Sheikah Plate

Anyone ready for yet another venting of feelings, emotions, and struggles from me? Yeah, I’m guessing not, but it’s happening anyway. As with my last two posts we are jumping in, forgetting the editing (sorry for the grammar lovers out there), and expressing my feelings. Is everybody ready? Then let’s go.

I want to talk about 2 reality checks I wish people, particularly Americans, would have. I know a significant portion of you amazing, and lucky, followers are foreign. How you must be laughing at my country right now. Or crying for us. It probably flips between the two. The first is the word people keep throwing around about how “careful” they are. The second is the reality check of the timescale we are looking at with COVID.

So let’s talk about “careful”. Do you know how often people throw that word in my face? Every. Single. Day. They think because they wear a mask to the store they are the very definition of “careful”. Now, don’t get me wrong, masks are so important in public I cannot stress it enough. If you go in public without a mask you might as well stop reading now. I can’t help you. But the idea that wearing a mask in public somehow earns you a “careful” title like you’re some kind of Animal Crossing character is ridiculous. Yes, you’ve cut out one source of infection. But if you do nothing about all the other sources of possible infection the word you’re looking for isn’t “careful”. It’s “reckless”.

Let’s talk about this graphic. This graphic shows the percentage of where people got COVID from in my state. While these aren’t exact numbers for every state (they are my state’s numbers), the proportions of the pie chart are pretty similar for other states. And this is not exact risk, because risk is defined by the amount of community spread in your area. But this graphic is a good reminder of how risky your choices are – the more percentages you can cross off your potential exposure list, the less likely you are to get COVID. “Unspecified” means everything outside of social, workplace, and household. This is school if your kids are in it, shopping and stores, dining in restaurants, and all the other little interactions we have with people daily. Now, for this example I need to break up the “Household portion” based on the percentages of the other groups. Because if you are the safest you possibly can be it doesn’t matter if your household is being unsafe – your household will determine, to a large extent, your risk level. So the math comes out to (yay, math, right?) 45% of household members got their COVID from social interaction (this is 27% of infections), 35% got it from unspecified (21% of infections), and 18% got it from the workplace (now 11%). And once again, these percentages also need to factor in amount of spread in your community – I’m not saying your true risk are the following numbers. But this is the true risk factor taken into account with community spread. So while it’s not the complete number, it is a portion of the complete number.

Now, let’s get into the nitty gritty. Let’s say you wear masks to the store, don’t dine in restaurants (I mean never. Taking off your mask in a public space, no matter what reason, is a big no), don’t go to the gym (because even with masks they’ve shown gyms to be pretty unsafe, plus most people working out don’t wear masks and that’s an enormous risk), and don’t have kids in school yet. That sounds super careful, right? Yeah, it’s not bad. If you do those things you’ve cut out 14% of your risk level. That’s it. JUST 14%. Your behavior is now at an 86% risk of getting COVID. Does that honestly sound “careful” to you? Now let’s add your household into this (roommates, parents, significant others, children – every single person you live with). If every single person in your household does all of those things you’ve cut out 14% of risk plus the 35% of household risk (which equals 21% risk because it’s 35% of 60%… Everyone following?)- you’ve now cut out 35% of the risk. You’re now at 65% risk of getting COVID. And seriously- that means every single person follows every single rule. Kids wear masks, especially at school, no one goes to the gym, everyone follows the rules and you’re still at 65% risk of getting COVID. “Yeah I’m super careful I wear masks to the grocery store” doesn’t sound so careful anymore, does it?

What if you’re lucky enough to work from home? Sounds awesome, right? Now you’ve only eliminated 21.5% of risk (unspecified + workplace). Does everyone in your family get to work from home? Yes? That’s fortunate! So if you, and everyone in your household, follow all the “unspecified” rules and work from home or have rigorous workplace regulations you’ve eliminated 53.5% of the risk. That’s it. Doing all those things combined for your entire household still only gets you to 53.5% risk elimination. That’s better, but still barely over 50%. If I told you the odds of getting attacked by a shark if you went swimming were 46.5% would you honestly go in the water?

