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And after all of this, people are trying to say this is just like the flu? Still?
My wife is a director at a large health agency. She lost a social worker on her team. The vendor that they work with lost 8 home health care aides. These folks died for $15/hour. Our veterinarian died from the virus. (She was a special lady. I’ve never seen my cat get comfortable with a stranger so quickly.) The refrigerator trucks parked in our neighborhood filled up with an overflow of corpses in April.
At first, I thought covid-19 was like the flu. But the flu never did this, at least in my observable world. I never in my life was one degree of separation away from so many people who died from the flu. People who would not have otherwise died. I never even heard of anyone dying from the flu, personally.
I don’t think that is like the flu any more. I hope to God I’m wrong now. I hope to God that I’m just a silly liberal in a progressive/fake-news media bubble and that I’ve been taken in by a hoax or mass hysteria and that tens or hundreds of thousands of people won’t die unnecessary and horrible deaths (gasping into a machine, surrounded by strangers) if we make the wrong choices. I can’t get that image out of my mind, of the anesthesiologist…just before she intubated patients, she’d ask them if they wanted her to choose a song to play. What would my last song be? I don’t even know.
I know that we’re also looking at a huge rise in deaths of despair, so there’s a trade-off. I believe that…