Day 125

July 14, 2020 

This is a pandemic. And nothing, beside sitting in your house feels the same. We are feeling the pressures of going back to school in-person. We are living in a country that is not unified. Our United States is now the Divided States of America and we are not handling the pandemic very well. The infections and deaths in our country are higher than any other. The push to reopen the economy is coming with a cost, a human life cost and we may be like this for quite some time. Even with a vaccine the world as we know it will most likely never be the same. Even though in 2003 there a coronavirus called SARS and we were able to get it under control within one years time without a vaccine. There are differences between the two viruses and they are documented here:  https://www.healthline.com/health/coronavirus-vs-sars.

The biggest of these differences is how easily COVID-19 is spread. Mostly due to asymptomatic carriers or mild cases in which little symptoms appear and thus people continue to move about and spread it to others. Because SARS was more serious in nature and the symptoms were evident right away the spread was contained through quarantine and tracing. It's also possible that because the death rates are different, with SARS being the more deadly of the two, people are not taking COVID-19 as serious. It is important to note both of these are coronaviruses and it may not be the last one we see. And since no vaccine was found for SARS there is no guarantee one will be created for COVID-19 aka SARS-2. In 2003, eight-thousand people were infected with SARS. In 2019 and so far over 12.5 million have been infected and since many are not taking the proper precautions to stop the spread of the virus, much of our world is being infected and affected. People want answers and they have been given them- social distance, wear a mask, avoid touching your face and wash you hands more than usual. Yet for many these are not the answers they want. There is so much unknown not much we know about the future.

Is that not the way it has always been? We cannot predict what will happen. We can only prepare and act. It is in our preparedness, or lack thereof, and our actions where we have failed and it seems will continue to do so until...who knows when.

In this case Jim Morrison's words apply,    "The future's uncertain and the end is always near"

Which is why we ought to prepare for life being very different going forward.