COVID-19 is an acronym for a disease caused by a new strain of coronavirus. ‘CO’ stands for corona, ‘VI’ for virus, ‘D’ for disease and ’19’ for the year 2019.
It is believed to have had its beginnings in the Wuhan, China area in November 2019. It wreaked havoc there and spread outwards to the rest of the world.
WHO (the World Health Organization) deemed COVID-19 to be to be a global pandemic. It’s been raging worldwide since its beginnings. It seemed to first be regarded of as a threat in the United States in January of 2020, but was not taken seriously enough at that time.
Gyms and many other public gathering places have been shut down for months at the time of my writing this in mid May. Gym locker rooms seem like a dream from the past after months of quarantining at home.
As with many issues facing society at large, belief systems are all over a continuum. And as expected, conspiracy theories are abundant.
On the furthest political right side of that continuum are those who don’t even believe there IS a pandemic. They actually believe this is all a government plot of some sort.
Then there are those who want to just go about life as usual in the face of the pandemic. Many legitimately concerned for the loss of income staying home entails. They’re willing to take their chances.
Others simply don’t want anyone telling them what to do. Those who don’t like being told what to do amaze me the most. After all, most of them don’t think anything of driving on the right side of roads, obtaining and renewing their drivers licenses, paying their taxes, and conforming to most other things that they are essentially “told” to do in order to maintain a civilized society. They’re also willing to take their chances with COVID-19. After all, it’s THEIR freedom of choice to carry this to those in contact with them.
Then there are the rest of us – about 85-90% according to national polls. We are those who are quarantining in order to try to prevent getting infected and – every bit as important – keeping our health care system from becoming overburdened. One has only to see what happened with COVID-19 in Italy to understand the dilemma we could end up in. When intensive care units fill up – and even more individuals still need such services – more people die. That cruel outcome played out in Italy.
The common sense part of quarantining is that should the numbers of hospitalized individuals rise to a level where it can’t provide the needed intensive care services, then more people die. It really is, unfortunately, that simple. So quarantining now lets us spread the pain of this disease out over time – and definitely help with cutting down the deaths.
I’ve chosen to comply with quarantining. And to follow the CDC recommendations – especially wearing a mask in public. In this situation I’m personally for saving lives. I believe every life is to be valued. There simply is no way to replace those who are lost. I’d feel awful is I were fortunate enough to not have the symptoms of COVID-19 but passed it along to someone else who it devastated.
But as with any argument, there are always people on both sides of it.