Now for the big one – socializing. Socializing is the hard one for people to cut out. But it’s also your biggest risk. If anyone in your household socializes in an unsafe way you will never get below a 46.5% risk. EVER. When you use the phrase “I’m super careful” to me and I can see your instagram, your photos, your telling me about all the things you’re doing, your unsafe interactions all I can think is “I do not think that word means what you think it means”. Allowing your family to have that much risk is not careful.

So what do we do, Teri? I’m so bored/lost/anxious/want everything to be normal. You can minimize that 46.5% risk by doing one very simple thing – closed social circles. For those of you science/mathmatically minded closed loops are easy to understand. For others, let me demonstrate with a long paragraph:

If Ellie (yep, going with Ellie because, spoilers, she was frustrating in TLOU II) only socializes with her family that sounds safe, right? She has 3 siblings and 2 parents. She sees 5 people regularly. Oh, and their kids. So let’s make it 10 people, without masks, not social distancing. Those 10 people are being the “careful” we’ve just talked about. Oh they wear masks to the stores, but they dine in restaurants sometimes (life is hard enough!), and their kids hang out with friends (they’re just so bored!), and one sibling has roommates (yeah, they hang out with their friends. I’m not sure who). How safe does Ellie sound right now? Ellie’s circle includes not just her 10 family members, but the friends of the 5 kids, and the friend’s parents, and the parents friends, and any other friends those kids hang out with. Let’s go with an even 10 people per kid (friends, families of friends, and friends of friends – honestly 10 feels conservative). Ellie is now up to 60 people she regularly comes into contact with without social distancing and masks. Then Ellie’s sibling with roommates – let’s count her numbers. Let’s see, she has 3 roommates, who each have 5 friends they hang out with on a regular basis. But those 5 friends also have 5 friends. We don’t need to go further. I’m pretty sure you’ll get the point. So that adds 30 more people to her list. She’s now up to 90 people she comes in contact with regularly without masks. Still sound safe to you? Let’s add yet another option in (but wait! Isn’t that enough? Oh, honey, this isn’t even the worst open circle I know about). Let’s say one of Ellie’s siblings starts dating someone. So we only add one more person, right? Wrong. We’ve not only added one person, but that person’s family that they see, all the people their family sees, and that person’s roommates, and all the roommates friends. We’ve just added another 90 people to Ellie’s circle. And the list never ends. Because this is the opposite of a closed circle. The risk is real, here, folks, despite the fact that Ellie wears a mask and “is so careful”.

Is Ellie more careful than the person who wanders around maskless, protesting, and shouting in people’s faces about “their rights”? Of course she is. I just wish Ellie, and people like her, would stop kidding themselves about their level of care and waving around their idea of themselves as “careful” like they’ve won some kind of award. You’re behavior is risky. Admit it. I care, on a professional and personal level, whether these people are actually careful. But I don’t get to make their decisions for them. They get to be risky all on their own. All I want is for them to take responsibility for their risky behavior and stop using the word “careful” when they really mean the opposite.

You want to talk about a safe social circle, the ones the experts discuss? Let’s talk about my social circle. Did you know that I can name not only every single person I have close contact with without masks on, but it is less than 20. Every single individual I come in contact with also has a closed circle. So my circle is literally the handful of people I see and the handful of people they see, who also see no one else. Sounds complicated? I’ll explain better. We see, on a regular basis, two families. One of 3 and one of 5. The family of 3 has regular contact with a married couple, who have contact with no one else. So right now my circle is up to 10. The family of 5 sees a married couple and a family of 4, who only see each other. So the entire circle of the married couple and the family of 4 is 6. My entire potential social circle is 16 people. That’s it. Is it hard? Yep. But we’ve all made the agreement that this is our life and for months on end we’ve all stuck to it. And if, for unfortunate reasons, somehow that circle is broken (one of the families comes in contact with someone outside our circle for any reason) they isolate themselves for 10-14 days to ensure they aren’t putting the rest of the circle at risk. Being truly careful is doable, folks. It’s hard and involves a lot video calls and outdoor physical distancing picnics to see people outside our circle. But we are being careful.

