Fear or Hope?

To the Editor:

I have considered our pre-COVID life and our lifelong acceptance of sickness. Whether it’s sun and melanoma, tobacco and heart/lung disease, alcohol and liver complications, colds, flu, chicken pox, food poisoning, stomach virus, bladder infections and dozens of others smaller and greater. We have a growing acceptance and adjustment to the fact that we have always had infectious threats in our environment. I would never make light of COVID. Over the years we have accepted as a culture that we do not live in a sterile world.

It is time for us to accept the reality that COVID and its progeny as well as other vicious diseases will be with us. COVID will be with us for some time, perhaps as a newly added issue to our acceptance that we live in an imperfect world. As with any infectious disease, stay home. The preponderance of COVID cases recover after a period of convalescence.

Address your fears and don’t panic. In addition to prevention and a cure, we must come to grips with our own dread of COVID. We must learn to live with the fact that everyone will get sick several times in their life. Are we creatures of fear or creatures of caution, endurance, adjustment and hope?

Jim Howse

La Grange