How We Go Forward in the Pandemic Is Up to Us

Not quitting in the face of failure is noble

Andy Slavitt
Medium Coronavirus Blog

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Photo by Tiffany Tertipes on Unsplash

When we lose someone to Covid-19 there are things to remember.

We have lost 230,000 people in the U.S. to Covid, likely more, and it’s not slowing down soon. This is what happens.

One of the profound contrasts is how something that has roots in broad community spread ends up in the most lonely of experiences. There’s no longer great mystery left as to how Covid-19 spreads. It is largely through the respiratory system, and while it is an inconvenience to do so, that makes preventing and controlling it easy to understand. We want to avoid those particles when others laugh, cry, talk, and exhale. We want to avoid the places where that happened recently or with frequency.

In crowds of people, the odds of someone shedding that virus at just the wrong moment goes up significantly. No one wants to spread the virus. Eighty percent of the time, it’s shared without knowledge.

People who are contagious are likely feeling fine. This is a significant difference with the flu. With the flu, most people stay home when contagious. At least they have a warning. Here there is no warning.

The devilish thing is this causes the disease to require us to do unnatural human things: to stay…

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