COVID Vaccines and Global Cooperation

In a world as interconnected socially, economically, and politically as our own, we've given direct pipelines for viruses to travel across the globe in an instant, compared to the isolation many viruses and bacteria experienced in previous decades and centuries. Stretching its roots deep into the past, the increase in globalization has been steadily marching along, and I have little doubt it will begin to slow down. In many ways, this globalization is a beneficial aspect of the world as we know it; in others, however, we must come to understand -- and quickly -- the dangers inherent in such a system. 

We should've learned from the Black Death, and then we should've learned from the epidemics Europeans brought to the natives of America. The various influenza pandemics should've set alarm bells screaming, and when that failed, it should've been the Ebola scare on American soil in 1989, or HIV/AIDS beginning that same decade. Or maybe it should've been SARS, or MERS, or Zika, or a million other moments and scares throughout history, almost every single one linked back to the global pipelines spreading across the world. We know the dangers -- or at least we say we do -- and yet not much changes. Precautions are taken in the moment, sure, but they rarely last once the virus slinks out of the spotlight. We return, like dogged lovers, to the same old habits that killed a portion of our population off before. After all, the vast majority of us are still alive, aren't we?

It's not difficult to see why many scientists have grown increasingly concerned about the potential prevalence such pandemics could take in our future lives. The slew of diseases that have caused scares -- or, in the case of a few, genuine pandemics -- goes on and on, and it seems that every year, we add something new to the list. Yet it comes as a fundamental problem in the way we handle ourselves. In an anthropocentric era, we treat nature as a lesser being, as a tool to be harnessed and used for our own good. We raze it, corral and breed species for our unnatural gain, and push back the fringes of the wilderness into neat, manageable rows. And in first-world countries, the result is even worse, with many governments and corporations seeing developing nations as expendable pawns for cheap labor and resources -- the same areas that usually discover some virus hidden in the woodwork and free it from its reservoir, all because humankind is greedy and materialistic. 

So often in science fiction stories do we hear of great civilizations creating the very thing that wiped them out. This will likely be our fate, as well, but the fiction got it wrong. Our technology won't undo us; our greedy natures, so adept at uncovering the hidden mines of viruses, will be our demise. We aren't cautious enough. And with the world growing ever more divided, we're failing to realize that cooperation is going to be the best tool we could ever have for fighting disease. The very idea of this prompt -- focusing on the ways in which cooperation will be necessary to create and distribute a vaccine -- is alarming, because tensions are so high between many countries. We were caught by COVID unprepared, and now we'd rather argue politics than save lives. 

It is assuredly possible to distribute a vaccine globally, but no country can do it alone. Manufacturing cannot be done at a small scale, by a single company, and distribution becomes even more complicated. Once a vaccine is developed, supplies are needed -- dry ice and cold-resistant glass vials, for example -- to even transport the doses to locations to administer them. Storage is required by shipping companies to keep them cold. Doctors and nurses need to understand the vaccine to the best of their ability, and patients need to understand any risks involved in the process. Likewise, doctors and nurses need to be available to administer the doses, and patients need to be able to get to the locations easily and affordably. We're told the U.S. military is going to assist with distribution of the vaccine, and that many schools and stores with pharmacies (such as Wal-Mart) will have the vaccine available, but they, too, have to have the storage for hundreds or thousands of doses, and the supply has to meet the demand. 

The global distribution of any vaccine is a monumental task, and it will require the entire world's efforts. One country may have the scientists who develop the most effective vaccine, but that's merely step one. Even the countries with the best infrastructure and manufacturing in the world cannot succeed at this alone. But it's genuinely difficult to imagine many countries working together effectively, and the idea that this rests on such an idea is terrifying. 

Thoughts, Patterns, Dilemmas

 I don't know what normal is; I don't think anyone does. There's a dictionary definition and a roomful of connotations, but what do they actually mean? What purpose does that word -- so often whispered behind hands and in morose circumstances -- actually serve? Normal. When you don't feel like you're it, the word seems to taste bitter, a slick of poison on the tongue. When you do feel like it describes you and your crowd, then you administer the poison, dolled out in pill-sized pieces of pain. But that's all melodramatic and dolled-up in pretty phrases. Really what I'm getting at is this: I'm not normal. I know that. In a lot of ways, deep in my genuine analyses of myself, I've always known that. So why does it sting so much now? 

