After year of pandemic, I’m finally feeling bit of fear about COVID-19

By David McElroy · January 21, 2021

There are only five people who work every day in the building where my office is located. There are four people in the office next door and I’m the only person who’s in our real estate office every business day. Of the five people who work in the building, I’m the only one who hasn’t tested positive for COVID-19 at some point.

Because of changes in how we all work, our broker and agents rarely come into the office these days. I run operations for the company, though, so someone has to manage daily business in the quiet office. That’s me.

Several of our agents have tested positive for COVID-19 over the last few months. At least one of the tenants whose rentals I manage has had it. Another customer who came into the office told us a few days later that she had it. If I expand the circle to friends and family of people I know well, there are quite a few more. Some just disappear — and keep it quiet — for a few weeks so as not to alarm others.

A close friend told me that five men in her father’s Sunday school class have died from it over the last year.

I’m not an alarmist. I never sit around and worry about what I can’t control. But I’m finally starting to feel some fear for my personal safety. And after a year, I wonder how much longer this can go on without serious damage to our mental health.

I could tell you quite a few stories about people I know who’ve dealt with this new coronavirus, but most of the stories are pretty mundane when taken individually. It’s just the sheer number of cases that’s gotten to me lately — cases that have affected those who I personally know.

When it was still a fairly new danger, I listened to stories from nurse and doctor friends who work in hospitals. Their work load was exhausting — and it still is — and they were seeing far more death than was normal even for them. Their stories were overwhelming.

But I could compartmentalize what they were going through, because they were part of the industry which had to deal directly with the worst cases. Today, a tiny bit of the horrors they were dealing with has started bleeding into my life.

I can think of 18 people who I personally know who have had this disease. Nobody I know has died yet, but some have been hospitalized. At least one was near death, but survived.

I have always looked at such dangers around me in a rational and statistical way. I know that some tiny fraction of people who drive a car every day will have an accident. A smaller fraction will experience serious injury. A few will be maimed or killed. I can know that without being terrified to drive.

I’ve looked at the pandemic danger in the same way. I’ve thought that people who were panicking were overreacting compared to the likelihood of it affecting them or their loved ones. I’ve also been puzzled by those who pretended the issue was “fake” or unimportant. The truth was between the two.

I still like my statistical chances. If 400,000 Americans have died, that leaves about 320 million of us who haven’t. Those odds are pretty good.

But I can’t ignore the stories of those I know. I can’t quit thinking about the fact that I’m the only person who works in my building who hasn’t yet been hit by this.

My rational side still understands all the statistics. I understand that I have a decent chance of never contracting this and an even better chance of not being killed by it. But for the first time in the year since this started, I’ve felt some fear this week. And that is very unusual for me.

I have no interest in getting into the politics of the pandemic or the social issues. I’m not angry at anybody who takes any particular position on these matters, even though they’re angry and shouting at one another. All of that seems counterproductive to me.

But I worry about the few people who I really care about. If someone disappears for awhile, I worry what could be wrong. I’m concerned about a lot of unknowns.

Anybody who knows me understands that I’m not a worrier. I understand that life is full of dangers and we can’t do much about them.

But for the first time that I recall, I’m feeling a bit scared — and a bit helpless — about an invisible bug which could kill me or kill someone I love. And what I’m going through isn’t good for my mental health. Or for yours.

I pray that we can make it through this safely. And I pray that the long-term economic and mental health consequences don’t kill us even if we survive this nasty killer bug.

Share on Social Networks

If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

Related Posts