Ah yes, who can ever forget the pandemic years from 2020-22, when everyone was panicked and wringing their hands about COVID-19. Everything from how we should handle it, whether we should shut down, and even how it came to spread across the globe and kill thousands is still being debated even after the pandemic was declared “over.”
Let me tell ya folks, it’s not over by a long shot.
The last time I had COVID was MLK Day 2022, and back then I was in the midst of writing an “educational” post about my experience and never finished it. Mainly due to the fact I was completely unaware of how much it would knock me around.
COVID returned to the household that Christmas, but fortunately Jess got it and I was spared.
This time around, its back and still ugly as ever. Fever, aches all over, jumping from chills to sweats, and lack of appetite of any kind. The lethargy is the worst for me, because I am not the kind of person who even when sick likes to lay around and do anything.
I used to as a kid – especially for sick days from school when I would watch The Price is Right – but since college whenever I have been sick I usually have no choice but to power through and continue onward with whatever I’ve got going for the day.
News doesn’t care if you don’t feel like it today. News doesn’t care if you’re sinuses are full of gunk. News has to be written regardless, is the way it has worked out versus how I view it (… in a perfect world, the audience would be fine with a sick day. The numbers don’t play out that way unfortunately.)
So here we are, Day 3 of COVID (home test was positive yesterday) and now I’m almost getting back to a semblance of normalcy. Maybe the worst has passed. Who really knows?
It seems to me people have come to rely too much on healthcare to solve all of their ails. It’s not to say that medicine has come a long way since the advent of germ theory and improvements to techniques and biomedical sciences and drugs over the past century. Penicillin’s discovery was in September 1928 – still less than a century old. Aspirin has been manufactured since the late 1890s by Bayer. DNA was first sequenced in the 1970s. There have been so many discoveries over the past 100 years it is hard to list them all, from understanding diseases previously not named or thought to be something else to nearly eliminating several horrible ailments from the world like Polio.
The breakthroughs made by science in medicine still comes with a caveat – we still have plenty of unanswered questions about the human body, still have major fights to wage against cancer and other diseases that kill millions every year, and we still barely understand how consciousness plays into how our bodies work.
Does praying for sick people whether they know it or not work, for instance?
All of this to say that if medical science still has plenty of work to do, and even your doctor you see locally is still learning as new information becomes available, why in the world would anyone begin to offer medical advice on social media?
It is just one of those things that bugs me, folks.
Mistakes were made with COVID-19, for sure. Armchair general in me says we should be critical of these mistakes.
The problem however is we were all responsible for the mistakes made when COVID-19 was beginning. Why? Because everyone from Joe Schmo to Gov. Brian Kemp and in between were responding to something deemed dangerous to our health with the expected panic we all experienced together.
I’m just as much to blame, considering at the time I told folks in charge on a local level this was going to get bad and we should close up shop temporarily across all levels of life for two weeks to let it pass over. I used what was done back in the 1800s when Cholera and Yellow Fever would spread across the south – you shut down the town, don’t stop the trains going through and wait for the all clear. You don’t allow it to spread past that if at all possible.
Times were different then, of course. People were more self-reliant, could survive in a town by themselves for a few weeks without outside supplies being required to keep everyone fed. This is not the position the United States is in anymore, so my concept for two weeks of everyone staying put was never going to work.
How many people, after all, have enough food to last past three days? That’s not food you WANT to eat, but food that will keep you alive.
Exactly then how do you shut down a global supply chain and not expect there to be major issues on the other side of what happens? The economy took a hit. It rebounded quickly after the government sent out cash like candy, and then got upset because the giant pile of cash sent out gave corporations a pass to raise prices on everyone. Sure, it was in part blamed on supply chain issues (which are SOMEWHAT fair) but come on, we all know everyone was making a giant profit over the past years. Most corporations are publicly traded, so it wasn’t like we weren’t seeing the quarterly earning statements.
Companies got greedy. Eventually, they’ll pay the price.
The worst mistake was in the field of education. Forgetting all the sudden that children are the incubators of every illness known to man and their immune systems usually bounce back way better than an adults, everyone decided that the pandemic was the perfect time to start online education and see how it would go. In the name of “someone think of the children” we watched as virtual schooling drove down test scores, and now the backlash is coming.
Local school districts all across the country saw cash dumped on it by the millions in the name of COVID safety, with mixed results on the outcomes. School shutdowns to avoid further spreading the virus did not mean that districts suddenly saw big savings on facilities costs. It didn’t lower the cost of teacher salaries because they didn’t go into classrooms.
I hear an argument recently as people complain about lower scores in certain areas of elementary school learning and how much is being spent on education and I’m reminded of one particular thing: this really isn’t the educator’s fault. It is the parents.
Why do I say that? The same group of people who are mad that their kids test scores in reading and math went down (and have been slowly bouncing back) are the same ones who give their kid a phone to play games on instead of talking to their child. Do you think using the phone all the time is good for them?
If it isn’t good for adults (I’m the worst, by the way, when it comes to my phone usage, so I’m speaking from experience here) then why would it be good for children?
If the worst mistake is the one we made by keeping kids home, then passing off the responsibility for their education to teachers over video instead of parents who (many still) were working from home, then we will have a lot of repercussions to pay in the future for it.
Now as for the rest of COVID thoughts: where it came from, is someone responsible for its spread, etc. I think we can all agree on one thing: it is nice to know, but does it really matter anymore?
It might have at one time, but no longer.
My experience this time around has taught me to be glad I’m feeling better.
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