Wasting Our Collective Breath

 With each passing day, I become more convinced that the infection is not COVID-19, it is us. 

With each passing day, I become more convinced that it is not the kids at school that we should be worrying about, it's the grown-ups out there trying to ignore what's going on.

With each passing day, I become more frightened by the phrase "extinction level event."

How can it be that after all these months, with millions dead and still more dying ever day, we continue to argue about a strip of cloth covering our mouths and noses? If your state has suddenly reached a new record level of cases, how could you not know that there were more ventilators heading your way from the Federal Government?

How can I be writing blogs about how to prepare/defend against a global pandemic a year and a half after the onset? After eighteen months of not being able to teach kids in a classroom? After weeks of preparation, we are still negotiating "what is safe?" There is no tastiness left in the irony of talk show hosts who denied the existence of a germ they could not see dying from infection. It is sad.

End of story.

And yet, here we are. New president, new year, and even more science later and we continue to argue the finer points of how to stay healthy. Maybe we should blame Web MD. The million or so self-diagnosed cases of bubonic plague might be a tip that being your own physician based on something you read on Al Gore's Internet may be faulty. Ben Franklin was not a medical doctor when he came up with the phrase, "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." That was a few centuries ago. Now we'd just say that wearing a mask is worth keeping your lungs. 

Unless it turns out that we are the germs and COVID-19 turns out to be the cure.