COVID has given us all far too much time for reflection. For some people, perhaps that was a good thing. They could find new hobbies, discover their own feelings, and try new things. I've done the same thing, and in those ways, COVID has provided me with a lot of time to enjoy the small things in life. For that, I'm grateful. And yet, every coin has two sides. Flip this one over and you'll find that extended periods of time locked away inside, oftentimes with little interaction from others, has its adverse effects, especially on people who already struggle with mental health problems. 

You see, I never counted myself in that camp of people. I always assumed I was a generally happy person, and to an extent, I am. It really wasn't until last year that I realized that maybe my behaviors weren't entirely...well, normal. I'm a very thought- and emotion-driven person, enabled by my own feelings, intuition, and thinking. I push myself into things because of these feelings, and though they aren't always correct, I trust myself (maybe that's a fool's endeavor, but that's a topic for another time). In any case, my mindset of patterns drive this even further. I suppose thinking in patterns isn't a strictly uncommon way of looking at the world, but I back myself into corners with this mindset. If a loved one doesn't say something they usually do, I jump to the worst possible conclusion: they no longer care. On the opposite side of this, if I don't feel exactly the same feelings I did before in a similar circumstance, maybe I don't care anymore. It's a distressing and almost daily occurrence, because logically I know that emotions are constantly in flux and little changes rarely mean anything. However, sometimes I still get anxious and allow feelings to simply feel...wrong. Sometimes this leads me into days or weeks where I barely trust myself, and I get by, but it's difficult. Usually it's worse when I have too much time to dwell on things. 

I think myself into stress, and I'm sure there's some sort of term out there for that, but "normal" isn't it. I don't have a lot of insight into this topic, despite dealing with for my entire life, and for anyone else dealing with it, I don't have a lot of coping mechanisms to offer up, either. It's just been something that's been on my mind a lot lately. Ordinarily, I try to keep my blog posts upbeat and on the positive side of things, stitching a little light into even the worst times. After all, there's a lot to delight in when it comes to life, even amidst a pandemic. But this last little bit has been hard, because my mind has made it hard. Those times will pass, though, and I keep that in mind when the room seems a little too small and cramped. It's all I can do. 

Until then, I thought I'd add in a poem I wrote for my Honors class and read aloud for an oral history project that was meant to focus on an aspect of our life. It's about this very same thing, and it's called Knots. 

 “What I meant was--” "I was trying to say--” “I don’t know why I feel that way--”

But I do.

I once heard a man on the radio or news
describe anxious thoughts and
OCD tendencies as corridors and rooms
and alleyways to drive down and
explore their offshoots.
But they’re not.
Not to me anyway,
as much as I once thought that
the man on the radio or news or
blues station or whatever was right,
as much as my own mind envisioned
these once dimly lit mental images.
They’re just not.

A fisherman from birth,
it was upon the banks
of the river I frequent,
my line tied in loops
and whorls that mirrored
my sun-bit hands, that it hit
me what my own thoughts were like:
knots.

A palomar knot tied around a granny
with a loop into a uni,
or a lazily wound arduous arbor
cinching into an improved clinch
where sections of searing line
burn into my brain as my
fingers work methodically to
untie their messy hair.

I see my girlfriend with a
grand dress on at prom,
her eyes as bright as the mirror
of my oft visited river,
and tie a butterfly loop around her,
hanging a loose halyard around the
exposed curve,
before pulling over a snatch
of something a friend said--
“I really didn’t mean to hurt you; I just meant…”--

and sliding a slip knot onto a uni-to-uni and
conjoining the two snippets of life like
sentimental talismans.
The two mingle and stew,
and I add a dash of the past with
a highwayman’s hitch
and get an itch in my mind
and a stitch in my side.

There’s names to analyze
and dates to remember
and classes to pass
and worries of weight
and blasts from the past
that make my head ache,
all with their own strand of
fickle fishing line.

And there’s my fingers,

dutifully untying the knots

one-by-one --

and bleeding.

