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COVID-19 still looms

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I hoped my family was done with COVID-19. I was, unfortunately, wrong.

For the second time, someone in my family has com e down with COVID-19 for the second time. My wife had it twice — once in early 2021 and again this past March.

My daughter also has had it once, but all it did was leave her at home with me, councing off the walls while she waited out her quarantine.

Well, around the same time my wife was dealing with her second round of the coronavirus, my middle child and youngest son was coming down with his first. I say “first” because as of yesterday, he’s got it again.

He’s taking it pretty well, letting us all know via the family group text with a message that included a photo of his notice of having tested positive at the doctor’s office that morning and the text, “Imagine getting Covid in 2022… again.”

He said he woke up in the middle of the night feeling “cruddy” and decided rather than just go on to school (he’s a teacher) and potentially infect other people, he would go ahead and go get tested. Good thing he did, because the new school year is starting up on Monday and he definitely didn’t want to be responsible for putting half the West Junior High staff in quarantine.

I think he’s going to be just fine in the long run. He said he was basically just tired and his Mama made him some chicken and dumplings, which I’m sure helped. Last time he had COVID-29 he had a lingering cough for weeks but

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he says this time, he’s not really even coughing, so maybe it’s going to be a minor case.

It does remind me, though, that you just never know what this virus is going to do to your body. I remember a while back overhearing a conversation between two people who had both had COVID-19, with one of them having it twice. There appeared to have been a little confusion about exactly how the “variants” work, because one of them said, “Yeah, I got this omicron, but it’s all good. It ain’t nothing compared to that coronavirus.” I think I knw what he was getting at but it still made me chuckle.

And really, I know that this pandemic is still a threat and no, it’s not really a laughing matter when people are dying every day, but I guess it’s like gallows humor or whatever… laugh to keep from crying, right?

It is important, though, to understand that this virus is still out there infecting people every day. From March of 2020 to around July of 2021, I included an almost daily report on the new case numbers and the death toll from COVID-19 in the paper for the State of Arkansas and for Crittenden County. County Judge Woody Wheeless, West Memphis Mayor Marco McClendon and State Senator Keith Ingram were all also very vigilant is getting vital updates and guidelines out to the community. Nowadays, you don’t really see that. Even the Arkansas Department of Health is now only issuing weekly updates instead of daily updates.

Is it because we’re just suffering from “pandemic fatigue” or is it really not as big of a deal now?

In case you’re wondering, there were 31 new COVID-19 cases reported in the county yesterday.

That’s the highest since there were 37 new cases reported on March 22.

Now that school is either back in session or about to be back in session all over the county, you can expect that number to go up. What will schools do in response? Masks?

Social distancing? Virtual learning?

We’ll have to wait and see, but it’s not over yet. Not at all…

Be safe out there, y’all!

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