I have refrained from posting in this forum because my initial posts many weeks back when this thread first started weren't taken too well. In those posts I essentially shared the belief that this was being overblown. Like sleddog has shared here regarding his wife, my wife is a nurse as well. She has worked in hospitals, in ICU's, and is currently the assistant director of nursing at a skilled nursing facility. They also have positive cases in the facility both among staff and patients. My wife has been on the front lines, especially the last many weeks here in Florida as the cases increase. She is testing for covid almost daily now and often having to work all day in full PPE and a mask, to the point that she comes home dehydrated, hot, and nauseous. At my job, we have had positive cases, even some I have worked in close proximity with are now home having tested positive. I have had to undergo testing, as well as my wife multiple times. My wife is currently home feeling a little under the weather while we await another test. I say all that to say that my opinion on this all comes from a fairly up close perspective on this mess. We know a lot of people who are positive right now, some of them we know very well.
All that being said, we still feel this whole thing is being blown out of proportion. Of all the cases we know of, and having some knowledge of several hundred here in my local county - not a single one of them has progressed beyond just a mild illness. In many cases folks who tested positive are at home and wishing they could go back to work because they have zero symptoms and are just getting behind. We know of some who have totally lost their job over this now. Unless you are immunocompromised, or are already in a poor, weakened state, this virus is nothing more severe than the common cold or flu, and in a large many cases its not showing any symptoms at all. Even in elderly people that my wife is seeing every day who are infected, if they are healthy older folks they are powering through it with little issue. The ones who are struggling are the ones you would expect to struggle - because they would struggle with ANY infection in their current state.
Yes there are some random cases out there of young healthy people just going down to this thing. The media has done a great job of pulling that 0.1% out of the mix and highlighting it. In context however, that is also to be expected. The Flu also kills some young and healthy people every year. This covid 19 thing however has grown into a massive global vortex of fear, the world media has pulled out their microscope and put this virus under amplification and is just pumping out story after story after story and the vortex has swallowed everyone up - even those who realize its being overblown are forced to swim with the current. If it werent for the media however, and we had treated this just like we did the swine flu in 2009 - how many of us would even realize there was a pandemic occuring? most people wouldnt know anything was even amis. Everyone around here has been talking about our massive upswing of cases in our rural county - over 80% of our case explosion however has been prison inmates. The virus hit our prison and has infected a lot of prisoners. I also know, from talking to the folks at the prison, that only about 3 of the over 200 infected there had even run a fever. None of them have had anything more than minor illness. There again, if not for the media and all the hype, all the folks at the prison would know is that they had 3 prisoners running a slight fever. Perspective is EVERYTHING. If the media focused on the average flu season as hard as we have focused on this virus, we could kill a good number of people every year just from sheer fear and panic of the invisible boogey men.