COVID and Halloween

A selfie taken at 
Fariston's Haunted Forest.

As September gives way to October, and the trees blaze with new colors and shed their coats, the newfound nip in the air tells me one thing: Halloween is on the way. There's sugar cookies emblazoned with ghosts and pumpkins on the shelves at Target now; there's pumpkins piled in neat stacks, just waiting to be bought, carved, and set on someone's stoop; there's a rack filled with costumes at Walmart, and the seasonal Halloween stores have opened their doors once more. In my mind, it's a marvelous time, but one that is left up in the air due to COVID. 

Much to my surprise, however, my favorite haunted attraction local to my hometown was planning on opening during the last weekend of September -- the same weekend I would be visiting home. My girlfriend had never been to any haunted attraction before, but when we found this out, she wanted to go. Naturally, my love of spooky haunts took over, and I was ready to hit the forest trails and be scared as soon as it was mentioned, especially when I had assumed the attraction wouldn't be operating this season. 

The attraction wasn't so different than usual, and we've been dealing with the restrictions put in place for so long now that they didn't seem so out of place at this haunted forest. Just after sundown, we arrived at a darkened forest, where a woman dressed in a bloody nurse costume took our temperatures at the head of the trail and ushered us inside the maze of rope that led us to the ticket booth. We paid, and were instructed to keep our masks on throughout the entirety of the experience, despite being outdoors. If we took them off at any time, the actors weren't allowed to get close to us. Other than that, the only major alterations were having smaller group sizes and the actors not being permitted to touch any of the customers. It was honestly a little disconcerting to see so little change from the usual at this attraction I knew so well. 

On the other hand, my hometown has been considering cancelling their annual Trick-or-Treating held at the town square. It's another fantastic example of the strange middle ground we are finding ourselves within currently, with some events still falling short of normalcy and others attempting to return to the way they were, with a host of safety guidelines put into effect in order to allow for this return. It's very saddening to imagine a lot of children losing a year of Halloween that they'll never get back, but I can also understand why it may happen. In any case, I'm anxious to see how this particular aspect of the pandemic unfolds. I believe it will have major implications for the holidays to follow, a precursor to the larger seasons surrounding Thanksgiving and Christmas. 

Vaccines on Campus: An Overview

As we continue our lives among COVID-19, the promise of an imminent vaccine still looms on the horizon. No matter who you are -- fearful of such a vaccine or desperate for it -- I'm sure the thought of receiving the COVID-19 vaccination has been on your mind. It's impossible to ignore the presence of this virus in our lives, and with a vaccine being proclaimed as the end of this mess, it's no wonder many of us cannot wait to get in line, roll up our sleeves, and receive our armor. With that said, however, there is another portion of the population who will no doubt show some hesitancy in such a vaccination -- and others who will outright refuse it. 

Because of this, the distribution of any vaccination hinges first and foremost on trust and transparency. Healthcare likely should not be politicized, but due to the structure of our system, it has inevitably become so. Therefore, the solutions to our problems must come from learning from the root of the causes: our governmental failures. 

The current pandemic is a perfect case study on the failures of our governmental and healthcare institutions, a fantastic example of what not to do in order to have citizens comply with regulations and other mandates. In many ways, our institutions have been massively incompetent, and this will undoubtedly affect the rest of our experiences with this pandemic, as well, including the inevitable vaccine to come. We already know that there is a strong correlation between pandemics and conspiracy theories (this link leads to a fantastic piece by the New Yorker on this), with the height of Illuminati conspiracies coming during the Yellow Fever scare. And this is only a natural connection. What better time for individuals to fear the worst than the moments when the world seems to be falling apart, when an unseen contaminant is threatening us at every corner? 

But in the modern day, the word "conspiracy" has become synonymous with "crazy," and thus our medical professionals and the like attacked the theories with anger and oftentimes hatred. These theorists -- who are more often simply afraid  more so than anything else -- were belittled, exacerbating the feeling of being backed into a corner. 

Likewise, the nature of a new virus presented issues with transparency, which in turn deepened the lack of trust that was already growing evident, especially in the United States. As new information bombarded the public, many ideas and findings seemed to contradict previous ones, which combined with the constant misinformation present on the Internet to create a dangerous cocktail of mistrust. As these contradictions occurred, many officials slandered those who refused to change their minds based on previous details, which continued to harshen these realities. 

