I can’t sleep thinking about any of my loved ones being in the hospital and I can’t see them, be with them. I can’t stand it. Mom is on lockdown in memory care, if it gets in there, I got no Mom, and I can’t even see her. Much as I have bitched about her, I can’t. And my fella with a serious underlying condition.
A few things scare me about this.
[ul][li]First, how contagious it is.[/li][li]Next, the number of people, especially in authority, who are not taking it seriously.[/li][li]Another thing is that we do not know how long the current restrictions in place, especially here in China, will last. There are a lot of families that are separated because of this. My wife is in Korea with her parents and there is no telling when I can go there or she can return here.[/li][li]Any serious disease for which there is no cure, but the treatment is “treat the symptoms” always scares me. I might be wrong as I am not a medical doctor, but that’s what this seems like to me.[/li]Finally, I really do not ever want to be hospitalized in China.[/ul]
What scares me most about the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is how long it has taken many government official to respond to it despite empathetic warnings by public health officials and how poorly prepared even the industrial nations are to deal with it, much less poorer nations with less resources and governance. The socioeconomic impacts, which have their own negative health and mortality outcomes, may be even worst than the disease itself. These are terrible for outcomes of this pandemic, even though the worst case fatality rates are probably less than 1% overall and less than 10% of the seriously afflicted, but moreso for an actually virulent pandemic with CFRs in the double digit range.
We are, collectively, so wholly unprepared for the global pandemic that epidemiologists have been warning is inevitable that I don’t know if industrial civilization could survive a really serious pandemic without devolving into pre-industrial living standards for an indeterminate period. We urgently need more robust response and financial systems that can weather this kind of challenge because this is not going to be the last or worst pandemic we will face.
Stranger
What Monty said, although I’m in the U.S.
I’m scared of the unknown. I’m a teacher and I haven’t seen “my” kids in almost 3 weeks, and I’m not sure when, or even if, I’ll see them again. I’m well aware that ATM I’m very lucky to still be employed, but emceeing an online class is not the same.
Will this last a month? A year? Two years? When will life go back to normal? I want to plan a vacation. Hell, I want to be able to go th the grocery store without worrying about catching some exotic disease.
The unknown has always scared me.
A couple of things:
- The ability of COVID 19 to be transmitted pre- and a- symptomatically.
- The belief that only the aged are at the greatest risk. Look, even if the young and healthy are considerably less apt to die, that doesn’t affect their ability to host and transmit this disease. So many people are urging relaxing distancing and work guidelines without acknowledging that basic fact.
There is scared and then there is scared.
I can name a number of people close to me who would be almost certain not survive. I’m not too comfortable with the odds for ordinary folk.
In some ways, maybe we are lucky. This pandemic is serious enough to focus some minds, and maybe we will see some improvement in preparedness and mindset. One of the worst outcomes would be, ironically, for it to fizzle out. We would endure storm of “I told you so’s” from exactly the people who need to be swayed, and we would end up worse off in our ability to cope with a really major pandemic.
Where there is chaos, there is opportunity. For agents of good and evil. I don’t imagine things are quiet in the background.
This new week April 6th - 12th scares the bejeebus out of me.
I am afraid to think how bad it’s gonna be.
I’m afraid of someone bringing the virus to me. I’m housebound for the duration. My family are also stuck here. At least we’re together.
What worries me the most are loved ones who are particularly vulnerable. I’m probably in that category myself, due to age and heart condition, but I’ve had some recent tests and am otherwise healthy and on effective medication and don’t really worry about myself at all. It’s those with specific conditions like COPD or more extreme old age that I really worry about. While most of us are in Canada, two of them live in NYC, which is not the place to be right now. I also worry about our dedicated health care professionals, who are at risk every single day, and who we totally depend on. I guess in general what scares me the most is that there is no definite end in sight, only a situation that is generally worsening.
Honestly, I’m most scared of - what if this happens again in 3 years? What if it’s worse? We can’t withstand something happening like this again anytime soon. A lot of people will just die.