Now for a caveat. I understand that there are situations completely outside of our control. One of the people in my social circle is a teacher and school is going back in session soon. Several of the kids in our circle are school-age and will be attending school. Luckily our state has a mask mandate for all school children and workers, but it definitely weakens our circle. These are circumstances beyond our control and they increase our risk. There are things we literally can do nothing (or next to nothing) about. But we are doing everything we can to mitigate our risk outside those mandatory circumstances. So our risk level, when school starts, goes up. But you know what, it’s a hell of a lot lower than the risk level of Ellie, who adds all the school-age kids and young adults (college, possibly), to their 180+ circle.

Once again, if people choose to make risky choices I can’t stop them and I can’t protect them. But they need to stop calling their actions “careful” like they’re actually attempting to be part of the solution.

Now let’s get into an even worse downer – the reality check. This is the reality check I wish most people could wrap their heads around. It’s the one scientists and public health experts and historians have known from the beginning. This virus isn’t going anywhere for years. Let me repeat that. This virus isn’t going anywhere for years.

There are two ways to get rid of a virus (or at least control a virus).

1. Douse the fire. Think of it like a fire. Fire requires oxygen to survive, so you douse the fire, cut off it’s oxygen source, it’ll die out without spreading. What is the equivalent of dousing the fire for a disease? Treatment at the source. It means being able to treat a person and cure them of the disease before it has a chance of spreading to another person. There are no known treatments for COVID. Nothing we have will, to our knowledge, kill COVID. The best we can do are symptomatic treatments, which may make your symptoms less severe so you don’t die while your body naturally fights and kills COVID on it’s own. So option 1 is totally out for COVID.
2. Remove it’s source of fuel. If we need to stop a fire we need to make sure the wood and materials around that fire can’t burn. You need to remove it’s food source. You can use fire suppressant, you can use water, you can do whatever it takes to get rid of it’s possible food options. If there’s nowhere to burn, it’ll die out on it’s own. Simple right? Let’s apply that to a disease. Humans and other animals are the food source for COVID. This virus will keep jumping around, infecting people as long as we give it a food source. There are a few ways to get rid of the food source for COVID – physical distancing, a vaccine, and herd immunity. Let’s talk about those in more detail.

Let’s start with herd immunity because it’s the easiest. Herd immunity means everyone goes back to their daily lives, no masks, no nothing, just back to normal. This strategy is also called “cull the herd”. It means we accept that our actions will kill a portion of the population and we don’t care. For herd immunity to be reached with an actively spreading virus estimates are that 80-90% of the population will need to become infected before the virus will go away. Let’s take the United States, because, well, I live here. There are 328 million people in the US. Let’s say only 80% need to become infected for herd immunity – that means 262.5 million infections. With a true death rate (that means the infection fatality rate) of roughly 0.5-1% (let’s go with the lower number so as not to shock you too much) that means 13.12 million people will die from COVID. Probably within a 3 year time frame. You want world numbers? Okay – 7.656 billion people. That means 6.125 billion infections and 306 million deaths. Does herd immunity still sound like a good idea? Callous, data-driven scientists, when we aren’t taking into account actual human life and are simply looking at the numbers, call these diseases population culling diseases. Removing 0.5% of 7.656 billion people is a number I don’t think we can actually comprehend. That’s removing the population of the United States, the third most populous country in the world, in 3 years. And that doesn’t include the 30% of the population that will have lifelong neurological and/or physical damage because this virus leaves 30% of survivors with scars that’ll probably never heal. That’s nearly 2 billion people with severe long-term, possibly lifelong, side effects.

