Views from readers: Getting past COVID + the life of nurses

Wise words

I wanted to share these words from an anonymous author:

“We wanted to help people. We were smart and driven. We loved science and physiology, and humans, so we made a commitment. We signed up. It was an honor.

We learned statistics and biochemistry, immunology and pathophysiology. We mastered genetics, virology, and pharmacology. We read scientific papers and learned how to interpret them. It was an honor.

We came running when you needed us. Literally, running down the hallway to the ICU, the trauma bay, labor and delivery. “I need help,” you said. “We can help,” we said. It was an honor.

You banged your pots and pans. You sent us pizzas and called us heroes. You needed us. We could help. So, we wore our masks, and our gowns, and our gloves, and our goggles. We decontaminated ourselves before going home and isolated ourselves from our families. We almost broke. It was an honor.

How quickly the joy turned to defeat. Elation to rage. You’ve learned to do your own research now. You know better than we do. Gaslighting is your language. You don’t want our help when we ask you to stay healthy. Yet you arrive at hospital doors begging for help at the end.

You stole our resources. You limited our ability to help those who did what they were supposed to do. You filled hospital beds and used up our ventilators. We can’t help any more. You broke us. There is no more honor.”

Steve Delahousey

Biloxi

Wrong direction?

Let’s take the long view of where we are heading as a country.

Public health, education and the economy is in a downward spiral. We can’t even unload ships sitting in harbors on the West or East Coast. Job numbers are dismissed by the media and the current administration.

Go to any retail store and the empty shelves tell a different story. Since the pandemic started, the Democratic Party has created more damage to our lives and livelihoods than anything since WWII.

The vaccine mandate by the same party has pushed the authoritarian culture to new highs, demanding your compliance or else.

The progressives is Washington, D.C., are holding legislation hostage in order to further develop a socialist agenda system that the media seems to embrace. The question is: Do they realize that eventually it will tear down their gated communities and they will join the commons, you and I?

Malcolm McBee

Gulfport

COVID thinking

In February 2020, President Trump said COVID would go away by itself.

Shortly thereafter, the president said COVID deaths paled in comparison with the 2009 N1H1 flu outbreak that killed 12,500 Americans.

The next month, in March 2020, Trump said he estimated that COVID would kill 100,000 Americans (roughly equivalent to two Vietnam wars or 38 Sept. 11th attacks). By April, President Trump said that a final U.S. COVID death toll somewhere in the range of 100,000 to 200,000 U.S. citizens would show that his administration “did a good job.”

On Jan. 3, 2021, the same week as the Capitol Building riot and his leaving office, President Trump said that the U.S. death rate of 350,000 was greatly exaggerated.

Last week, the U.S. Covid death toll exceeded 720,000. This means that more than 1 in 500 Americans have died from the disease. Covid deaths have reduced U.S. longevity by 1.13 years nationwide.

Yet, governors of large Republican voting states, such as Texas and Florida, continue to downplay the importance of vaccinations and masking in confined spaces. So does our governor, Tate Reeves.

And, yes, commentators on Fox News and other national media outlets, as well as social media sites, criticize the government’s effort to control disease spread by vaccinations and appropriate masking.

So, when will it end?

When will we set politics aside, to consider the history of the disease and the safety steps advocated by this nation’s top infectious disease experts? When will we follow the Christian teaching to treat your neighbor as yourself, by helping to stop the transmission of the disease to others in our lives?

Sadly, there presently are, and will be many more, Americans buried whose grave stones could be engraved: “ I did my own research.”

Charles A. Boggs

Long Beach