Corona virus dominated the news in 2020

 By SJ Otto

Tomorrow is the last day of the year 2020. That number sounded like something special when it began last January. But it has been a year full of dread.

Early in the year we heard in the news how the coronavirus spread all across China. It started clear back in January. Next it went to Europe. Italy was hit hard by the virus. And still in all this time it seemed so remote from America. It seemed like it couldn’t happen here. Then about March it started to hit the USA.

At first it was New York. That made sense since world trends usually come to New York firs. But it didn’t take long for Coronavirus to spread across the country. 

It still seemed remote to me because I live in Kansas—the middle of the US and most of Kansas is rural. Kansas is one of the last places most trends end up. But even today, Kansas has as many Covid-19 deaths and as many cases as most other states. We’ve had our hospitals filled up, just like every other state. We had a nearly complete shut down of businesses, such as bars and theatres back in April. The state let up, a little later, and then it clamped back down. Every one now wears a mask when they go into a business, such as a grocery store or liquor store.

Not long ago I went to my brother, John’s favorite bar, Judy’s. The people there were not wearing masks. There was no social distance. There were no protections at all. Both my brother and I found the same thing at a local bar I like, Dudley’s. We are both concerned and worried about catching that virus. My brother is seven years younger than me. But that doesn’t make him real young. I am 65 and have diabetes. If I get the virus, it doesn’t look good. On top of our ages are the grim reports that people much younger than us have died from Coronavirus.  For example Rep.-elect Luke Letlow (R-La.) has died from the coronavirus. He was 41.

As the year comes to an end we have a lot of hope ahead of us. There is the vaccine. However there are some right-wing nut jobs that are spreading fear of taking the vaccine and they are denying that the virus is a real threat. They have denounced the Coronavirus as a hoax. Unlike the nuts, my brothers and other members of my family plan to get and take the vaccine when it is offered to us. For the next few months we will all continue to wear masks when we go into stores or businesses. I’m hoping that by summer we can start to return to normal. Maybe this time next year the pandemic will be over. Maybe the masks will be gone. It is hard to tell. Will we ever get back to the way it was before? Who knows? I have never in my life seen an epidemic or pandemic as bad as the Coronavirus. I have heard about all these different epidemics, such as the Spanish flue epidemic, from around the beginning of the 20^th Century. It lasting from February 1918 to April 1920, it infected 500 million people – about a third of the world's population at the time.     

We are living in strange times. But 2021 holds out hope that things will be different.

 

Pix by How to Use Masks during the Coronavirus Pandemic - Scientific American & Spanish Flu- Wikipedia.