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Food Is Medicine in the Fight Against Covid-19
Staying healthy in a pandemic means both avoiding infection and shoring up our immune systems
In medicine, as in other realms of life, the Covid-19 pandemic continues to unfold as a dark chapter of human history. Physicians have now treated scores of patients with every imaginable permutation of this infection. As unrelenting as this virus is, we have seen infectious disease epidemics before, and we know how to mitigate their spread.
The measures that physicians and public health agencies continue to advocate for — mask-wearing, physical distancing, hand-washing, avoiding large gatherings, and limiting travel — are based on decades of public health outcomes research. And we know they work.
While it is clear that these measures are essential, and have been critically important to limiting the contagion of the virus, which has left more than 245,000 people dead in the last eight months in the U.S. alone, and infected over 54 million people worldwide, we must ask ourselves what else can be done?
We know now that Covid-19 is a long-term public health threat. Until an effective vaccine is widely available, it will continue to spread. We also know this virus has been disproportionately killing our elders. From March through October…
