine i always say first take the vaccine then buy the ticket do not mistake first take the vaccine buy the ticket wherever you’re traveling vaccine is available in usa all over so go and take the vaccine and then buy the ticket very simple okay thank you for that okay another question here what are airlines doing to keep passengers safe it looks like all the questions are going to mr khan so i’m telling you one thing airline is extra careful i spoke to one of the airline they said we don’t want to be a car with carrier we can stop flying wherever we can see a large amount of the corvette uh people are there like i gave you the example for india right so people are uh airlines are not going there so simple airline is taking care of you very well so they want you have to take rt pcr test within 72 and 48 hours on the return so that is must but you must take care of yourself first if you’re hesitant to take the vaccine that you are inviting a death upon you so please do not do that thank you okay more questions are coming and another question says what airlines are best for kobe traveling so that is so travel in business class so any airline is good travel in business class if you can afford it do not say spend money on yourself okay thank you thank you for that um okay another question um [Music] oh great job is a comment great job with the nutrition portion so um any other input until questions come on again i’ve exhausted all um questions that are here so if you the panelists have anything to jump in and share so far go on ahead please hope analyst will not ask the travel question oh pardon i said hope panelist will not ask the travel question [Laughter] if they do you can handle that so i’m here yes any thoughts from the panelists [Music] so i can ask about the uh doctors uh if they can explain about the pcr test and the rt pcr test so people will know more about it so that if anyone can help this i can answer that if no one else wants to so pcr and rtdcr they’re both polymerase chain reaction where they are using the existing dna or rna that’s there to duplicate real time pcr the rt pcr allows you to go through and use a smaller amount and also check to see what is the concentrations that you’re finding it so it’s not just an antibody test and you will get it’s far more sensitive as a matter of fact the rtpcr test was able to go through and people would still test positive even six up to six months after they had covered simply because they had enough remnants left inside of them that they would swap positive for and that’s why you would hear a lot of stories about people who after they after a couple of weeks they would go and they were asking them to test twice to make sure two times in a row that they were not they had to have two negatives and it wasn’t that it was leaving and coming back so much as that it was such a sensitive test that you’re still clearing even though you’re better you’re still clearing some of that virus from your body and so you will periodically shed a little bit it’s just not enough to go through it’s not a higher enough viral load to be able to give it to somebody else thank you thank you thank you okay um thank you doctor a performer for that i um we have um more questions here um okay how do you convince someone who is reluctant because of the vaccine quick development um what we try to convince them is if you look at the numbers of what’s out there and that the number of i mean the nurses and doctors the hospital staff were some of the very first people to get the vaccines and so you see with us being the first ones to go get the vaccine if we felt comfortable with it and were successfully made it through then surely just wanting to get back to life as before would make it safe safer than going through and getting the virus and i know a lot of people were concerned about the blood clots but the incidence of blood clots for the women in pfizer was so much lower i mean when it was it was one in a million for the blood clots for women and with the pfizer and you have one in a hundred thousand for blood clots and women that take the birth control pill most women in their life have taken the birth control pill but you just don’t you you don’t see the difference in those numbers thank you that’s the good one okay um question from lisa andrews what guidelines to travel to do you have any guidelines that you know of for someone who wants to travel to ghana uh well uh very simple like i explained you before right we we are getting information on a day-to-day basis so whenever you plan to book the ticket that time that we have whatever the information we have we will give it to you immediately like we are giving a journal information you require the rtpcr test so i’m giving an example if you book the ticket today and you’re traveling after one month so before 72 hour of your departure mark your calendar you will call to your travel agent if there is any changes or new update please do get that and follow guideline at that time now today we got a very good news that cdc says 110 countries you can you know they lift the restriction on 110 countries so you can fly there and i can see that athens like greece is one of them they allow you to come and enjoy your uh summer over there and for the u.s national there’s a they they put a very limited very less restriction on that so whenever you’re going to call you will like it and you will enjoy and you will buy the ticket but it’s not a mean that if you purchase a ticket today for athens whatever the less restrictions we have today it gonna be apply the same thing in next 14 days or next one week because during the cover time we have seen every day there is so many changes so that is very important the first guideline is to keep in touch with your agent until your travels start like 72 hour before departure thank you thank you for that okay okay um next question um is it true that children are now being admitted more often since they are not getting vaccinated so anyone can take the question [Music] yes you are finding more children that are being admitted now than were before it’s more high the strains that are going through or more highly transmissible also when you’re looking at the ratio because all of the adults are going through and getting and have been vaccinated you were seeing the children hadn’t been vaccinated and so you had a higher ratio because the adults had been vaccinated and you have fewer adults coming in with us lifting restrictions if it is still transmitting around you’re starting to see some of the children okay thank you joy do you have any questions on your side please uh the most recent one i’m not sure if you just said this one or not because the audio went out for just a moment but one of them is it true that children are now being admitted more