[2] Quarantine Day 300?
400000 people dead because we didn't do the right things early on. If we had taken this seriously we would have had a lockdown in the spring, followed by a relaxed summer and fall, followed by a stronger lockdown in the winter followed by a well runned distribution of a vaccine. Other countries were able to manage it better.
Besides the 400k dead, we have millions of people with Covid lung. People who barely had a cough are now having x-rays showing permanent damage.
https://abc7.com/how-does-covid-affect-the-lungs-x-ray-in-symptoms/9811546/It was never a secret that I have HIV. Since 1986! I also have prostate cancer, first diagnosed in 2011, but the type that you just monitor. Gleason-3. And a heart attack 6 years ago, almost certainly due to the early HIV meds.
I've been quarantining since March 12, 2020. Never expected it to last this long. I figured the worst of it would be behind us by May or June. But due to it becoming a political issue, it just kept getting worse and worse. So I have stayed in my house. Going to TJs every other week for groceries. Hiking the hills in the evening. Exercising in my bedroom.
But I also quarantine to protect others. I could have such a minor case that I never know that I have it, yet infect someone who could die from it. Can't wait for the vaccine.
Yet, even with a vaccine, I'll continue to wear a mask and social distance. If I were to be exposed to the virus, a vaccine would allow my body to quickly fight it off. But quickly is not instantaneous. In the day or two that it would take my body to fight off an infection I may or may not be contagious to others. So until the majority of people have the vaccine, life will not get back to complete normal.
If we had acted correctly a year ago, we may have been able to contain this. But now covid19 is endemic. It is everywhere, and even animals can catch it and pass it on. Like tetanus and polio, everyone will need to be vaccinated for it for the foreseeable future.
Some people think their economic difficulties are due to governments ordering lockdowns. But do you think that if we had hit 400k deaths by May that people wouldn't have hid in their houses anyway? Certainly those that could quarantine would. Office workers, like myself, who can work from home were always going to do so. Rich people always were going to do so. So the complaint is that the government allowed poor people to protect themselves too. (although not very well, as they are the ones still hit hardest by covid)
In the 1918 Spanish Flu we had up to 50 million deaths world wide, out of a world population of just over 1 billion. Despite modern medicine, this pandemic could have been that bad too.
