COVID-19
I hope everyone is safe and at home! Who doesn’t know about the COVID-19 outbreak happening on all of us! It’s because of this we all are into this lock down situation waiting for it to finally go.
I think, especially with the audience that we have, I feel young people feel they’re immune to this virus. Because we consistently hear on media that this virus primarily affects those over the age of 60 or compromised immune systems.
While the majority of cases, that’s true it doesn’t mean that by being 20-30 years old, you’re immune to this virus. Absolutely not. There are healthy 30-year-old doctors, nurses who have lost their lives because of this virus.
And on top of that by you potentially taking the risk of going out and not socially distancing yourself you’re actually serving as a vector to continue the spread of this virus. And potentially cost lives of people who can’t protect themselves like those who are of older age or have compromised immune systems.
So my message to those who are young is let’s not be selfish. Let’s think about others and figure out how we can protect them. But let’s also understand that this virus can easily affect you and your family. Also, yes there are also some myths and mistakes we are making around COVID-19.
I think also, as far as media and politicians go, we are making a lot of missteps on how we are educating the public. Where we think we need to constantly update numbers and give media flashes of “Outbreak”, “News Alert”, and “Flash” like it’s not necessary.
In fact, I encourage people to not look at the news more than once a day, or perhaps every other day. Because those numbers can fuel so much anxiety just by the way it’s presented. So with the politicians and media in mind, I’d love for them to get medical experts on.
Help and information MyGov.in
Allow people who are actually treating the COVID-19 patients or people researching on them to have the mic more often. So that they can explain to the audience what’s happening and understand what we don’t know about this virus. But also at the same time, explain the steps we are taking to figure it out.
Like, the number one question everyone is been coming up with is when is this gonna end? And people start throwing out potential dates. April 15th, April 30th, maybe May or June, this and that. But the truth is we don’t know exactly. We have to be honest. And we have to not be afraid to say I don’t know.
But then say, what’s our yardstick gonna be off when we are gonna consider opening the country back up. So I really urge the media to tone down that “alertness” that scary like, “Omg, outbreak, alert warning.” Make it more meaningful.
Let’s put information out there. Let’s not make it so political, like controversial about what China’s doing wrong or what this party’s doing wrong. It’s about medicine. And in medicine, it doesn’t matter what race you are, if you have committed a crime or not. We treat everybody. And that’s how we need to think about this situation.
Author: Ankita Mundhra