I'm sorry to hear that he might have it. I think by the time this might be over, most Americans will have had it. Most people getting it here was never inevitable, as evidenced by countries like South Korea that kept their numbers lower thanks to wearing masks and vigorous contact tracing and quarantining.
In the past week I have heard that three family members in two states know at least one person each that has it. No one in my family yet, but it's only a matter of time. The president is actively working against the efforts to fight the virus. Summer was supposed to be when we might have a chance to prepare for fall. If it's this bad now, and getting worse, by fall hospitals are going to be more overwhelmed than they ever have been when coronavirus increases much more dramatically, combined with the seasonal flu and other illnesses that people have. This pandemic has still hardly begun here.
It's good that younger people don't suffer the most severe impacts from this generally, though there are certainly exceptions and long term the side effects of having had this are not well known. Some rarer cases involve people suffering symptoms of various types for a longer period. I saw a news report in the past few days about people who have had symptoms for quite awhile and were using social media to talk about their symptoms so that they could help others who might also be suffering from some of the more rare side effects. And of course while usually younger people recover, some do need to be hospitalized and that adds to the hospitalizations.
If kids go back to school in person, that's going to make all of this even worse. I don't see how sports are ever going to happen either.
I haven't been out since March, but I finally bought some masks online, some cloth masks and some of the surgical looking masks which probably don't do a lot of good because they were cheap and not really surgical masks. I also bought some goggles too. All of this could go on for a long time so it was time to prepare for when I do ever need to go out again. In August or September I will get a flu shot, so by then at least I will have to go out. I would imagine the flu might also be bad this fall and winter with people not getting the shot, which helps protect you, due to the coronavirus being around. You can still get the flu having had the vaccine, but it might lessen the symptoms. I'm thinking that might be about the best we can expect from a coronavirus vaccine. We will likely get some vaccines for the coronavirus, but we might to need to continue to get it like the flu vaccine. I don't know how long the vaccine might last. If this is something that can be this bad during the summer, I wonder if we might need a vaccine once per year or even more often. (The flu vaccine lasts through the flu season, but it doesn't work for 12 months.) I don't know if getting a coronavirus vaccine would mean you couldn't get it for awhile after that or would just make it less likely to get.
I'm just not counting on the coronavirus ever going away. I think that's unlikely at this point. |