So we need a vaccine! A vaccine will be nice – but it’s not going to save everyone. A vaccine, at the best of times, is 70% effective. So that means, if 100% of the people in our country get vaccinated, 30% will still be vulnerable to COVID. With herd immunity already pinpointed at 80-90% that means 10-20% of people would still have the possibility of getting sick if we can’t wipe it out of our communities. Now, that’s a best case scenario. There’s no way on the planet America is going to get that lucky. First of all, most vaccines are looking to be about 50-60% effective. Which means 40-50% of people who get vaccinated will still be at risk of getting COVID. And that doesn’t take into account the roughly 1/3 of the population in the US who poll in at “anti-vaccine”. So if 33% of the population doesn’t get vaccinated plus 26% of the population aren’t immune because of vaccine efficacy we are looking at 59% of the population of my country not having protection against COVID. Then we still have to make up the difference to get to 80% immune. The vaccine won’t save us unless we do more.

Physical distancing is the best cure we have right now – it’s really the only cure we have right now. If we stay away from each other we can keep the fire low – the virus can’t jump to another person and restart if there isn’t a person to jump to. That’s why 6 foot distancing and mask wearing is SO IMPORTANT. I cannot stress enough how important this is. If we give the virus nowhere to go it’ll get under control all on it’s own. That’s how New Zealand did it. It’s how Taiwan did it. It’s how Vietnam did it. Distancing until this virus is gone or until we can start vaccinating will save our world from so much pain and sorrow. I wish people could just get. this. through. their. heads. STOP SOCIALIZING and we may not have to stop socializing for much longer. The more you do it, the more fuel you’re giving the fire, the longer this will take to get under control.

So what we need is a mindset change. Stop thinking of this as a short term problem and start visualizing it as a long term problem. This virus isn’t going anywhere until either herd immunity is met (with or without a vaccine) or we can burn the virus down to nothing. So figure out a long-term, sustainable game plan for getting life back to as normal as you can. John and I have already figured out our game plan. It’s not easy, especially with a 4-year-old, but it’s sustainable and removes as much risk as we possibly can. Change your mindset and focus on creating a long-term plan that minimizes your risk of not only contracting the virus but of spreading the virus. If you want tips or help – I’m here. It’s not easy, but we’re in this for the long haul. We’re looking at at least a year (at the earliest) before life slowly starts to normalize. If people change their mindsets and come up with a plan now we may finally be able to nip this virus in the bud.

My last post was so cathartic I kinda wanted to do another one. I really feel nearly 10x better after writing that last post. Almost nothing has changed but I think expelling some of the frustration I’ve been feeling really helped me cope. So let’s do another one! As with my previous post there will be no editing, no going back to ensure coherency, nothing. This is just me, reminding myself of the things I’ve been working on the last few days.

Even after my last post I couldn’t shake the depression. That was, honestly, to be expected. I’m carrying a bit of weight here – it’s understandable I can’t shake it after one post. But I realized, in talking to my husband, that some of my problem came from carrying the burden of other’s choices. They wander around, not wearing masks, throwing COVID parties, screaming at store employees, gathering indoors, and protesting the very things that will save them. I read it in the news, I see it in my local town hall meetings, I hear about it from friends, I notice it every time I walk out the door. It feels like a slap in the face. I’m putting my life and sanity on the line for a bunch of people trying their hardest to ruin everything I’ve worked for, trying their hardest to kill (inadvertently, true, but still at fault) the most vulnerable in the population, including my family. It hurts me to see how much people disregard the truth because it’s inconvenient, because it sucks, because whatever.

And it hurts that their decisions could hurt the people I love. I have several immediate family who are high risk, several in-laws who are high risk, and the probability that myself and my son are high risk. There’s a lot riding on other people to do their part so my family can be safe. And I hate that the lack of respect and compassion that people feel toward one another will keep this nightmare lasting for a very. long. time.

But I came to realize the other day that I can’t save people. I can protect myself and my family the best I can – with knowledge, with advice, with recommendations, but they are ultimately going to have to save themselves. I can’t stop Karen from getting sick – I can’t even stop her from passing it along to my friends and family. All I can do is my best to educate, to test, to compile data, to do my job. I can’t save everyone.