I probably shouldn’t have watched Contagion today.
What scares me most is that we have a president who… well, you know. And his supporters, including some governors, who believe his ongoing ramblings are a substitution for facts.
But on a personal level, neither my husband nor I have been out of the house in over two weeks (we live in the county with the highest incidence in the state, and our community has the highest incidence in the county). At some point we’ll have to go out for food. My husband is younger and healthier than I am, so can probably survive an infection. But I’m high-risk, and if I get it I’m a dead man. Especially if, by the time I get it, the medical professionals and their supplies have been depleted.
I’m scared of losing my stepfather. He is almost 80. He’s relatively healthy, but he lives alone, and has been depressed since my mother died. My father died 22 years ago, and he has always been “Grandpap” to my son. He is my son’s last grandparent. He didn’t come into my life until I was 33, but we built an excellent relationship, and I really love him. He lives alone relatively isolated because his house is on a big piece of property, so that’s good-- but it also means that if he got sick suddenly and couldn’t alert someone, it might be a while before someone checked on him.
Between my brother, my stepsister, one of my cousins who is close to him, and me, one of us calls him every day. So far, so good. He has the money to get his groceries delivered. But he’s probably getting really depressed. He has TV and a landline, but no computer, and no online friends. The VFW was his main social outlet.
I’m also a little scared of produce shortages because the itinerant workers who leave the country in the winter, and come back in the spring won’t be allowed back in to put in crops. We’ll have skeleton crews of the people who stay here all year, supplemented by out-of-work people desperate for anything, who don’t really know how to do farmwork.
People like me will just bite the bullet and pay higher prices, because there will be shortages, not absences, but there will be people priced out of eating anything fresh for a year. And what I spend on food will be money I can’t use for something else.
I’m scared that there will be a good vaccine, and anti-vaxxers will prevent us from achieving herd immunity. I hope employers start making getting the vaccine a condition of returning to work. Of course, with everyone getting use to working from home and e-learning, I hope anti-vaxxers don’t just decide “I won’t get the vaccine-- I’ll work from home and homeschool, like I’ve been doing.”
I have a personal solution to the economic downturn. DH has a job that probably won’t go away; we have good insurance through it; and I can deliver for Amazon and Uber Eats forever. It’s actually fun. I get to mostly sit in my car and listen to the radio. Finding addresses takes no effort with GPS. Before the delivery gig started, circumstances conspired, and I ended up with two cars. I was going to sell one, but now I’m thinking that if I’m going to be indefinitely, I’ll keep both. They are both paid for. This way I always have a back-up if one breaks down. I’m putting 90% of delivery miles on the older one, the one that will not depreciate with more miles, and because I have both, I
can stay on top of routine maintenance, and fix things before they are expensive. AND WE HAVE A LOT IN THE BANK. So we are very comfortable, and mostly worry free.
But there’s a little “survivor’s guilt” that goes with faring the economic storm better than most. In fact, for our income bracket as federally determined, we are filty comfortable.
I get it that if those are my only worries, I’m pretty well-off.
But those are my worries.
My Brother has cancer.
So, that.
I have a lifelong history of respiratory disease(s).
So, that.
The lack of responsibility among our elected officials.
And the risk of mob violence.
If you are not lucky enough to get away with mild or no symptoms, the disease appears severe in those it chooses to hurt. Like, very severe and very painful. Even to those with no pre-existing conditions, and I have a ton of them. :eek: Scares the daylights out of me. I would consider myself lucky to survive this year.
All of the above, but mostly not knowing how long this is going to go on and [del]wondering[/del] feeling pretty sure that when this initial phase is over, COVID is NOT over. It will recur sooner or later. I know people say stuff like “there are no guarantees in life,” and “you could walk out of the house and get hit by a car,” and that is true, but most of the time we are able to go about our daily lives acting as if we feel reasonably safe.
That is over. There is nothing to be done to assure yourself you are safe from this except isolation, and how long can we do that? The thin veil called The Illusion That We Have Some Control has been ripped away and we are faced with our own and our loved ones’ mortality every day.
