I apologize to anyone who will find this account disturbing or graphic, but I feel it is important that anyone and everyone needs to know the truth about how insidious and dangerous Covid-19 is. First off, no one is safe. To my frustration I see young people and for some reason Immigrants walking around without a mask and gloves from outside my bedroom window as if they have some kind of protective shield around them. Covid-19 does not discriminate on who it kills. There are people online, especially on YouTube claiming the virus does not exist or that they had it and magically survived with some tea and meditation alone and meanwhile they were never tested. From what little I can state about this virus, Covid-19 seems to hit people quite suddenly. In the cases with family members they were fine the night before and the next morning they woke up sick. I mean hitting like a ton of bricks. Within a day my mother and father were rushed to NYU - Brooklyn Hospital and both did not last even a week. In some cases it has been confirmed that people developed dementia in the hospital as a side effect and organ damage can occur such as kidney failure as an example. This is regardless of whether or not a pre-existing condition was present. The behavior of the virus is so unlike anything we have encountered before that there is no exact uniform set of symptoms I could tell you. What I can tell you is there is no cure. All doctors can do is give you things to help battle symptoms, but in the end the battle is up to the body and perhaps will of the individual and if you believe in a higher power regardless if it is personal or impersonal, God and for the record I am NOT an atheist. Now the tragedies don’t stop with death. I can only speak from my limited experience here in Brooklyn, New York that the bodies are contagious with the virus that the clothes they die in are left on. They are probably bagged and put on ice and held at the hospital for a maximum of three days before going to the morgue for another five days. After that they are put in a coffin that appears though I cannot confirm to be made out of cardboard and buried in mass graves on some island like a scene from an apocalyptic film or holocaust program whether it is the Shoah or later holocausts that occurred in Africa, Asia as well as the former Soviet Union since sadly there is no shortage of evil people seeking power for power’s sake on this planet and willing to kill millions for infamy.
If you are lucky enough to get a funeral home to take the bodies because of the amount of related deaths out there and coordinate a burial, there is no funeral, no last Rights, the bodies are not dressed and are preserved in any fashion. Instead they go from the truck to the fridge to the casket to the cemetery and buried. No one can be present at the grave site aside from being within a sealed car with windows pulled up. Once the bodies are buried eventually you will be able to visit the gravesite, but since this virus is not going away anytime soon, you will probably have to wait until 2021 before you can have a proper funeral or memorial at the gravesite. Even people who choose cremation have similar limitations placed upon them in terms of what happens to the body before cremation and the length of time you may have to wait to receive the remains or have them interred at a facility. There are no wakes and no goodbyes save for whether or not you get a chance to FaceTime or speaker phone talk to the person before they die. These are the cold realities of Covid-19 save for perhaps those who are “wealthy” or “important” enough to warrant the best care money can buy and even then, there are no guarantees. So be compassionate instead of fearful. Don’t stigmatize those with the virus and those who are related to anyone in any way, shape or form from this disease. Don’t panic because accidents happen when we panic in a pandemic (sounds like a bad jingle).
We will move beyond this, but it won’t be easy. A lot more people are going to die, including the possibility of myself or you who are reading this. Make no mistake, Coved-19 is real and it is an indiscriminate killer. So no matter how healthy or young or special or whatever a person thinks they are and how suburban or safe you think you are in, there is a danger and it is real so please be good to each other and pray or whatever you do and stay safe. God bless you all. Thank you.
