Friday, Apr. 3rd 2020

Corona Virus

Corona virus

The threat from COVID-19, or Corona Viral Disease (20)19 has swept the nation. No doubt you’ve seen sweeping changes to your lifestyle during this time. You may be working from home, going to work in a nearly empty building, or working as usual with changes like wearing masks or gloves and being concerned about others around you carrying this virus. You may be home-schooling your children, who may or may not be cooperating with this idea. You have no doubt had many scheduled activities cancelled for the foreseeable future. Dr Leonard has seen the next two months of dog agility trials cancelled so far, and possibly more to come.

However, you may also be enjoying spending time with your family more. Playing board games, taking the dog for more walks or playing with them more. Perhaps even doing some training! You may be enjoying watching movies together, cooking at home rather than taking food out, planting a garden, or just doing some spring cleaning. Maybe you’re even getting back to some old hobbies, or getting some good books read.

We are not human health experts, so we won’t be trying to teach you much about how to avoid infection or talking about infection, recovery, or death rates. We encourage you to avoid public places as much as possible, and wear gloves when touching surfaces others outside your family have touched. Certainly, don’t associate with other people outside your immediate family any more than necessary and take precautions when you must do so.

However, Dr Leonard shared the following information on her personal Facebook profile and thought it might be useful to you here. In addition to the glove information, she recommends looking at videos on YouTube about disease transmission, including these two: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5-dI74zxPg&fbclid=IwAR25SYin65BfLG2SsqmrSJmuHHR2yj5Ad7HM090X0GT2hy4rCm4-bbWc4RI

And

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdrrgVVi-9U

Here you go: If you’re going to wear gloves to shop, it makes NO sense to keep them on when you get back in your car, or to touch your phone while wearing them, or to scratch your nose. Consider them contaminated as soon as you touch the first thing outside your car. Put them on as you enter the store before you touch anything. Don’t touch your purse (I am not even putting mine in the cart and usually leave it in the car) or phone or put hands in pockets or touch your face while wearing them. Do your shopping, touching nothing with gloved hands but the cart and items you put in it. Then, take off ONE glove to get your credit card out and make sure it touches NOTHING but the credit card slot. And wiping it off after with a safe sanitizer isn’t a bad idea before it goes back in your purse or pocket. As a matter of fact, Dr Leonard recommends bringing ONLY your credit card and keys inside the store in a pocket. If you have a purse, secure it safely in your car (but not on the seat!). Use the remaining GLOVED hand only on the cart, or put another glove on, to return to your car without touching anything else but your purse/card/wallet with your ungloved hand. Remove the gloves and place in an outdoor trash receptacle AFTER you put your groceries in your car. Alternatively, you can even do this with re-usable dishwashing gloves but wash them or sanitize them thoroughly each time they are worn. Be mindful when removing to touch only the wrist or inside of the glove with ungloved fingers. Again–gloved hands should touch NOTHING but potentially contaminated surfaces. Ungloved hands should touch NOTHING but safe surfaces inside your car. Sanitize your hands when you get back in the car, before touching the wheel or your keys. Then wash well after you unload the groceries. Consider wiping down the groceries before putting them away. Consider changing clothes and showering if you’ve been in a public place, especially if you have at-risk individuals in your home. Of course, be mindful to NOT touch your face with gloved hands, or hands that have handled groceries or bags, until you’ve washed them.

Changes to how we practice:

Due to the Social Distancing mandates, we’ve made some changes in how we see our patients. For now, we ARE open and for the most part are holding our regular business hours. There may be some days we open a bit later or close earlier if we don’t have a full appointment schedule. CALL FIRST (816-331-1868) before coming to our clinic to see if we are open, and to make sure we’re prepared for you if you don’t have an appointment. REMEMBER, we have an online pharmacy you can access through the front page of our website to order prescriptions and even some of our supplements. They also carry flea and tick products and even a few foods including Honest Kitchen.

If you or a family member or anyone you have close contact with has a fever and cough, please do NOT come to our clinic. Ideally, you will wait until you are healthy to make an appointment. If your pet is in urgent need, have a healthy family member bring it, and let us know the pet may have been contaminated so we can wipe them down with a safe sanitizer before we treat them.

When you arrive for your appointment, we should be waiting to come get your pet. If not, call the office and let us know you’re here. Please have your pet in a secure carrier or on a NON-FLEXI lead. We’ll come in mask and gloves to get them, and ask you to wait in your car. After they’ve been in the building 5-10 minutes, call the office to see if we have their bill ready as we’ll try to prepare it first as long as we know what we’re doing for your pet that day. If so, we will have you give us the credit card information over the phone, and send the receipt out with your pet.

Once we are done with your pet, we will use our home-made safe sanitizer wipes (paper towel soaked in a mixture of ¾ alcohol, ¼ witch hazel, and about 20-30 drops of anti-infectious agent essential oil blends) to wipe them down lightly, and wipe their leash or carrier. We will use the wipe to hold the leash or carrier as we return them to you with the receipt and any supplies or medications you have purchased. We will not be offended if you ask us to put any purchases in your trunk or back seat so you can sanitize them at home. Whatever precautions make you comfortable!

If you or a household member are at high risk, we encourage you to put off any non-urgent care for your pet until the threat has passed. Even such things as vaccinations or heartworm tests can wait. We WILL authorize up to a 6-month extension on heartworm testing during this time and still allow prevention purchases for pets currently on prevention.

If your pet has a more complex problem arise, we may want to exchange some emails to get a thorough history prior to an appointment. Please make sure you have DocSandi@wholehealthpetcenter.com as an accepted address in your email account. We are also using email to do some minor “telemedicine”. Some issues, like skin problems or minor GI upset, can be diagnosed with pictures or videos and some email question/answer exchanges. Then medications can either be ordered from a local or our online pharmacy, or picked up at our office. If we are using this method to care for your pet, please expect a “consult fee” of $12 base plus $1.50 per minute to be applied. Don’t worry, Dr Leonard types quickly.