This is the backdrop of societal issues that we will be introducing a supposedly life-saving vaccine into. I'll be the first to admit that I'm hesitant to receive the vaccine as soon as it hits the public. With a name like Operation Warp Speed, I grow concerned that potentially dangerous side-effects will be overlooked -- or worse, that the trials won't be enough to produce them. I know I will eventually receive the vaccine, but I also feel as if it is a valid concern. As far as the distribution of the vaccination will go on UK's campus, again, transparency and trust will be the major components of fostering a beneficial environment. Our universities should take a note from the failures of our government during the early stages of this pandemic and alter their approach to its later stages. 

Dorm Life Amid Disease

 

Key aspects of the current dorm life:
IDs, keys, and my wallet. 

I'll be the first to admit that I was terrified of dorm life. Sure, I had stayed away from home for a few days in the past, but a few days was a lot less than a few months. What would I eat every day? What if I couldn't find anything I liked to eat some days (after all, I'm a notoriously picky eater)? What if I got sick? What if, what if, what if? I chased this thought around for a long time over the summer, until I dreaded the moment when my head would hit the pillow and it would resurge. When the time came, I was extremely anxious, and after my parents left, I flopped down on my bed and cried. When the tears dried and I felt normal again, I set my room in order, hanging my posters and righting each wrong. Then I did it again, until I was satisfied. The next morning, I did it one more time. Then I gave up. 

All of that said, I'll also be the first to admit that I really don't know what to say on this topic. It's just life to me: weird and whimsical at times, but more often boring and hardly worth the effort of retelling than not. It's how I often feel with these blog posts. After all, I'm just another person, and not one with particularly powerful stories at that. I wake up, some days in the early morning for my classes and sometimes at noon when I'm free and need a good sleep to rejuvenate my energy. I walk five minutes up and around the block to Target at the beginning of each week to buy bread, lunch-meat, fruit, chips, and drinks. On Wednesdays and Fridays, I get Chick-Fil-A or Papa John's or McDonald's on my way in from class. The rest of the time I eat in my room. If I'm going home that weekend, I don't eat at all on Fridays, until whoever's picking me up arrives and we can grab a bite to eat together. 

Most of the time I take my laundry home with me, because I'm awkward doing it in my residence hall. I'm just as awkward taking my trash out at the end of the week. Sometimes I get brave and wave to people I know, but those are few and far between right now, and I'm usually more comfortable with AirPods in my ears and music swaddling me. When I get bored, I'll cart my laptop and my yellow legal pad outside and work on personal writing projects or homework until my back aches from the colorful chairs in the courtyard. Every now and then, friends will stop by and chat. I call home, and I call my girlfriend. I'm convinced this pandemic has driven up the number of drivers, because horns and sirens blare deep into the night. Other times, the quiet is constricting. 

All of that is to say...I'm living. I wear masks getting food and taking out trash and buying groceries; I sanitize when I get back in for the day; I spend a lot of time inside on Zoom calls; I have worries that my roommate could get COVID and throw us both into quarantine; and I only see the folks in my residence hall. Things are different, yes, but I guess I'm in a weird spot because I have nothing with which to compare my experience. I'm living, though. And I guess that has to be enough sometimes. 

A Scare

My family's COVID gear.

Living in a tiny county in Southeastern Kentucky, the threat of a pandemic didn't seem very real. Even as our schools closed, our events were cancelled, and our lives changed entirely for the foreseeable future, the threat didn't exactly seem relevant. Our case count was extremely low, the result of individuals returning from vacations and business trips, which were quickly contained by our health department and forgotten. There were a number of rumors flying around, but many cases couldn't be determined as testing wasn't available. Later on, many supposed cases turned up negative. Still, fear spread like wildlife, and with our county being rampant with diabetes and heart disease, it wasn't difficult to see why. 

