Control: People’s Reactions to a Super Psycho Death Virus

I, Dalton Lewis, admit to a shameful truth: we don’t react very well to tragedy. We have lost hundreds of thousands of people to this thing and have imploded as a society due to disagreements over this super psycho death virus, this coronavirus known as Covid-19. Some people won’t wear masks inside. Some people have huge parties without wearing masks. Some people won’t get tested or admit to symptoms. Why? Why do we behave poorly?

America is the worst country in the world at handling this virus, this Covid-19. Chicago has more gun crimes this summer than previous summers. 100 or more people were arrested for rioting. The mayor didn’t see a connection between this and the death of George Floyd. That deserves peaceful protest by Black Lives Matter. This wasn’t that. This was breaking and looting and stealing and destroying. This wasn’t justified.

Experts want us to get tested. They say that getting tested helps epidemiologists to trace the travel of the disease. It can also remove you from situations in which one might give the virus to someone, say one’s elderly parents one lives with. (That’s me — I live with my elderly parents. If I get it, they will probably get it.) Still many people don’t get tested, and sometimes the test gets it wrong.

A dry cough or headache are symptoms. Not tasting your toothpaste? Symptom. Hit a wall while running? Symptom. There are many symptoms. I ignore these symptoms because I don’t think that I have it. I don’t think I have them, but I want to be careful. Should I get tested? I don’t think that I have it.

One can lose a sense of smell or taste. Fever is a common symptom. Why do these things happen but people don’t get tested?

There are people arguing for opening everything up, and that is causing more deaths and more people contracting it. It’s been six months and no vaccine. Wouldn’t you think that America, with all its intellectual and economic might, would cure this by now? Don’t you think that they’d have a vaccine by now? But nothing. We have nothing by now except masks to wear in public and a test for the virus.

People are now afraid of hospitals as a result of this. Mexico has 52,000 deaths, and the numbers are higher because people aren’t going to the hospital when they get sick. Those places are places of death and disease, we are told. When I go to the hospital for my monthly test to see if my medications are killing me I notice strong measures to prevent the disease from spreading. Someone takes my temperature before I enter, and everyone wears masks and has hand sanitizer. There are clear glass dividers between us and the employees at desks finding us our help. Still people don’t show up when they need to show up. Why?

In the world of Warhammer a tournament happened this weekend. I saw it on Facebook. 24 or so people packed one large room, and some of them wore masks but some didn’t. I imagine that many of them spread the disease. I worry about these sorts of events. We aren’t ready for that yet.

What do we do? We lose our minds when this stuff happens. We go crazy. I don’t know what to say except that we aren’t handling this crisis very well.

Thanks, and take care, friends.