Anti-vaxx Chronicles: The grim reality of a slow COVID death

kos

Daily Kos Staff

Thursday September 09, 2021 · 11:48 AM PDT

2021/09/09 · 11:48

Needles preloaded with the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccines sit in baskets awaiting patients at the vaccine clinic at Hartford Hospital in Hartford, Connecticut on August 24, 2021. - According to officials at Hartford HealthCare, booster shots are only available to patients with immunocompromised systems at the current time. (Photo by JOSEPH PREZIOSO / AFP) (Photo by JOSEPH PREZIOSO/AFP via Getty Images)

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Facebook is a menace. COVID-19 is a menace. Conservatism is a cesspool. Together, those three ingredients have created a toxic stew of malevolent death and devastation. We can talk about all those things in the abstract, look at the numbers and statistics, and catch the occasional whiff of seditionist right-wing rhetoric. But I hadn’t really fully understood just how horrifying that combination of right-wing extremism, Facebook, and a killer virus was until I became a regular at the Herman Cain Awards subreddit. This series will document some of those stories, so we are aware of what the other side is doing to our country.

I’m going to be honest. For me, COVID was a statistical nightmare, not a personal one. That is, my circle of family and friends have always taken this disease seriously. I haven’t lost anyone close to me. I’ve been horrified by the grim statistics, numbers and charts on a page, thousands of people dying. But I’ve never had a personal experience with what that looks like on the ground, and I hope I never do. Today’s cautionary tale provides just that—a look at the pandemic’s personal toll—and it’s even more nightmarish than I ever imagined. Fair warning, this one isn’t easy to read.

Today’s cautionary tale doesn’t have any memes or rank stupidity. It’s just a tragic, heartbreaking personal tale from the frontlines of the pandemic.

I was really hoping this story wouldn’t have a heartbreaking ending.

This poor woman lost her husband because she was trying to have a child with him. Now she never will. Sometimes this is too much. It is so much easier to look at statistics and think, “2,500 dead in one day? That’s terrible!” instead of seeing how just one of those deaths plays out in real life. In the abstract, 2,500 is so much easier to handle than one in … whatever the opposite of “abstract” is. One on the ground, in real life, at the human level.

I hope her pleas to vaccinate reached some unvaccinated people. And I hope her tragic story continues to inspire more people to take the lifesaving jab. There has to be a silver lining to this tragedy. There has to be.

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