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I was finally, after many months, able to procure a job last month, and at a medical clinic. I basically answer the overwhelmed phone lines and answer a lot of covid questions. I also call people with covid results and such. I won't give any specifics because that would just be foolish (and likely illegal), but there are a few general things I can say. First off, I can say with broad certainty that most people in the medical community are really not worried about this thing. Other than gumming up our phone lines and wasting a lot of our staff's time over mostly little things, covid has not been particularly bad. I've called well over 100 people a day at times to give people their test results, and the general feedback from nearly everyone who have had it land somewhere between a very mild cold and a very unpleasant flu. There have a handful that had no symptoms at all, but the majority of people are either surprised that what they had was covid, or were pretty sure due to being rather sick. Also, losing your smell and taste is a fairly common event. Though I have a limited sample overall, from the dozens of people who've had it, I've only had a single person have to get hospitalized for it.
As I, and pretty much every doctor and nurse I've spoken to, have noted, it seems like much of the world, or at least our chunk of it, are making rules based off the rare occurrences of the really bad cases rather than the average. Just like we shouldn't be making policies based off those rare edge cases of people who had no symptoms at all, we really shouldn't be closing everything based off the edge cases of bad reactions. I can't tell you how many people are terrified and don't know how to handle a virus that behaves more or less like most every other virus we've experienced in our lives. People will find out they or a loved one has it, and freak out wondering what they're supposed to do. A lot of them are already on the tail end of it too, with maybe a few more days of quarantine. It's weird having to tell grown-ass adults that, just like every flu or cold you've had in the past (and this from the CDC's guidelines backing it up), once your fever breaks (for at least a day) and you start to get better, you ARE better. The fever breaking typically means your immune system finally has a handle on it and, as long as your symptoms are generally improving, you're not contagious anymore. It's that simple.
Honestly, I feel like if everyone had been told this was just a particularly nasty strain of flu and not to worry about it, this past year would have been barely a blip on the radar. We should probably do the mask thing in general when we start feeling ill, like a number of asian countries have done for many years now, but forcing everyone to wear them all the time is a bit much.
As I, and pretty much every doctor and nurse I've spoken to, have noted, it seems like much of the world, or at least our chunk of it, are making rules based off the rare occurrences of the really bad cases rather than the average. Just like we shouldn't be making policies based off those rare edge cases of people who had no symptoms at all, we really shouldn't be closing everything based off the edge cases of bad reactions. I can't tell you how many people are terrified and don't know how to handle a virus that behaves more or less like most every other virus we've experienced in our lives. People will find out they or a loved one has it, and freak out wondering what they're supposed to do. A lot of them are already on the tail end of it too, with maybe a few more days of quarantine. It's weird having to tell grown-ass adults that, just like every flu or cold you've had in the past (and this from the CDC's guidelines backing it up), once your fever breaks (for at least a day) and you start to get better, you ARE better. The fever breaking typically means your immune system finally has a handle on it and, as long as your symptoms are generally improving, you're not contagious anymore. It's that simple.
Honestly, I feel like if everyone had been told this was just a particularly nasty strain of flu and not to worry about it, this past year would have been barely a blip on the radar. We should probably do the mask thing in general when we start feeling ill, like a number of asian countries have done for many years now, but forcing everyone to wear them all the time is a bit much.
