In the early morning of January 2, 2021, my husband, brother-in-law and I gathered in a strange place to mark the new year.
It was a piece slowly lit in the intensive care unit of our local hospital, and the time approached at 2 am
We were there to say goodbye to my stepfather, Joseph Savoia: resident of Woburn for life, Avid Red Sox Fan whose devotion lacked equal.
He was taken by CovidThe disease which, according to current estimates of the World Health Organization, took at least 3 million in 2020 and which Which now attributes more than 7 million dead and counting.
A little over a year later, his wife, my mother-in-law Eileen Savoia, died on January 7, 2022, also hospitalized, and also with Covid. I could not attend because at that time, I also obtained it, by sending my condolences remotely, including to my husband’s family via Facebook.
She was a lover passionate about horror, mystery and real crime. Together, Joe and Eileen Savoia raised four sons and, in their death, have become two notes in a solemn refrain of more than 7 million votes. These are the voices of lives whose last moments have been inaugurated by a virus to take its place with HIV / AIDS, smallpox and bubonic plague among the deadliest infectious diseases in history.
For me, as a AA journalist, Covid represented one of these paradoxical moments of both a catastrophic event and living a life permanently because of this.
Some five years after the propagation virus, closings, demonstrations and an atmosphere of chaos and fear are not a bit like “The Stand” by Stephen King, are comfortable to us.
There remains a threat, especially for the elderly, for those who have compromised immune systems, and for black and brown communities, with an inheritance of access to unequal health care which can set up a person for a life of chronic conditions making them more vulnerable.
And, this remains a curious symbol, and a storyteller of a familiar story: from our quest to find the cause and healing of a deadly disease, often dangerously hampered by a confrontation between science and our own human nature.
I will put my bias cards here. I grew up in a cleaning in which science was that the guest is always welcome, whatever the time or circumstances.
My two parents were in nursing, which means that public health in particular had a special presence. Not only were their nursing journals delivered by subscription among the magazines of our coffee table, but also books on all sciences, with my father particularly interested in astronomy. And I became a lover passionate about all creatures, on all fours, on six legs, no legs.
In this way, my now lifted husband, Lawrence Carradini, And I was well matched, with a love of poetry and science, and he ending his doctorate in vertebrate zoology before his death.
And so, the desire to consider science as a virgin quest for knowledge, without prejudice or political, is naive. As Covid showed us, like AIDS before, the really separation of the science of politics is simply not possible.
Part of this conflict inevitably takes place on social networks, where I thought if a disease of illness could have been awarded to the pneumonia vaccine that I received and did not regret.
Without bad will, I recently released an acquaintance who replied that he had ceased to obtain the vaccine against the flu during “the false pandemic”. I only wish him good health and the same for anyone around him.
But my parents-in-law and some 7 million others have not been removed from this life by a mass psychosis induced by a news from the plague, whose professionals understand me and my colleagues, who worked on the same real pandemic.
I really covered the survey on a very real seniors care establishment Where Covid struck as he did in so many Congregation Care Environment. The pandemic really happened and the virus really persists.
Those who claimed and continue to claim have really disappeared. The space they have left can never be filled, except by memories of those who loved them and who still love them.
The trip of science is old and fracturing, its tools as good as the people who apply them, and sometimes, an incorrect conclusion is part of this process.
In November 2015, I was standing on the shores of the Mediterranean in Alexandria, Egypt, thinking of EratostheneChief Librarian of the Alexandria Library.
He used a stick, a shadow and a questioning spirit to understand the real circumference of the earth, and came to the right answer. Maybe just as bright and essential was Claudius Ptolemy, Who concluded that the land is the center of the universe, and although his idea prevailed for more than a millennium, he was completely wrong.
All this tells us that the earth is round and that a theory accepted for a long time can over time can turn around when more information becomes available, the information also provided by science and scientists. It is not a large and unique revelation; It is a meticulous and sometimes painful trip.
In the last months of 2019, a brand new virus has not brought many signs about how it behaves, or how to stay in advance. As a virus, this owes us nothing. It is up to us, with the help of science, to understand how to answer them.
What we now know about Covid Know is a vast wealth of knowledge more than when the virus has started its mortal world trek.
As human beings, it is in our nature to want a concrete and absolute guide from which to take the direction and build our lives. It is also something that science can help to shed light: the features perhaps in our DNA itself, transmitted to us of our primordial ancestors.
They also looked at the sky above them, the earth on which they stood, the creatures with which they shared a habitat, and with each other, to better understand their world and to raise children to become strong and strong adults capable of navigating in an uncertain place and time.
Thousands of generations later, we live as beneficiaries of more access to information, observation and collective experience that our ancestors would even have dared to hope for us.
It is our turn to build on it. Do not decade them, or the next generation, back backwards. The earth does not turn this way. Nor do we have to.