![]() ![]() Pride in the devoted care we provided for each person in those hospital beds. I look back to that time with great pride. Our patients needed us, their families were trusting us, and we were called to act, adapt, and help save as many of those precious lives we cared for as possible. The unknown was frightening, but the urgency the pandemic placed on health care workers all over the world didn’t allow us to sit in that fear or uncertainty for too long. I vividly remember the fear that banded my co-workers and myself together and a sense of uncertainty that was felt throughout the medical center. We were then whisked away to a four-hour crash course on “how to be a critical-care support nurse.” What I remember next is a unit filled with ventilated COVID patients. John Ryan, our nursing director, informed us that our unit would be transitioning to a 36-bed COVID intensive-care unit. ![]() March 2020, my fast-paced medical-surgical unit came to an abrupt halt. *** “The unknown was frightening, but the urgency the pandemic placed on health care workers all over the world didn’t allow us to sit in that fear or uncertainty for too long.”īeth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston Most of all, I appreciated the support I received from my family. I cheered each patient that I discharged home, and seeing them reunite with a family member put a smile on my face. I held out hope and prayed that each would survive. Of course, it’s never easy to witness my patients suffering, but I never gave up on any of them. The patients in this unit had low oxygen levels and could suddenly become critically ill. Through all this, seeing these patients deteriorate and having several heartbreaking discussions with family members was an emotional roller-coaster. We fed patients, cleaned up after them, made video and audio calls with their loved ones. Nurses jumped in on many other job duties on the COVID floor in order to reduce the use of personal protective equipment. In addition, the work was incredibly taxing. First, I went through extreme anxiety and fear of being exposed to the virus and carrying it home to my family. Working with these patients brought extraordinary challenges. And while helping the virus spread is one role the tentacles play, there are many others.īut Krogan says even those viruses do not seem to set off the huge growth of tentacles that was seen by his colleagues on coronavirus-infected cells.I work on the gynecology surgical oncology inpatient floor, but during the pandemic, the entire floor converted into a COVID-19 inpatient unit. Many viruses change the cells they infect, and growing tentacles is one way they do it, says Columbia University virologist Angela L. HIV and some influenza viruses have been known to use tentacles to help them enter into cells. Vaccinia, a member of the poxvirus family that causes smallpox, uses the tentacles that sprout from infected cells to “surf” towards those cells and inject them with more viral particles, a study found. “It’s just so sinister that the virus uses other mechanisms to infect other cells before it kills the cell,” says UC San Francisco’s Nevan Krogan, one of the paper’s senior authors.Ĭells sprouting tentacles don’t just look creepy they keep nasty company as well. But the discovery of the virus’ zombie tentacles move makes scientists think it has found more than one way to get into a cell. ![]() Typically, a speedy rise in infected cells will make a victim feel sick and also help the virus to spread to other people. Until now, the process by which the coronavirus was thought to infect cells was pretty ordinary for a virus: it found doors it could open on the surface of the cells that line humans’ mouth, nose, respiratory tract, lungs and blood vessels.Ĭoronavirus outbreak: Fake news! 7 rumours on social media that aren’t true Then, they looked for medicine that could scramble those chemical signals and mess with the process of infection. Scientists set out to identify the chemical signals and chain of events that take place when a virus meets and infects a host cell. The new research uses the science of “proteomics” – how proteins work with or against each other. These medicines, many of which were designed as cancer treatments, seem likely to work because they block the chemical signals that start these tentacles in the first place. The scientists also believe they have found several drugs that could make it more difficult for the virus to create these new zombie cells. Their research was published last month in the journal Nature. The authors of the new study, an international team led by researchers at the University of California San Francisco in the US, say the virus uses these newly sprouted tentacles to become better at capturing new cells. ![]()
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