By Madeline Fuerstenberg, Community Reporter
The COVID-19 mid-March surge in the United States prompted Steve Weiss to add blogging to his medical activities.
Weiss, who has practiced internal medicine in Eau Claire for the past 32 years, knew a storm was brewing. He said he felt an urge to deal with it not only in the medical world but also by reacting in writing.
The result was eight weeks of blog posts and a total of 255 pages posted online before other commitments called a halt to the effort, which began on March 22. Sunday’s post was the final one by Weiss, at least for the moment.
The series of pandemic-related blog posts, “Diary of a Pandemic,” had some 30 subscribers during its run. The posts remain available online.
The blog covered a variety of topics relating COVID-19 on a local, national or international scale. In his blog, Weiss discussed the pandemic as it relates to public health, psychology, politics, economics and other global perspectives.
“I just thought that there was so much going on and I was so interested in it, intellectually, that I just wanted to record it,” Weiss said in an interview earlier this month. “I’m enjoying the writing.”
In a time of “poor national leadership,” the U.S. is poised to be the worst affected country by COVID-19, he added.
Weiss said he spent around 40 hours a week writing his blog posts. Research and writing a single post typically took around five hours, Weiss estimated.
Responses to the blog were generally positive, Weiss said. During this time of isolation and social distancing, Weiss said, the blog allowed him to keep in touch with people all around the country.
Weiss said he is considering transforming these posts into a book and may try to provide “periodic posts at some point in the future.”
With his mixture of clinical research and personal experiences, Weiss said a book could possibly sway some people before the upcoming presidential election. He closed his final blog entry by urging his readers to recall, “come November, Barack’s one-word tweet.”
“Vote.”
Reactions to the blog
Charles Rohren, an associate of Weiss, said he has recommended “Diary of a Pandemic” to the readers of his own weekly health column, “Chuck’s Corner.”
Rohren said Weiss’s blog features astonishing daily output that “lucidly probes” at issues relating to the pandemic – an “erudite mixture of science, current affairs and personal experiences with patients, friends and family.”
“(Weiss) often includes easy-to-digest data – sometimes with figures – comparing successful and chaotic national strategies across the globe,” Rohren said in an email. “As a doctor, Steve brings an understanding of human motivations to his reflections. He has a real empathy for his Midwestern neighbors.”
Rohren also noted that Weiss’s writing is factual, and science based. He does not “pull punches” or convey anger that one might find polemic.
Sandeep Basu, another colleague of Weiss, said “Diary of a Pandemic” tries to provide a frame of reference among the pandemic-induced insanity.
“(The blog) has – in a matter of weeks – become, along with the daily cups of coffee, my favorite pick-me up,” Basu wrote in an email.
“There is no area of human existence that has not been affected by (COVID-19): Our lives, health, employment, finances, social interactions, personal freedom, travel, education and the list goes on … everything seems to have been tainted by the virus and we are all struggling in our own way to make some kind of sense of this,” he said.
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