In all seriousness, as we approach two years of this crap the more sympathy I feel for ICU staffs who’ve witnessed so much suffering and death. They are the ones who will, in all likelihood, suffer PTSD years from now. The very sound of heart monitors and ventilator pumps must be enough to trigger the memories of patients who lost their battle with Covid.

I’m just grateful that I live in a region where people in the urban areas of Sacramento and the San Francisco Bay Area took social distancing and mask mandates to heart. ICU beds were, for the most part, never beyond capacity. This is a particularly sensitive topic for me as we nearly lost my mother to a pulmonary embolism during the third wave of the pandemic. The ambulance got her to the nearest hospital with ICU beds with ventilators and she pulled through it all. Had all the ICU wards been filled with Covid patients, as was the case in Southern California and other parts of the country, my mother would not have survived, as her heart stopped (and she was defibrillated) twice until they got her on a ventilator. Makes me wonder how many others were not so lucky.

Worry if you don't hear the beeping noise, because then you are free....of this life.

Stupid is as stupid does.