Hello everybody and welcome back to the COVID Camper! My name is John Blanchard, and I am a family physician with SALTA Direct Primary Care. Today is April 7^th and day 15 in the camper.

How to treat someone at home who may have COVID? If you have someone at home who has all the classic symptoms of COVID. The fever, the cough, the aches and pains, vomiting, diarrhea, loss of taste and smell, the mild symptoms like the common cold. If someone is having these symptoms and they cannot get testing, you need to treat them as if it is COVID. You should isolate them in the home and that can be difficult. If there is a separate room and bathroom available have them use that only. If you need to access the room, be sure you and the person is wearing a cloth mask over their nose and mouth. If they are using utensils and plates you want to make sure that those are washed right away and wash your hands after interacting with them. You can also wash their laundry in hot water. Daily you should wipe down all hard surfaces like doorknobs and all. It is possible to be in the home and not contract the virus.

One thing I hope comes out of this pandemic is for people to learn about mindfulness and meditation and counteracting the stress response. I want to demonstrate to you how to complete deep breathing. This is typically ow we start a meditation and again meditation. It is not, not thinking, but filling your mind with a repetitive sound, repetitive muscular movement, or repeating the same phrase or word. We always start in the same way with deep breathing. You can do this without meditation as well which tends to help decrease that stress response. So, if you are feeling very anxious and very stressed you can do what is called abdominal breathing. Put your hand on abdominal and take some slow deep breaths through your moth where your abdomen comes out. Instead of chest breathing, you use your abdomen. You start by breathing in through your nose and out through your mouth. And you do it loud enough where people can hear if they are sitting by you. It kind of looks like this… And surprisingly if you do two or three of those deep breaths you can begin to elicit the start of relaxation response and again that is how we start a meditation.

One thing that I am very proud of as a direct primary care physician is how we have been able to respond to the Coronavirus. We have talked a lot about monitoring your symptoms at home but of this it is very important to monitor the oxygen level within your blood. The vast majority of people are going recover from this virus but sometimes within the second week we are seeing people beginning to have difficulty with breathing and it can be hard to assess how low the oxygen level is going. At SALTA Direct Primary Care we have the ability for our patients to drive by and have an oxygen level check. We are identifying if they have COVID, then following up every two days, then if they have shortness of breath, we follow up daily and then ask them to come in for a clinical assessment to see if we can keep them at home or if they need to go into the hospital.

If you want to learn how direct primary care can work for you, feel free to call Kyle at 248.922.3076. Kyle can answer all your questions and see what six of our locations is best for you or your company near you! You can also follow us on Facebook @salta_directprimarycare. OR you can search us on Google stating, “direct primary care near me!” or join right on our website at saltadirect.com

Stay safe! Love each other! Get your masks on and stay home!