COVID-19: A Historical Moment | Reflections
I feel... as if I'm living in a Hollywood dystopia movie. The cultural and political environment is so weird. Maybe it's just my anxieties.
I've always had terrible anxieties.
The Stock Market is up and down... not that I'm too concern, as I don't play the stocks, but I feel it's an indirect indicator of the economy. Really, I'm the type that still believes in CD accounts.
I do think that people are not using their best common sense with regards to this.
The coronavirus is not the same as, say, Ebola, which is way more lethal, in my opinion.
The coronavirus is a group of viruses that causes the seasonal flu and even the common cold. The risk-groups for COVID-19 are the elderly and those with compromised immune systems, like infants. They don't die from the virus itself, but instead from complications caused by the virus, like pneumonia.
The WHO website, which I trust more than any news outlet or news media (especially the CDC under the current administration), states all of this.
Now, S. Korea is much closer to China, and would generally have more interaction than Italy — yet, Italy has a higher death rate, why? Well, first is the aggressive testing that S. Korea has taken, including drive-thru testing; second is that Italy has a much older population than Korea does.
Like, if you're relatively young and don't have any other medical conditions, it would be basically the same as getting the flu — and I'm not trying to minimize the severity... I mean, I remembered when I had the flu and how much it sucked.
I couldn't get out of bed. I was constantly thirsty and felt dehydrated, but at the same time I didn't want to get out of bed to drink anything. I didn't even want to eat, even though I was hungry, but apparently not hungry enough to force myself out of bed. My feet was always cold. I seriously didn't even wash myself for like a week just because I did not want to get out of bed!
I alternated between a stuffy nose and a runny nose. I had so much leakage from my eyes that at one point my eyes were actually crusted shut from all the globs of whatever that formed. Afterwards, I had a hacking cough that never produced anything other than a constant cough that hurt my chest and bruised my left ribcage from coughing so severely. I was on viral medicine, antihistamine and decongestants for the symptoms, and steroids and even an inhaler for that hacking cough that lasted for 3 months (no kidding!). Even after I was better, that dry cough just lingered on for months.
So I'm definitely not making light of it, but the factual evidence is that, for the majority of the population, if you do get the coronavirus, you are NOT going to die. Just like the majority of people who get the flu don't die, but it definitely sucks, takes a long time to recover — and for certain groups, you CAN die from it.
Yet, no one is shutting down a country for the flu! No one even shut the country down for Ebola, the bird flu or the swine flu, or for SARS or MERS.
What the flak!?
I do understand that the concern is that because it is a new strain of coronavirus, that health experts do not yet know the full implications of the virus itself — but I mean, it still falls under the same category of viruses that gives you the common cold.
I'm sure we all know an old person we love, or we're worried about our newborns, or anyone with a compromised immune system, so of course it should be taken seriously — but I think it's totally unnecessary for what's going on too.
I understand that there are also a lot of people that we love who aren't necessarily old, but has health issues — diabetes, high blood pressure, cancer, thyroid problems, anemia, and the thousands of other health problems out there... but just like with the seasonal flu, these people are high-risk by default. That's not to say that a healthy young person who gets it is going to be OK; like I've said, I've had the flu a few years ago and it really SUCKED, but I recovered — and according to WHO, the majority of people who are infected with COVID-19 also recover.
Like, I am so anti-Trump, but this is the rare one moment where I actually agree with him. Really, the only people who need to worry about it are all the old people in government, who are constantly gathering in large numbers, who don't believe in science, who thinks you can pray away a disease. I mean, the majority of the population isn't even old though.
Millennials out-number Boomers.