In my own home, fear was less palpable, but the anxiety was still prevalent. In 2009, my dad had had a major heart attack, the effects of his heart disease still well-known to this day. And just last year, he developed diabetes, making his issues and possible complications with COVID two-fold. As such, my mother, sister, and I began wearing masks and sanitizing everything very well almost immediately, with little hesitation -- not so much for ourselves, but for my father and my grandmother, who often visited us, as well. By the time I left for college, all was well, and my father's fear was at a minimum. 

At the end of September, however, my family paid a visit to me in Lexington. We went to Fayette Mall, and then to an ice cream shop. This was on a Friday, and I passed the weekend lazily, reading snippets of my current book, playing Pokémon, and watching YouTube videos. On that Sunday night, I called home to wish everyone well for the night, and Mom told me she couldn't talk long. Odd. I asked her why, and from the background came the sound of retching. My sister and my father were both sick, with coughs, upset stomachs, and sore throats. They claimed to have felt very fatigued starting Saturday morning, and it worsened into Sunday. 

Instantly, my mind shifted to the worst case scenario: COVID. After all, what virus was more on our minds at the time than this respiratory bug? I went over our time in Lexington in my mind a million times, wondering when it could've been contracted. Images of little bottles of hand sanitizer danced in my mind, and I couldn't decipher when we had let our guards down. My dad isn't the best about wearing his mask at all times -- he claims it's frustrating to wear, especially after having done it for so many months -- and I wondered if he had taken it off at some point when we weren't paying attention. 

As he worsened into Monday morning, he finally agreed to get tested. My sister declined for the moment, citing that she was feeling better. Maybe she was, but I tend to think she was afraid of the test more than anything. I texted them to keep me updated, and then logged onto class for the day. Later that morning, as the day marched onwards towards noon, I received a text from my mother: Negative. We couldn't be more relieved. My dad, being the stubborn man he is, declined any further tests or medicines and went back home to rest. By Tuesday afternoon, he was feeling better. 

This story sticks out to me because I never thought it was a worry my family would ever have. Disease has never been a prevalent thought to me, even as the pandemic worsened around me. I took basic precautions, but to say I feared it? Not really. Until the disease snaked its fingers into my life and tightened its hold. Until I realized that disease can touch anyone, at almost any time. 

Delights

The Book of Delights by Ross Gay.

In my Honors 101 class, we have a single required text, a work by Ross Gay called The Book of Delights. As someone who is enamored by the written word, the concept of such a work intrigued me from the beginning. The author gave himself the task of writing a short essay every day for a year on something that delighted him that day, and our assignment using these texts is to find and discuss essays pertaining to certain topics within our modules. Being an Honors class, the course is heavily discussion based, and today, after we had shared all of our chosen essays, we were tasked with discussing for a brief moment things that delighted us. 

I focused on things I missed that filled with me delight -- hiking in the mountains behind my home, tracking animals, and fishing the creeks -- and this led my group into talking about other things we missed. Again and again, mentions of life as it was "before" came up. People missed interactions; they missed hanging out with their friends without masks or social distancing; they missed having little worries of such concepts each time they left their homes or rooms; they missed being human. I left class inspired, but I also left class deeply saddened. How could things have changed so much? 

My class is about a twenty minute walk from my dorm, and on my way back, something kept coming to my mind. One of my classmates shared back a certain essay that I couldn't get out of my mind. It was titled "The High-Five from Strangers, Etc.", and it focused on the author getting a random high five in a café by a stranger. He reflected that this simple act of kindness, this random act of humanity, brightened his day, enough so that he devoted a chapter of his assignment to it. As I walked, the sounds of muted life occurring around me, swaddled in the cloth of masks imprinted with the UK insignia, the essay made me think about all those threads of interactions by strangers -- tiny nods, miniscule chit-chat, gentle smiles -- forming a massive web of delight. Sure, not everyone loves these interactions, but most of us very much do, even if we aren't entirely aware of it. 

And as I turned onto Avenue of Champions, I remembered all those interactions my classmates spoke of, all those little moments that had evaporated thanks to this pandemic. All that humanity, gone. I wish I could say I felt more connected to my classmates, but I don't. I wish I could say I felt more connected to the people at my college in general, but I don't. And I don't think I even realized why until now. The humanity is gone. Oh, we try to restore it; we try to communicate, and laugh together, and pretend it's all okay. For the most part, it is okay. But we've lost a part of ourselves. We're walking around with our ties undone, our shirts untucked, our buttons disheveled. We're not whole anymore. Try as we might, one cannot ignore the way a mask stifles our smiles and expressions as we pass one another on the street, or the way these regulations quiet our friendships and our ability to form them. 

