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Ridiculous, yes? - to run a medically-based blog and to have no specific posts addressing the defining medical issue of the early twenty-first century. I drafted a post on COVID months ago but never got around to completing it, but it's nearly a year later and here we are. We continue to be plagued by The Virus and the vaccine is just beginning to be rolled out.

Like everything else about the COVID phenomenon, the vaccine is surrounded by fierce argument and conflict. There are groups who state that preference should be given to various groups based on age, race, profession; or conversely that these groups should NOT be given preference as there are other groups that need it more. All of these arguments have a grain or more of truth. But as happens so often, each group is ignoring or downgrading the needs of other groups at the expense of their own. Not to mention that there are many potential recipients who plan to refuse the vaccine for various reasons.

The good news is that testing accuracy has improved, and the majority of those who get COVID don't get that sick. For those who do get really sick, the immediate and long-term consequences are severe. I type this as I sit at home on my last day of quarantine (I tested positive on January 2). I was one of the exceedingly fortunate ones who never got that sick. It was the equivalent of a nasty cold, and I still can't smell or taste much of anything. 

This thing spreads. Our little epic began just before Christmas when one of my parents' caregivers informed me that she had tested positive. Her husband and son are two of the other caregivers and they tested positive a day or two later. Then everybody else got sick. Do you know how difficult it is to find people willing to care for COVID-positive elderly? Pretty damn hard. My mother was coughing heavily and after examining her it was clear that she had bronchitis at the very least. I dragged my parents in to our urgent care on December 26; they tested positive and I was negative. I helped care for them as we frantically searched for a home health company willing to take on COVID positive patients, and finally found one. (My mother is bedridden and can't even sit up by herself, so this was necessary.) 

One week later with the onset of cough I retested, and this time I was positive. One of our regular caregivers and her daughter both wound up in the hospital with low oxygen, but my parents never ran a fever and their oxygen levels remained good. We were so, so lucky.

Many were and are much worse off. Plenty of people younger than I have died from COVID or are still disabled from it with severe shortness of breath, memory issues and cardiac problems. The US was unable to react to the infection in an organized manner, as we run more on a state-based system than federal; so some states reacted better than others, plus travel was not locked down as soon as it could have been. (I'm looking at you, New York.) This assisted the spread of the virus over the holiday season last year. 

Speaking of New York, many state/county/city governments packed the elderly into nursing homes like sardines and then we had to watch them die, in many cases alone and abandoned by terrified health care workers. The fact that 2020 was also an election year contributed to the general chaos as blame was thrown like hand grenades, resulting in a massive delay and waste of effort which could have been put to much better use in reacting to the pandemic.