We are about two and a half years in on the Covid-19 pandemic now. And driving around or going into stores here in Florida, you could get the idea that it is all over and done with. Virtually no one wears a mask any more.

There are exceptions. My wife and I always wear masks in stores. But not now since we don’t go into stores. The two positive test kits you see in the image above are ours.

We are both fully vaxxed except for the second booster. Some strategic procrastination on my part kept us from this because I was having trouble scheduling a “down day,” you know that day when you feel crappy after getting a Covid vaccine shot. Well, that “not yet, but soon” attitude probably cost us in spite of other Floridians probably considered us as overdoing the mask thing.

The fact that we got the first two Moderna shots in 2020 and the booster some months back, is probably what kept us at home and not in the hospital. For us the symptoms have been like a bad cold and persistent flu. We’re lucky.

How did we get it despite precautions? Simple. We screwed up somewhere. We were in the presence of someone who had it and didn’t know it. That has been the primary trap of this disease from the start—you can be infected and spreading it and be totally unaware that you might be harming someone.

For me, the idea that we might have passed it on to friends and family before we became aware of having it was truly frightening. The first thing I did after testing positive was hit the phones, calling friends and family and sending up flares. Luckily no one got it. I called a restaurant where we had eaten to warn the owner, an old friend, to make sure she and her staff were okay. By all reckoning it looks like we didn’t pass it around.

But here we sit and have for the past two weeks. Today is the first day I’ve had the energy to do some actual writing. I have been able to get bits of work done, but concentration on more complex projects, not so much. Hopefully this little post precedes getting some real progress made on real work.

Meanwhile couch cushion compression therapy (my code name for relentless binge watching) has been the name of the game.

The Broader Picture

While most people we see around act like the pandemic is over, it is definitely not. Last week’s statistics were showing over 100,000 new cases per day. And one can be pretty certain that positive cases are radically under reported. I know this because my positive test and my wife’s were done at home and are not any agency’s radar.

The Covid-19 pandemic has killed over 1 million Americas to date. The last thing we need now is to become desensitized to this number. Covid-19 has killed more Americans than almost all of our recent wars combined and in less time.

For someone vaccinated repeatedly, Covid symptoms appear as a nasty cold or flu. Our symptoms are survivable albeit annoying. But for unvaccinated people it can still be deadly. And there are still a lot of unvaccinated people out there. In Florida that number is close to 25 percent. There are some medical contraindications to getting vaccinated, but not many. We have one friend who has a blood clotting disorder whose doctor said no way. Too many others still subscribe to the lunacy that the vaccines are really a Bill Gates plot to plant microchips to track everyone—of course these folks write and read these crazy ideas on the very smart phones and devices that DO track them.

My wife and I are going to be fine. We’ve avoided the worst symptoms like out of control inflammation and pneumonia. But this is a wake-up call for us as to our responsibility to others.

There is nothing wrong with wearing a mask when you’re out and about. It ought to be considered a badge of responsibility not a sign of paranoia. We are not in a cowboy society where every person is reliant only on himself. Like it or not, our world is inter-reliant and interdependent. It is our care for others as well as ourselves that sets us apart.