COVID-19 and the Future
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Ah, COVID-19, ever heard of it? Seems you can’t go anywhere today without hearing about this virus. I go up to the mall and I see people wearing full respirators as well as face masks. It seems a little odd in my small town considering there’s no one here that has the virus. There have been absolutely no cases. My local hospital is prepared for the virus, but the staff there have nothing to do because the virus hasn’t materialized.
Now, I want to mention that COVID-19 is a serious illness. People have been dying from it. This occurs whenever there is a new illness. Currently, we have around 2.1+ million people infected with this virus worldwide. In case you were wondering, the world’s population is 7.7 billion. That is a very low amount of people infected with this virus. I don’t know how high the numbers of infected or going to go, but so far the infection rate is not that high. Perhaps social distancing is working.
The problem with that is that you’ll never stop a virus. Once we stop social distancing, the virus will still be there. People will still get infected with this virus no matter what we do. The only pathogen we have been able to stop is smallpox. All other viruses and pathogens still exist. The Back Death from the Middle Ages still exists.
Why don’t we shut down the world whenever we have an ebola outbreak? That is an absolutely horrific virus and one that you’re probably likely to die from if you get it. Yet whenever we have this virus breakout somewhere we don’t shut down the world. What we do is isolate the main area where this virus is in an attempt to contain it.
The natural thing to do with the COVID-19 virus is to isolate people in old age homes. The reason for this is that this is where most of the infections are taking place. While some young people have been infected by this virus, the vast majority of people are elderly and those with compromised immune systems.
We had another infection that used to impact people with compromised immune systems called HIV/AIDs. We never shut down in the world for AIDs. I grew up in the 1980s so I lived through the era of AIDS. It was an absolutely horrific thing that happened to people, yet we did not shut down the world during this insanely tragic event.
