People have made a valid attempt to shame me. However, someone living on their mother’s couch in Iowa has little influence on my actions. I spend most of my time in the mountains hiking, or mountain biking and it is shocking, and I mean shocking to me how ignorant people are of the actual risk of contracting COVID-19. News media hype notwithstanding, the risk of contracting it is extremely low if you follow very simple rules. However, I’ve had people claim I’m killing their grandmother, and children by going out of my house into the mountains and taking in nature. Evidently they’re unaware that the places I go are so remote, that the likely-hood of my interacting with people, let alone infecting anyone, including grandma is more remote than my being attacked by a mountain lion.
I work from home. I also travel. When I do go out i wear a mask. When I get home I wash my hands. I don’t touch my face, and I certainly don’t put my hands in my mouth, or fingers in my nose. Ironically, other than the mask, all other actions were common for me. My mother was a good teacher. This disease has managed to take hold because people don’t follow basic hygiene. If you watch the produce isle at a grocery store for 5 minutes, you’ll never again eat an apple. The behavior of people is most disgusting. People scratching parts of their bodies, or inserting their hands into their mouths or other places even worse and then touching food. It’s a wonder we all haven’t died of some horrible gastrointestinal issue long before COVID attacked our lungs!
I travel to and from Colorado to California, having homes in both places. I also travel for work, although that has been curtailed greatly since the pandemic, but not completely. When not on a plane, I travel with a 35ft camper (or what one friend calls the taj mahauler). It’s easy to stay safe when you have your own rolling apartment. Again, the only change I’ve made to my life is I wear a mask when required by law. I also keep my distance when inside. Most of all, I’m clean. It’s surprising how many people are not.
It is also surprising how many people don’t actually research the numbers of sick, or put two and two together on how they are getting sick. It’s a surprise to them that sitting in a room full of people with little or no ventilation will be a risk, yet being on the beach is not. Governments and municipalities have ZERO clue how to manage the disease because they’re not responding to science, but to political pressure. Hundreds of people on a windy beach are a political risk and bad optics, not a health risk. Masses of unmasked people in a church are a health risk, not a political one. Telling a morbidly obese 55 year old to wear a mask is easy, but convincing them to take a walk, and take off 80 lbs requires effort. No one wants to make the real effort. They all want the easy way through life.
If you go to the CDC site, or Worldometers.info and check the numbers, you’ll find that the current rate of infection against the world population is just below 1%. If you are just looking at the U.S. it’s about .5%. That’s just the infection rate. That doesn’t mean that someone is sick, or has any serious reaction to the disease. That number is .005%. That’s right, you have a .005% chance of having a serious illness. Death is even a lower risk. Seriously, the risk is low even if you do nothing to mitigate your behavior. If you bother to wear a mask, or stop hanging out in crowds at the rave, your risk goes to almost nothing.
If you take the time to read this, you will make the assumption that I am a conservative. It even reads pretty conservative to me when I go back through it. However, I’m actually quite liberal. I’m pro-choice, believe in gun control, universal healthcare, women’s rights, minority rights, and think we should be funding education 2 to 1 over the military. What I don’t believe is that COVID-19 is the death of our world. The numbers don’t even come close to proving that out. However, until after November, COVID will be the major story. Well…unless Biden loses.
Rex