There are several things I wish I could do. I wish I could ensure that the only people who get sick and die are the people making the bad choices. But that’s not how viruses work. Let’s say you wear a mask but Karen doesn’t. You’re risk of getting sick from her is not as high if you’re wearing a mask but it’s much greater than 0 if she’s not wearing one. And it’s not even 0 if you’re both wearing a mask but not social distancing. I can’t stop you from possibly getting sick if you’re vaccinated (vaccine’s have complicated protection factors, DM me on instagram if you want the long explanation) if Karen chooses not to get vaccinated. I can’t even protect the people who are trying to be cautious. But I especially can’t protect people who aren’t listening at all. People who are going to gyms, people who don’t wear masks, people who dine in at restaurants, people who stand right behind you in line at the grocery store, people who feel like concerts, like movies, like religious services, like barbecues are somehow safe. And then, in a league of their own, are the socializers. These are the people who have open social groups, who don’t know who their friend/neighbor/family member has been hanging out with but they think it’s safe to see them because they only hang out in groups less than 10. Or some other arbitrary number that actually means nothing to a virus. Because if you hang out with 10 people, but those 10 people all hung out with 10 different people a few days before you just spent an evening with 100 different infectious possibilities. Not 10. But somehow, no matter how often public health officials say it, no one is listening.

It’s extra hard with families. Family has always been safe -they’re familiar, they’re home. they’re comfort, they’re protection. But this virus doesn’t care about how safe your family is supposed to be. Family is not a safe zone. Because people let their guard down with family. They assume that family is safe, despite the fact that brother has roommates who don’t care about social distancing, or sister goes to bars because she’s young! what’s the harm? The virus doesn’t care that you love mom and dad and would never want to hurt them but I’m for sure going to visit for the weekend/have sunday dinner despite the fact that you aren’t allowed to remote work anymore. That’s the scariest part about family – you let your guard down, because family is supposed to be safe. But what you don’t know is that, because you can spread the virus for about 48 hours before symptoms even show up, or show up at all because you’re asymptomatic, you could be hurting the people you love and you don’t even know it.

I can’t save anyone who doesn’t want to be saved. I can’t save the neighbors, I can’t save Karen, I can’t even save my family. I have so much knowledge, nearly 15 years of experience, knowledge, and expertise, and despite trying my hardest and doing my best I can’t protect them. They call it “different circumstances”, “living your life”, “constitutional freedom”, “you just don’t understand”, “my rights”, “a conspiracy”, but what it really boils down to is choices and sacrifices. I can’t force people to make safe choices and I can’t force people to make the necessary sacrifices to ensure their safety. I cry nearly every day from the fear of losing someone I care about. I cry for the 140,000+ US fatalities whose families have already lost someone they cared about. I cry for the hundreds of thousands of people who are going to lose someone they care about before this is over. I wish I weren’t afraid for the people I love but it scares me so badly that sometimes I just feel empty inside.

I, alone, of everyone I know (outside of work) understand the reality of viruses and pathogenesis on a high level. I’m not THE expert, I’m not even a doctorate, but I understand it better than they ever will. And I have the benefit of my colleagues, my understanding of scientific literature, and the regular updates I receive in my job, to broaden and expand my knowledge. But it doesn’t matter – because my knowledge can’t save them. My example can’t save them. My pleading can’t save them. After all I can do the rest has to be up to others. I need to accept that. I need to accept that if and when something goes terribly wrong it’s not my fault. I did everything I could – to the point of people pushing me away, to the point of threats from the public, to the point of losing friends and family. The rest is out of my hands. I think if I can ever accept this truth I may, finally, start to feel okay.

