Six months ago last Saturday, our world got flipped in a single day. March 12, 2020, will forever be linked to when things really began to change with the coronavirus.
Has it really been six months?
At seemingly every turn, mere mention in spoken or printed word of the year we’re in brings all measures of ridicule and scorn. It’ll take a miraculous turn of events for anyone to even remotely one day suggest, “Ah, 2020, that was a good year.”
Truth is, there are good things that have happened this year. There have been special occasions in families — yes, weddings went on. So did births.
There’s been job loss the likes of which we haven’t seen since the Great Depression our grandparents and great-grandparents lived through, but there’s also been many who discovered new ways to make a buck or two.
We’ve met people we didn’t know before. Personal accomplishments have been many all over the place.
But as so often happens in our society, we haven’t focused as much on the good as we have the bad. The coronavirus is deadly, dangerous, and it’s led to a lot of things that we’ve really struggled to grasp.
We were originally told the hotter weather — not just warm, but energy-zapping humidity-laced hotter — would lead to it deteriorating. Although, a “second wave” in the fall would be likely. We were told a spike in cases could and very well might overwhelm our hospital system, the way things went crazy when New York City was the world’s epicenter.
Volume continued in the summer, but a spike can’t be shown on any legitimate graphs. And our hospitals in the Old North State have remained at a steady use for beds and ventilators.
A big thing now is percentage of positive tests coming back. But, most people tested are either feeling sick or think they were exposed to someone sick. So we wonder, what’s the true value of that metric related to the population as a whole?
Independent research released this week using information from the state Department of Health and Human Services shows 98.2 percent of people we might be next to anywhere — name any place, whether it be the grocery store, a gym or in line to vote — have never had a confirmed case of COVID-19. And 90 percent of the remaining 1.8 percent have recovered from it. That leaves 99.8 percent of our state’s 10.6 million people as no risk to any of us.
Yet, Tuesday we counted the 12th fatality in Bladen County. And we went above 800 cases. For each of us, it only takes one.
We have to sort it out, to decide on wearing a face covering, to decide on how much public interaction we wish to take, and to decide on how much of our life’s liberties we should surrender.
Regardless of those choices, we need to stay positive and live our lives as best we think we can. These are things true before 2020, and will be long after it has gone.
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