I was a local teenager during the 1980s AIDS health crisis. I do not remember being told that there were too few condoms on the market so we should give all the condoms to the health care professionals! Of course there is a difference between the AIDS virus and COVID-19 virus. The comparison is far-fetched. But both AIDS and COVID-19 don’t just go away while people stay home and watch television or attend to their children.
I get that people want to forget already the sickness and how unprepared we were for this coronavirus. There are, however, many hard questions, decisions, and possible wrong turns ahead for ourselves and our leaders and communities. Tuning out is no more the solution than is over stressing.
While sheltering in place and [keeping] physical distance are important things we all can do, testing and voluntary contact tracing should be ramping up concurrently to stop the virus spreading. Is that happening? Why or why not? This is just one of the questions communities must ask. Doctors don’t have all the answers. A pandemic is a public, not private, health crisis. Everyone must be part of the fight against the virus.
We can be sure that the USA did not create COVID-19, but what we do with it is our choice as a nation, state, community, family, individual.
Camina Tripodi
Santa Maria
This article appears in Apr 16-23, 2020.