Custodio: Thoughts on Covid

Custodio: Thoughts on Covid

I WAS sitting quietly by my window having coffee and a garlic cream cheese bun when a thought crossed my mind. What if my dearly departed sister suddenly showed herself to me from the garden? I imagined her smiling and then waving at me, short of actually saying: "Hi! How are you? I'm okay! Stop crying!" Well. Tears filled my eyes instantly. You never get over losing someone you love.

Imagine losing someone from Covid. You are isolated from family members and friends when you test positive. You get whisked off to SPMC when you have moderate to severe symptoms so that you can be monitored well. No visitors. It may seem really harsh to enforce this but it helps to prevent any further infection from spreading. When a Covid patient passes on, he leaves the world without the comfort of having his loved ones around him. He won't have a wake and will be cremated to further protect everyone. I know it feels harsh and heartless but that's how it is when you're dealing with a virus that we still don't know much about. The medical community is trying its best to discover as much as it can, but things like this really take time.

I do think about how much our lives have changed since March this year. Who would have thought masks and PPEs would be so commonplace? Sometimes I giggle at the thought thinking of how I used to think it was weird that they wore masks in South Korea and Japan. Now we all look the same!

The pandemic is not a hoax. It is real. It's unfair to say that this is all about money because lives have been devastated and changed forever because of it. A lot of my colleagues as health care workers have given their lives for it, and a lot of us bravely face the risk it entails just to be able to serve the populace. Things are definitely not the same especially with the strict protocols that limit the load we take in, but we are still here. It takes more than just money to keep things going in the time of Covid. Even if hospitals are compensated for taking in Covid patients, it will never surpass pre-covid gains. It will never compensate the risks, the stress, and the worries of the health care workers and their families. It will never pay for the discrimination of others and the dangers of being attacked just because you are wearing a scrub suit and identified as a health care worker. We all know this has happened, quite sadly, to a lot of our frontliners.

I understand that what is happening is overwhelming. We are all dreaming the same bad dream, hoping to wake up soon. But this is reality. The new normal is here and so we must live through it together. Let us work together so we can overcome the surging challenges of Covid.

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