often since they are not getting vaccinated yes that’s what she just answered okay then then there and then the next one is how do you know who is vaccinated in the stores now with everyone taking their masks off you don’t you just have to get vaccinated so it doesn’t matter that’s a good answer you just have to get vaccinated so you feel safe if anyone around you is not vaccinated but you are you are the one safe and if they don’t have their muscle they are putting themselves at risk that is the message i am uh giving into my advertisement uh because we speak like punjabi we speak like uh hindi urdu so i put a message do not buy a ticket until you get vaccinated so in my language i used to say that vaccine lag out the ticket if someone understand that so they must follow that phrase vaccinate a vaccine is very important for our life thank you thank you that’s so true okay thank you um joy i think there’s one more question on your side or two how do you convince a parent to vaccinate their children if they are reluctant themselves sometimes you have to go through and convince the child or convince the adults around the child so maybe the grandparents um some of the communities that we’re working in to try to overcome vaccine hesitancy is we’re using some of the elderly that were the first to get vaccinated and we’re very grateful to be able to get vaccinated helping them you’re very grateful you’re taking care of your family and helping them help their children and help their grandchildren want to get vaccinated and so maybe a parent might decide i don’t want to do this for me but what they’ll do for their kids might be completely different yes thank you in addition to that uh tell your children if you want to go to disneyland take the vaccine thank you that’s a good one usually it’s not the children that we have to convince it’s the middle aged parents that need the convincing because the elderly are a hundred percent on board with wanting it and the children have heard enough about it that unless they’re hearing a lot of scary things from their parents they they want to get life back to normal back to what they remembered and they want to get it absolutely some of the unique or you know kind of scary side effects of covet that have uniquely affected children is higher rates of type 1 diabetes that is never before seen so there’s some other significant um side effects that seem to uniquely affect children that aren’t being seen in adult populations i think hearing loss was another one and it’s not significant but when it’s your child it would feel significant so um you know i don’t feel that scare tactics work but that those are part of having all of the facts um it and that’s been in the research if if you’re willing to maybe just do a quick search but they’re the type 1 diabetes correlation with children who’ve had coven is a scary fact to consider along with some of the other more serious long-term repercussions thank you for that um joy i think there’s another question on your side and you can speak to that if none of the panelists can go on ahead join next question is how do we address mental health issues during the code pandemic our second the last webinar we had in um april was about men covet and mental health and it’s on our facebook and um do any of you have any comments to add to that question yeah that’s that’s unique and i think there are multiple populations that their mental health has been effective for some people it might be someone who’s elderly and is more isolated because they don’t have someone who is a caregiver because that person now is maybe homeschooling their children or um has to take a second job to make ends meet so i think people have felt more isolated there have been increased rates for women having postpartum depression because they do feel more isolated and have in their pregnancy from even some of the early research that came out about covid so i think every population that was at risk is now at higher risk one of these silver linings i would presuppose is to say that people might feel more comfortable now using telemedicine or telehealth um it’s quite feasible to get virtual maybe just an initial consultation i think that helps people um maybe feel more comfortable their first time if there’s still some stigma around getting help even in the first place it’s quite easy to do that now virtually so i say don’t be afraid to take advantage of any resource whether it’s online or in person again that’s not a substitute long term but i say that’s one of the good things is that people can use telehealth and telemedicine the same preventative strategies that help you reduce your risk for covid are good at preventing other diseases too so keeping your weight in check managing your stress in healthful ways those are things that not only help your immune system fight covet but are good for your mental health so probably in doing those things you’ll reap many of the benefits and also prevent a lot of the physical and mental things that we we want to keep in check thank you so much for that anyone else has anything to add to that okay um i think we have some comments joy can you share those comments for our our questions there’s just one comment and it was talking about how it’s become so political about the kobe 19 pandemic that people are starting to get very scared just relying on like fox news cnn and other uh news outlets instead of getting information from um healthcare providers and other people who have more knowledge about these things yes that speaks to um dr haskins do you mind talking about getting information so people will not be scared you did cover that in your in the beginning yeah this last slide um i have the dashboard for you can look up your county if you live in boone county or anywhere i’m and i would assume if anyone’s out of state there’s probably every state’s uh health and human services website i hope it’s as up to date as missouri’s is oh let me find it bring it up uh but i have the county i did no it’s not working really um sorry um the department of health and senior services this link here provides a dashboard that shows all of the data so the good news is numbers really i’d say they shouldn’t but they can’t really be politicized numbers are facts and figures and they’re not really open to interpretation so you can use this link right here and you can see how from day to day you know you can assess your risk based off of what the county that you live in in missouri if you just need some good reliable health information from the nih there’s also topics under like osteoporosis other nutrition physical activity guidelines but this is i’d say a really good place to get the facts because again numbers don’t lie um and then from from there you know we can leave it to the epidemiologist to assess