The pandemic is spreading wider and also coming closer, shrinking around each one of us.
My brother got sick last week. He was the first one in the household. Then dad got a fever. Then my brother's girlfriend felt weak. Mom is also not feeling 100 per cent, but hanging in there.
A few days after my brother's first symptoms his test came in positive for COVID-19. Seems that the system is badly overwhelmed, so other family members didn't have tests done yet. Anyway, I'm not too worried about tests at this point, as the rest of the symptoms are alike.
They all are feeling somewhat alright, and I'm hoping it will stay like that until they fully recover. But ever since the news came in, I've been really worried for pretty obvious reasons.
First, my family is in St.-Petersburg. The distance always intensifies my worries, since I feel that I can't really help (not that there would be anything I could do if I was there, but it doesn't help the restless brain).
But my main concern now is that hospitals in most Russian regions have been working at over full capacity for a while now. The other day ambulance ended up bringing COVID-19 patients to the doors of the Ministry of Health because the hospitals refused to take them in since they were overfilled (there are not enough beds, so outside of patients lying in corridors, there is also such a thing as sitting hospitalization now).
It's pretty chaotic and seems that quite often if people need medical help they get lost in this chaos.
Besides, since February I've been reading and educating myself on COVID-19, but the only thing I learned so far is we still hardly know anything about this novel coronavirus (research takes time, a lot of time, whether we want it or not). There are a few personal cases in which every person in the household or company got sick, but one. Why? No answer yet.
Several friends of mine went through the disease, some had unexpected after-effects such as a sore back or brain damage, others hardly knew they had it. No understanding of why it goes so different either. And so no way to predict what's going to happen to my family.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, in my head I was debating what was better, to meet the enemy, meaning to get sick, hoping that I'll get it in a light form, and get over with it at least for some time; or do my best to avoid getting sick, as going through a serious disease was never a good thing in general.
I don't know if COVID parties - gatherings with the alleged intention to catch the virus – are still a thing in the States, but I spent quite a bit of time in the summer trying to understand how I felt about it. Just a refresher, last summer there was news about young Americans throwing parties and inviting at least one person confirmed with COVID-19. The first person to get infected would receive a payout.
At the end of September, the New York Times reported on a Texas man, 30, dying after attending one of those gatherings.
As ridiculous as it sounds, the idea of an unknown enemy is still scaring me big time. Unless we personally experience something that's a threat to every person, we keep granting that unknown enemy extra power. We tend to be more afraid of it than we would be if we've already met it. So I could see a shade of somewhat like common sense behind those parties.
But for the most part, I think it was an adrenaline rush, youth's maximalist protest and provocation. On the other hand, leaving aside the unknown factor, there are a lot of real reasons to be worried about the virus.
I used to smoke before, and I was one of those people who would say we are all going to die one day, so why not smoke? It was later that I figured that even though one day death will come for me, I still don't jump under the bus and instead always check the road before crossing. (I quit smoking soon after that discovery).
Some of the latest research suggests that the earlier patients who had COVID-19 in Wuhan and other places don't have antibodies anymore. So there is a good chance that we all are going to check it out for ourselves sooner or later. But now that COVID came really close to my family, and the unknown part of it worries me not the less, I know that I don't want to get to know the enemy intentionally at this time. At least so that my loved ones don't have to go through what I feel now.