Now, readers, I understand that this makes it seem like no one is listening to me. It’s not true. I have several family members who are taking this just as seriously as they should – I have several who don’t even need me to take this seriously. I have friends who want to learn and ask me questions all the time. I have people who give me hope that the others may come around. And I have you, who read despite the fact that this isn’t about gaming or food. So while I need to accept that I can’t save the people who aren’t listening as much as I wish they were, I also need to understand that there are those out there who do care and who are listening. Maybe focusing on them will help, too. Because if I can’t save everyone maybe I’ve helped save one.

And I know you’re all looking for a recipe – this is a recipe blog, after all. But I’m going to take the next post (or two, or three, or ten) for myself. I’m well aware that I may lose followers (if, indeed, any of you still exist out there) or have some other backlash that I am completely unaware of but I think it’s time to take the advice of my really good friend Kim and purge some of the anxiety that I’m going through right now.

This is maybe not going to be a happy post – it may even be downright depressing. So be warned before you proceed. This is going to be a post where I work on just expressing how I’m feeling, acknowledging the realities of my situation, and attempting to cope with the overwhelming strain of the situation I’ve been thrust into. This is probably 100% going to turn into a stream-of-consciousness post and now you’ll get to learn that I’m not necessarily that great at writing. So good luck if you decide to read. If not, this was really for me, anyway.

As some of you know I work for my state public health laboratory. I’m a microbiologist who started working in microbiology in 2007. I’ve held a variety of jobs within that field but I specialize in infectious diseases that have a high mortality rate. I’ve studied the immune response to and infection mechanisms of those types of diseases for 13 years. I’ve specifically worked in public health for over 8 years and have specialized in diseases that cause outbreaks or have high mortality rates. I’ve been a part of the flu response nearly every year, was a part of the Ebola testing team during the Ebola crisis a few years ago, and was the head of the tuberculosis program for my state for over a year. I’ve had entire semester-long classes dedicated to vaccine study and have been trained in epidemiology and epidemic and pandemic response. I’ve also spent the last few years programming data tracking systems for my state and working with the CDC and Association of Public Health Laboratories on data transfer and collection between entities. So to say that the current COVID-19 crisis is literally my area of expertise is an understatement. I have been trained for a pandemic of this nature for over 13 years. Everything I know, everything I have been taught, has prepared me to understand and extrapolate data and information in a very real way.

And yet, being trained for this situation has placed a burden upon me and my coworkers that very few people in our modern time have ever had to bear. Every public health expert, every laboratorian, every healthcare worker assigned to COVID-19 has been given the burden of the world to carry on our shoulders and, at first, it was easy to bear. We were praised (well, not us scientists as much as the doctors and nurses, but we pretended like we were praised along with them), we were deferred to as experts, people trusted us and believed us and were willing to sacrifice for the good of the people around them.

But then things got harder and we were asked to continue to bear a burden no one should be asked to bear. We’ve been asked to work obscene amounts of overtime with, in the case of my state, no overtime pay. We aren’t even paid for hours over 80 per 2 week pay period – we earn “comp time”, which is essentially PTO we can use at a later date… What later date? It expires every 6 months and, well, if you haven’t noticed the pandemic hasn’t let up enough to allow us to take that time off. So our overtime hours expire and we’ve worked 60+ hour weeks for 5 months straight for nothing. And when we ask when we will have relief – a day off, extra help, or even just not having to work 7 days a week anymore the answer is always “when the pandemic is over”. Which could take up to 2 or 3 more years… So what we’ve been told is that, in 2-3 years from now, we won’t be breaking ourselves anymore. Trust me – we’ve already broken.

But still it felt okay – we had people praising us (or, at least, the healthcare professionals) and people still looked to me for answers. I am the expert, after all. The ACTUAL, REAL expert. Until that wasn’t what happened anymore. People in public health started receiving death threats for trying to protect people by mandating masks. A stupid, simple thing – just wearing masks. No shoes, no shirt, no mask, no service. There is NO DIFFERENCE between not being able to shop naked and not being able to shop without a mask. Yet multiple public health experts have been forced to resign because the death threats got to be too much. There have been threats coming to my team, my coworkers, to the testing site collection teams, to the people who are still putting their lives and their physical and mental health on the line to protect the public. Because of any and all possible stupid reasons you can think of. Because people are scared and selfish and inconsiderate and think that threatening us will make a plague go away.