My late husband, God bless him-- he was the loveliest man, the kindest person ever, was ill during our entire 10-year marriage. We went from one medical crisis to another, one hospitalization to another, one surgery to another until the last one that he did not survive. Many on this board live in similar circumstances with a chronically spouse or other family member. It takes a toll on the ever-watchful caregiver. The uncertainty, the fear, the anxiety. The times I worried about him the least was when he was in ICU, because I knew he was being watched around the clock. But I wasn’t sick. I wasn’t in danger. I was worried about him dying, but not myself.
But now, that vulnerability applies to all of us. We’re not safe anywhere except locked in our own homes. The least safe place to be is in a hospital. Think about that Detroit bus driver who was sneezed on by someone and now he’s dead of the virus. We don’t know who around us could be transmitting the virus to us. If we catch it, we don’t know how it will play out-- mild symptoms or life-threatening ones? PLUS, there are friends and family who are just as vulnerable, or more so if they scoff at (out of stubborn ignorance) or simply can’t take precautions due to other priorities (like working in essential jobs, caring for someone).
Eventually this will be over. Even the Black Death ended eventually. But will we who lived through it ever permit ourselves the illusion of feeling “safe” again? Will we even be able to. 
Oh, I forgot to mention: I’m in dire need of spinal surgery. My spinal stenosis is getting worse, and in addition to my inability to walk much, is affecting my left leg. Before long, I won’t be able to walk at all. Surgery would help, but there’s no way in hell I’m going anywhere near a medical facility, let alone having surgery. So I just have to sit at home and hope for the best. Man, this sucks.
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I’m a bit scared about the rather crap-shooty nature of severe reaction to the disease. Not so much for myself; more for numerous people I know (including a younger sister with cancer) who are in groups at high risk of these severe effects.
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I likewise am rather scared about the long-term economic effects on the low-wage sectors of the economy. I’m not at high risk of ending up out on the street anytime soon, but so many others are, and the uncertainty as to how long so much of the economy must remain shut down is wearying.
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Even though I know that the possibility is not high, I have a somewhat irrational fear of being attacked and robbed by a desperate, starving mob.
What scares me most is the math. Absent a vaccine, the only way this really ends is after enough people have been infected that herd immunity starts to work. But that’s probably hundreds of millions of people in North America alone.
And so far it seems like, even with the best care possible, it still has about a 1% fatality rate. So that number of infections still translates to a couple of million deaths in North America. “Flattening the curve” really only helps by keeping the fatality rate to that 1%, by avoiding a complete collapse of the healthcare system.
So, even a best case-scenario looks like a couple of million deaths, just spread out over a longer time.
I don’t know exactly what scares me most…and that’s kinda scary.
ThelmaLou got it right. You may slow it down now, but this is going to be fought in rounds so don’t be lulled. Remember that boat scene in Friday the 13th? Cult Horror Movie Scene N°49 - Friday the 13th (1980) - Ending Boat - YouTube
I’m scared for my elderly parents and friends.
I’m scared for you with the face, who has been deployed to Washington since she works for the Public Health Service Commissioned Corps (which is overseen by the Surgeon General). I know she’s stoked for this, seeing as she was inspired to become an epidemiologist after watching “Outbreak” as a kid. And I’d be stoked for her if she were working under any other administration. But since she’s working under this administration, well, I’m terrified. I’m scared she won’t have the PPE she needs to do her job and that she’ll be fired if she dares to speak out about it. I’m going to help her husband take care of the kids on the weekends. I know they are distraught to not be with their mommy, but I hope seeing my face (and hearing my voice, which sounds just like you with the face’s) will make them feel better. Even if I am the bizarro world version of their mother. 
And I’m also concerned for me. Not terrified, but concerned. I live alone, so if I get sick, I’m going to be dealing with it on my own. I’ve got plenty of food and Tylenol, so perhaps I’ll be OK. I will probably be OK. But of course I have considered the possibility I won’t be.