Here we are, kids. When we made those New Year’s Resolutions and set goals for 2020, none of us thought that three months into the new year kids would be out of school FOR THE REST OF THE YEAR, that toilet paper would be a hot commodity, and that we would all be sewing fabric masks for ourselves and others just to go to the grocery store. Never did I ever think that I would get my temperature checked just trying to go to my office. Granted, I work at a hospital, but nowhere near the front lines. I wish someone would have had a crystal ball and could have told us this was coming…because NO ONE would have believed them! What kind of craziness is this?!
We all know how we are holding up. Here in Central Iowa we haven’t felt the brunt of the illness and most people don’t even know someone who has had the virus. We are feeling like this is all a little out of hand. We are ready to get back to normal. I don’t even have the words to talk about school not going back. At all. Done. My kids are trying to adjust to online work and figure out a routine. Throw in the fact that my 17 year old broke her foot at the end of February during a dance competition, that we found out two weeks later that they weren’t returning to school after Spring Break, and by the next morning found out a dear dance friend had tragically died the evening before, and I’m just happy they get out of bed each morning. I promise I will expand on these things later, but suffice to say that the fact that my children are holding up as well as they are is a damn miracle.
Now, let’s talk about all these people who want to open the state back up. I know that you’re bored. Frustrated. Out of work. I know that you’re healthy. That is the key point in this. You and your family are healthy. That, my friends, is where the problem lies. I agree that the soonest way to achieve herd immunity is to let everything go back to normal and just let whomever is going to get COVID get it. But at what cost? If you want to just open things back up, you need to come to terms, right now, with the fact that you will get sick. Your family will get sick. Your friends and neighbors will get sick. You may be thinking, “No big deal. I’m healthy. I’ll just be sick for a couple weeks and be fine.” Again, that is is where the problem lies. We don’t understand this virus. We don’t know exactly what it will do. We are now hearing that people who had the virus and recovered are testing positive for it again. That doesn’t exactly sound like herd immunity to me. That sounds more like the cows got out and are running across your neighbor’s field and eating their flowers and pooping in their yards. Please close your eyes and imagine yourself sick with COVID, having difficulty breathing, feeling like one of those cows ran you down, and oh, by the way, your spouse has it. And your children have it. And you need to take care of them while you have a fever and can barely walk across the room.
Our hospitals will be overwhelmed. We are handling it now because we haven’t had a surge of very sick people. But you are basically asking for a situation like they have been dealing with in Italy and New York where there aren’t enough of anything to save people, and you are asking for people to die. How do you know one of those people won’t be you? Or your parent? While most of the deaths have been older adults with underlying medical conditions, some perfectly healthy younger people have contracted it, ended up on a vent, and died. They. Died. I don’t think you have really thought this through. Maybe there is an epidemiologist out there who can play out the situation and give us some predictions on what will happen. Maybe we can do that thing like we did with the DARE program in school where every so many minutes a person “dies” from drugs, or in this case COVID, and we tie a black armband around random people to match the predicted outcomes of just opening everything back up. Would that help you understand what you are asking of everyone?
So. Before you are quick to say that everything should open up. Just let people get it. You need to realize that COVID isn’t everyone else’s problem. It’s very soon going to be yours. Plan now to be sick. Think it through. Imagine the sweats, the chills, the pain in your chest, the coughing, the fever, and it lasting for 2-3 weeks. And there is nothing you can do to make it better. Go on. Close your eyes and imagine it. If you’re one of the lucky ones, you recover at home. If you’re not, start imagining how it will be in the emergency room and in the hospital. Imaging struggling to breathe and giving the doctors permission to sedate you for God knows how many days and to insert a tube down your throat to breathe for you. Imagine waking up 10 days later and not knowing what day it is or if your family is ok or when you will be strong enough to walk to the bathroom. I hope to God that you are a better person with a shred of compassion who doesn’t wish death on innocent people. Just stop with your mouth and your “rights” because you know what? Those other people, the sick ones, the ones who died, had rights, too, and you just took them away because you wanted to get things back to normal. So did they. All those health care workers? They want normal, and you are taking away their rights to sleep, to eat, to protect themselves because they care a little bit more about humanity than you do.
That is my rant. I really don’t care if you disagree. Watching your children lose a friend for the second time before they are out of school, watching parents grieve and knowing that the aching pain you feel for them is nothing compared to what it actually feels like…those things really make you put into perspective what matters and what doesn’t. Those parents would give up anything right now…including all of their rights and would stay inside for the next year if it meant having their children back. I don’t want this virus or this quarantine or any of it anymore than you do. Stop being an asshat and contributing to the problem. You just make yourself look dumb. Peace out.
