It’s Getting Everyone.
COVID has struck again where I live. It started a few weeks before school let out, when Shane’s friend’s vaccinated brother got it. I pondered whether or not to test Shane; he’d eaten lunch with his friend. But the friend never got it – just the brother.
Then my friend called and said her son had been exposed at school. They wouldn’t tell her where or how he’d been exposed: which class, which activity, what time of day. She didn’t know if he’d been exposed randomly or close-up and unmasked. Eventually – after exposing countless other people – the vaccinated and boosted friend’s son also got it. As did most of his friends.
Before Christmas, more people I knew had it – and more got it – over the holidays. These people were all over the country, and all of them had been vaccinated. Some had already had their booster shots. “Breakthrough” seems to be inaccurate in the case of Omicron. It’s getting everyone, everywhere, and fast.
I hold on to hope from the science: everyone who was vaccinated is getting well. They are not being hospitalized for weeks, and they aren’t dying. They are fighting it off – something we did not know how to do only a year ago.
I keep thinking of a video I saw in 2020, showing how exactly the virus worked. Knowing how it works is the key to figuring out how to stop it – so I was interested in that video. The viral cells started in the nose and what made it dangerous is that it replicated itself, like most viruses do. But after a few days, it moved into the lungs and replicated itself so freely there that it didn’t allow any room for air in those lungs. That’s how people with COVID die so quickly.
The people who made the vaccines knew this, and they acted accordingly. They may not have known how to kill the virus, but they knew how to stop it from replicating so wildly. So Pfizer and Moderna made vaccines that stop the replication of the viral cells in the respiratory system.
Even though the virus is spreading like wildfire right now, many people’s bodies are already fighting it off as quick as it comes, thanks to two vaccines and a booster. And the people who have these vaccines have the added bonus of stopping the cell replication in the lungs – so even if they get a “breakthrough” infection, and the virus makes them sick, they will fight it off.
I am not saying I am no longer afraid. There are people who are sick, who have serious illnesses who could still die because their bodies are not able to fight COVID. I feel for those people, and I want so badly for this to be over – for COVID to be defeated and not deadly to anyone anymore.
But for right now, since I can do nothing except my own part, I want to beg my 3.2 loyal readers to get vaccinated, to get boosted, to make sure that everyone they know is vaccinated – before COVID reaches anyone they love.
It’s hard to fight this disease; it’s harder still to watch the multitudes die. The vaccine does make a difference. It’s how we stop the virus. It’s the only way. And a year after vaccines became available, I’m still begging for people to do this, so they don’t die from a virus that didn’t need to kill them.