What is Good About COVID-19?

So, to put our mutual quarantine into perspective, lets focus on some things that have come about because of the COVID19 scare that are actually good.

· A Return to Washing Our Hands and Awareness of Prevention

The same measures being instructed for how to prevent the spread of the virus, are the same measures taught in medical schools and nursing schools to prevent cross contamination and infection. They are the same measures being taught in classes for food service workers to keep food safe – the Food Handlers Permit they are often called. They are the same measures your parents and grandparents attempted to teach you all those years ago, so that you yourself would stay healthy and not spread dirt or germs to others. Washing your hands before and after touching food, or using the lavatory, or working around someone who is ill, is basic common sense and we should have been doing it all along.

· Awareness of Health in General

Suddenly, its okay to talk about health and disease again. For far too long, health or lack thereof are subjects that weren’t talked about much in dinner parties. We didn’t talk about these things at family holiday dinners. It just wasn’t considered seemly. As a result, vital information that might have helped someone was left unsaid. Now, people are freely sharing health information. We are suddenly sharing our knowledge about vitamins, minerals, herbs, foods, what we should be doing and what we shouldn’t.

This is a huge improvement over decades past. As a Naturopathic medical student, I and my colleagues were thrown out of restaurants more than once for discussing medical information a bit too loudly and making other customers “uncomfortable”. Now, they probably would be asking if they could join us and take notes.

· Increased Sense of Community

The shared hardships of long longs, shortages, and quarantines is causing people to start pulling together. We are starting to ask each other for help. More importantly, we have started offeringeach other help, without waiting to be asked. While there are those, especially in cities, that initially entered panic mode, began buying everything in sight, hoping to resell it at great profits, it seems as if this is slowing. Real community and interconnectedness are taking the place of panic and greed.

· Greater Awareness of the True World Situation

Many are now starting to finally observe that some of the so-called “conspiracy theorists” have been right about many things. Whether or not this virus was developed in a lab (it was); whether or not that lab was a biological warfare lab, and whether the virus originated in a Chinese Lab or a US lab or both; whether or not the spread of the virus is being exacerbated by cellular damage caused by 5G wireless networks; whether or not governments, corporations, or the infamous “oligarchy” of the ultra-rich behind the scenes controlling governments are deliberately attempting to reduce the world population, or simply induce enough fear to better control the population, all these subjects and more are now fair game for conversation at the dinner table or anywhere else.

More and more people are waking up to a larger set of truths, not liking what they see, and are ready to start making changes.

These are all good things. As this Panic-demic proceeds and runs its eventual course, which it will, humanity as a whole is waking up.