our risk to tell us um what are appropriate behaviors based off of those numbers okay thank you joyce i think that small comments or questions there is one question at the end how high is the cobin 19 rate in coal county currently if anyone knows that you are muted sis i don’t know the rate but they have it listed as moderate so it’s one in my presentation it was it’s one step below and that was as of monday morning so we’re at substantial for the transmission level so we’re still in the orange as they go from red orange yellow and blue for low and we’re at substantial for cool county wow interesting thank you for for that any more comments or questions joy on your side there are mostly comments um just saying thank you for the great webinar that this information is encouraging then i think yes um last question can the presenters share their slide on the mid missouri blackness association facebook that is yes we will we will share all the slides and information for the presenters tonight for anyone who um who wants to follow up and look more into the information they will be free to access those on our facebook um can you share the um joy can you share the facebook link is that possible for you to do yes let me copy and paste it real quick okay thank you so the audience we’re still um we have um 10 minutes to the closing time so this will be the time for us to go round again amongst all the panelists to share if there’s one thing that our audience needs to take away tonight what would it be i will let you jump in whenever you feel comfortable thank you get vaccinated [Music] thank you i’d say prevention works we’ve seen the impact that vaccines have had on coven again same with wearing masks and being wise about our hand washing behavior and respiratory hygiene the numbers for the common cold and seasonal flu show that prevention works and so this could be a really good motivating factor to to maybe also get your flu vaccine because you know the second season b is going to be coming around when we’re not really on guard or not thinking about it maybe use this as an opportunity to get your doctor to check that mole that you haven’t been asking about when you’re getting your coven vaccine or schedule your mammogram if you’ve been putting that off so just remember prevention works and the good news is it doesn’t really just prevent just one chronic or infectious disease you’re reaping the benefits when you are taking care of yourself because if your body’s a temple you don’t want to be to be the kind that’s like crumbling and then ruins you want it to be a really pretty shiny dimple right so you owe it to yourself do that thank you thank you from my side um it’s a very simple message get vaccinated you know why it’s not you want to travel it’s not only you want to save your life and your loved ones there is you you must know that in the travel industry there’s a lot of people are not working there lay off if you’re going to get vaccinated airline will operate regularly and they will hire more people and they will hire back those people who they are sitting at home trust me we are living in the one of the best country in the world but they have a limitation and we are hearing that they will stop unemployment in texas so if you will not get vaccinated people will not travel airline will not operate and those all unemployed unemployment people will not be on the job do you really think they will get a job other than the travel agency which they have a tons of experience the answer is no now the doctor panels are sitting here how many jobs you can create you cannot hire like 100 thousands of people sitting in your offices you have a limitation so please help and support travel industry we need you to get vaccinated thank you thank you for that um my takeaway would be eat from the rainbow it’s the easiest way to get nutrients and to get a variety of them um so just make your plates look colorful really and get vitamin d yeah go out go outside an exercise yes absolutely thank you i am the joy has just put up the link and to our facebook the mid missouri black nurses association facebook for our audience to see and all these um the recording for the webinar will be um available in a few days um on the facebook but the slides will be available tonight immediately as soon as we receive them we will um put it on our facebook for our audience to access and make available to others and share with their families and friends so thank you yes alicia can i say please don’t turn my powerpoint into a pdf this they will lose access to the videos that are embedded okay okay wonderful just post it the way you sent it post it as a powerpoint the way i send it so they can watch all the videos if they want okay felicia my last comment to you thank you so much thank you so much so you are a wonderful person that you invited me and you are sending a very good message to everyone i hope people watch and apply in their life yes thank you so much thank you and i appreciate all the help that you gave me when i needed to travel to nigeria to get my mom thank you for that because when you’re more than welcome when the pandemic hit one of my concerns was not being able to travel abroad because most of my family are abroad it broke my heart my biggest is not the sickness but am i gonna be able to see my family again that was my biggest concern and until i was able to contact um the world chase travel i will put the information also on our facebook for people to reach out to them if you need help for traveling i was able to reach out to them i’ve been using them in the past but they were amazing they have been amazing but that period it really they really gave me the best street the best i don’t know how to explain it they made my dream came true of going home to see my mom who was sick and who i i didn’t know if she was dying or gonna be better or if i was ever gonna see her again making that possible for me to travel during that time in december that was a huge thing for me and had it not been for their help and information and guidance i would have been stuck or got to nigeria and not be able to enter so it’s very important listen to the advice for the tips that he gave us so thank you so much and mister thank you so much for trusting on cheers will travel and um thank you very much uh again uh that the all the doctor panels they really help during depending pandemic time uh and helping uh to other people i really appreciate that thank you so much from us thank you thank you dr apple farmer thank you kate yes and thank you dr haskins for for coming and thank you our audience for being a part of this and have a wonderful summer and travel safe and get vaccinated and make sure you eat right and exercise and go out in the sun thank you and have a good night everyone good night