Fred Boyles MDI Contributor
Is the enemy coronavirus or is the enemy fear?
Lions Den is a Marco Polo team. We check-in by posting a video of what’s happening in our day two or three times a week for 2 to 5 minutes.
One of my teammates on my “Lions Den” team posted a video for the team, as he ranted on how he was accused, judged, and prosecuted due to his wife being in a room with a person who tested positive for the coronavirus.
His wife got a call from the CDC tracing team and was informed she had been in the same room as a person who had tested positive. She was interviewed and asked if she had any symptoms. She replied that she and her son had a slight fever. Within the hour, a medical team dressed in protective gear showed up at their apartment house to test her and her son.
The neighbors wanted to know what was going on. The phone started to ring off the hook. The CDC called my teammate’s workplace, and told his boss to remove him from the workplace immediately. He was dressed in protective clothing and sent out to stand in the parking lot. His boss came rushing outside and started scolding him on how stupid he could be to bring that disease to work. My teammate countered with the fact the boss posted about a party on Facebook the previous week. It then escalated to threats and an urging to fight. Ultimately both he and his wife and son tested negative but were told to isolate for two weeks.
My teammate is resentful and is convinced the whole thing is a hoax to get Trump out of office. The Democratic Party has victimized him. He lives in a state of being a victim.
In 2014 there was an Ebola epidemic in West Africa, which killed 11,000 people. On the streets of Ireland, everyone was in a state of fear. The hospital workers in Dublin had been warned to prepare for the worst. Consequently when a young black man came into their hospital the nurses and doctors refused to go near him. Finally one of the doctors stepped up to care for him, her name Dr. Murray. This young black man died three hours later. It turns out he was in the last stages of cancer and did not have Ebola.
Dr. Murray wrote: “If we are not prepared to fight fear and ignorance as actively and thoughtfully as we fight any other virus, it is possible that the fear can do terrible harm to vulnerable people, even in places that have never seen a single case of the infection during an outbreak. And a fear epidemic can have far worse consequences then issues of race, privilege, and language.”
What has helped me is to read up on epidemics. The forgotten influenza: the plague has struck several times in the last 2000 years, killing half of the world’s population. The 1918 flu killed 50-100 million worldwide. The 1968 Hong Kong flu. One million died worldwide, and 100,000 killed in the US. This flu is still with us every year and kills mostly people over 65. The fear that went with it is mostly forgotten and rarely recalled.
I had the flu in February and March and have not fully recovered; it has weakened my lungs and increased my asthma symptoms.
I have a new level of commitment to preventative health regiments of steroids, live-food plant-based diets, sleep, and exercise.
In my opinion, we will learn to live with this, and in time the fear will fade.
Knowledge from reliable sources helps me plan for the flu and manage my anxiety.
And deal with not only a coronavirus but my fear.