I think that we sometimes forget that this pandemic hasn't simply assaulted us on the front of health. It has assaulted us on all fronts, including the most human front of all: interaction. The soul of our society has been dulled just a tab, a facet of our lives sanded down and eroded. And I think it does some good to realize that, to understand it and come to terms with it. Tonight, I'll be writing a list of delightful things that I miss, and when I'm done, I'll crumple it up and start over. Then I'm going to make a list of delightful things I can reach. 

The Return of High Schools

My sister being temperature checked before
school this year. 

With colleges roaring back to life and high schools beginning to awaken from their slumber, it certainly seemed that our time of pandemics and quarantine were coming to a close, at least for now. But with numbers skyrocketing in many areas, and with our own President ill with the virus, it appears that we were grossly misled. Adjustments are continually being made and adjusted as our time with COVID-19 marches along, and they will likely continue to be made and adjusted for a long time to come. 

I always find it interesting to compare the current climate to that at the beginning of the pandemic, and because I was a senior in high school when the quarantine stint began, I was on the front-lines of the experience, like so many others. Whispers of the virus appeared in the news and on social media; major universities began closing their doors; and then roughly a week later, we were issued a statement regarding a potential shutdown of in-person classes at our tiny school. It seemed so unbelievable; it was all occurring too quickly to understand, and many of my classmates -- myself included -- didn't believe it would really come to a lockdown. Spoiler alert: it did, and as the virus consumed what seemed to be the entire world, many of our traditional senior activities fell by the way-side, as well. Our graduation was threatened and then remodeled to include a small group of family members and a single student in our gym -- the location of our rudimentary graduations -- at a time. We took what we could get. After all, something was better than nothing at all. 

This summer, I took a part-time job at my former high school, doing odd jobs with the custodial staff, and it was then that it hit me how different the next school year would look like. The Class of 2020 had lost out on about half of their year; to the next classes, however, school wouldn't even look the same. As we sterilized and cleaned the entire school as much as possible and helped to track the movements of the limited staff allowed inside, I realized that we were on the brink of a new reality. The temperature checks before work should've tipped me off to this earlier, but I don't think it was until the superintendent sat us down and told us the plan that it really struck a chord. As we moved desks to be an acceptable distance apart, often revamping entire classrooms, I understood the life my sister would be stepping into very soon, as a freshman in high school. 

As my departure date for college neared, coupled with the end of my employment, rumors began to swirl about rises in cases in my home county, and the question that was on everybody's minds became, Will in-person classes happen at all this school year? I was in the No camp. As August began and I left to pursue my higher education, my sister wasn't starting her high school journey until later that month --and it was planned to be entirely virtual. At the same time, my cousin had just graduated college and had landed a job as an English teacher at a nearby school, where students were also slated to partake in a virtual education. 

A photo my cousin sent me
of her empty classroom
during first period.

By early September, things had begun to evolve. My sister's school was making plans to split the students into two groups, who would attend classes on different days depending on their group. On their off days, they would attend class virtually. My cousin's school was planning a similar approach. And last week, the approaches were implemented, to various degrees of success. At my sister's school, a spike in cases appeared seemingly overnight, and as they prepare for their next steps to be announced in the coming week, rumors have once more begun to take shape. Many believe the school will return to a fully virtual approach after only a week-and-a-half of in-person classes. 

At my cousin's school, the story is even stranger. When they opened last week, offering students the chance to attend either virtually or in-person, my cousin had many classes that were entirely empty, the only interaction the faces on her computer screen logged into Zoom. She said it was an eerie feeling, especially for a first-time teacher, and I can only imagine the trials such new faces are experiencing right now. 

Truthfully, we are caught in a strange middle ground right now, stuck in the midst of re-openings and a potential new wave of shutdowns. I can't begin to guess what the answer will be, but I pray for everyone in our high schools right now -- and really, anyone in our education systems, teachers or otherwise. We're all simply doing our best.