And then the threats on our jobs have started coming down from politicians. Public health experts have been removed from their positions because they pushed back against the politicians. My job, and the job of my coworkers, is threatened if I don’t complete irrational projects by insane due dates. The politicians know this is an election year and demand more than we can possibly give. And all we are trying to do, all we have ever tried to do, is our best. Working long hours, giving up our health and sanity and personal connections, barely surviving isn’t good enough to those in the ivory tower who care more about their image than their employees. And that doesn’t even cover the discrediting that is being done by major politicians against the public health experts who are trying to avert an even worse tragedy than we’ve found ourselves in. We’re doing our jobs and getting absolutely hung, drawn, and quartered by the politicians and the citizens we are trying to protect.

But that’s okay, right? As long as our families are here to support us… Well too bad that train pushed us off the rails a few months ago, too. When they started questioning my expertise with their favorite news channel’s host guessing at what things mean. Or insisted that the knowledge of someone in any old scientific field was equal to mine. Or want to stop me right there, I obviously haven’t considered the impact these measures have had on one aspect of life or another. When the lack of trust, the attempts to discredit me, and lack of care so many of them have shown for me began to happen was the day I truly broke under the strain. It was the day I realized that most of my relatives had completely ignored me, and almost no one had attempted to check up on me, though I constantly tried to check in with them to make sure everyone was armed with knowledge and knew someone was thinking about them.

That was when I felt the last reserve of my strength drain. Going from being the hero to the villain in a story is unpleasant. Especially when nothing has changed – I’m still trying to carry the burden of the pandemic, along with my coworkers and fellow healthcare workers, just the same as I was in April. The truth and the scope of the pandemic has not changed. NOTHING HAS CHANGED on our side. What has changed is the rest of you. I’m exhausted, mentally and physically, from fighting – fighting misinformation, social media, the news, the public, the protesters, the threats, the bosses bosses, the politicians, and my own relatives. I’m fighting so hard to protect people and I just keep getting thrown to the ground and under the bus, over and over again.

This is easily one of the worst tragedies of modern history. over 130,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 since February. You know the last time 130,000 people died from an event in the US? World War II. Though, the US involvement in World War II lasted 4 years and had a total of 405,000, which brings the average deaths per year to about 100,000. COVID-19 has already surpassed that average in 5 months. And, if we aren’t lucky and people continue to ignore the true scope of this pandemic, it’ll definitely surpass the total number of deaths from WWII. If we do, in the next few years, surpass 405,000 deaths from COVID-19 in the US that will make this current pandemic the deadliest event to happen in US history since the 1918 Great Influenza. The worst thing that has happened for over 100 years. Think about that.

Can we all try to be a little kinder and more considerate of the people who are trying to prevent this from becoming the biggest loss of life the US has ever seen? Can we stop being so callused to the fact that this is not going away and resolve to change our behavior for the long run in an effort to save people? If you realize this is the worst thing that has happened in 100 years maybe we can all resolve to adjust our lives for the meaningless time frame of a few months, a year, two max, to protect each other. I bet, if you promised to help shoulder some of this burden, I’d feel mine to be a little less. And then maybe I could get the good night’s sleep I haven’t had since February.

Hey, everyone! Did you know you’re the best? Like, really, the best people? You’re patience and kindness is unbelievably relieving to me. What with one thing and another, I’ve had to take a longer break than I intended. I’ve been dealing with surgery, illness, and family and work issues. So instead of the regular recipes and exciting new things you’ve been waiting for I think I need another few weeks to recover all the aspects of my life. This will help me get back into the swing of things and back to regularly posting much sooner than just half-heartedly throwing things out there.

Again, you guys are the best for sticking around! Hopefully it won’t be too much longer until I feel up to posting again!