Rant #2,451: Who Will Answer

It is Friday, July 17 ... just another day on the calendar.

Even during the pandemic that we are going through, my Yahoo home page is filled to the gills with stories that absolutely demand my attention.

With states like California, Arizona and Texas going through major spikes in coronavirus cases, with more and more people going into hospitals and getting really sick, my Yahoo home page never fails to deliver to me the news I absolutely need to read about:

"Facing Up To 60 Years For Killing Her Five-Year Old, Mom Tells Court 'I Miss Him and There's Nothing I Wouldn't Do To Bring Him Back'"

"Yes, You May Be Reading the Wrong Horoscope. No, It Isn't NASA's Fault That Your Zodiac Sign Changed"

And here is one that I simply, absolutely, positively must read, and if I don't, my day will not be whole:

"Kate Upton Sips Wine By the Pool In a [sic] Oversize T-Shirt and the Fuzziest Sandals"

Heck, I want to see Upton in a bikini and this is what I am presented with?

And heck, where is Elizabeth Hurley in her latest, greatest bikini photo to show us all how women who are over 50--and have no career at all--are supposed to look?

I make fun of these things, but I guess they serve a purpose: to take us away from the real news of the day, and whatever the real news is, it most probably revolves around the coronavirus. which has permeated every facet of our lives ... and the scary thing is it might just do so not just for now, for for the years still to come.

Every facet of our life has been changed by this thing, and I have some thoughts on what I feel about the coronavirus and how it will affect us now and into the future.

First of all, I do not mind wearing a face mask ... well, I actually do mind wearing a face mask, but if it prevents the spreading and the contacting of the virus even one iota, it is something that I won't argue about doing, even though while I don't mind wearing a mask, I kind of do, if you know what I mean.

I think the coronavirus is real, I don't think it is a scam for total control of our lives as some people think it is.

But I do believe that however best we can, we absolutely must get on with our lives.

Yes, there are thousands of new cases of the coronavirus being detected each and every day, but let's be honest about it: 99 percent of the positives amount to very little real sickness. Most people who get it are asymptomatic, or at the most, have a few symptoms.

That is not denagrating the 1 percent of the population who gets it, and gets it bad, really bad, bad enough to go into the hospital, and some never coming out. One is too many when you are talking about that horrid portion of the disease.

But we are basically shutting down and changing our lives for 1 percent of those who get the disease and actually suffer from it.

Does that make sense. shutting down for 1 percent of the population when 99 percent of us who get it are generally OK?

I don't have a real answer to that question, and I have gone back and forth on this subject many times in my mind.

The reason I cannot come to a personal conclusion about this is that we still don't know the long-term affects of the virus. We have no idea how long the antibodies last--it seems that they don't last long in some people, as we have seen people get the virus not once, but twice--and we have no idea how, over the long-term, contacting the virus does to our bodies and our health.

We do know that this virus spreads like wildfire, but we also know that testing is funny, and one can have a positive test one day, and a negative test another day soon after, using the same exact test.

We do not know precisely how many people have actually gotten the coronavirus--my family and I tested negative a few weeks ago, as you know, but could we have had it before that and were asymptomatic and didn't know, or do we have it now and are again asymptomatic?--and we don't know how much of the population will get the disease one way or the other. I remember reading that doctors have predicted that 80 percent of the population will eventually get the disease at one level or another, so without daily testing, there is no way in determining who really has it and who really does not have it--or who has had it in the recent past.

With all of that rolled into a ball. I personally do not see how we can shut down our civilization again. Shutting it down once destroyed so many things, including businesses and yes, lives, that I can't see doing it again.

Look, people are going to get the disease, some people are going to be asymptomatic; some people will have some symptoms; some people will get sick from it; and yes, unfortunately. some people are going to die from it.

No, we should not be like Sweden, which just about completely ignored the coming of the virus and is now suffering from the aftermath of ignoring the warning signs. The country did little to nothing to protect its people, and now has one of the highest coronavirus instances in Europe and the world.

We can continue our lives, but with great precautions.

We can reopen our businesses and get on with our lives, as long as we do it responsibly and not go whole hog into anything, like Florida did.

We must open schools, because education is tied into so many other things, but again, we must open them responsibly, even though to be quite honest about it, opening the schools creates a logistical challenge that I doubt even Solomon would be able to figure out.

We will get through this, but we have to get through this responsibly, and our leaders must all--and I do mean all of them--stop using the virus as a political football, throwing us all off course and taking us away from what we should all be focusing on, which is eradicating the disease forever.

And once that cure is found, we must all get vaccinated, whether we like it or not.

We have learned from the measles what can happen if even a few people don't get vaccinated, and we certainly don't want that to happen in this instance.

Personally, I still am trying to wrap my thoughts around what we should do and what we are being told to do, and often, the two things do not mesh.

Are we fighting the disease, or is this a great social experiment to see if we can follow orders to the letter, making our country and our world into one that is robotic rather than one where we can think our own?

I just don't know right now, I just don't know.

But as I think about it a little further, I will continue to wear my face mask, continue to observe social distancing, continue to go with the flow we have been given--

And no, I don't have to like it.

Have a good weekend, and I will speak to you again on Monday.