until death do you part

HA HA.
Made you look.
If you're thinking this is about marriage, you are incorrect.
Welcome to a lesson about viruses.
No, not specifically the one behind this current pandemic.
For starters, scientists and medical professionals are still gathering data there.
That means the jury is still out, deliberating on what to do with that case.
The viruses I'm going to present are some we've known for decades.
What, those are the ones we already know everything about?
No, we don't.
Those are the ones we already have vaccines to protect us?
No, you wish.
Remember, SARS-CoV-2 is related to the common cold virus - no cure for that yet, no magic vaccine to keep us from getting it again and again and again, with us susceptible to catching a cold from the day we are born until the day we die...
you know, until death do us part.
The best option we have when we are ill with a cold is to ingest a variety of drugs to relieve the symptoms.
So, what is the case for folks hit by the common cold's bully sibling?
Right now, six months into the pandemic stepping foot on USA soil, the options for relief are few and none are over the counter.
As Dr. Anthony Fauci said three days ago, only two drugs of all those tested have been demonstrated to have some limited ability for symptom relief in COVID patients, one (dexamethasone) for those on ventilators and requiring oxygen, the other (remdesivir) for those on low-flow oxygen, but not on ventilators.
For those patients, with death a distinct probability, on ventilators or in need of constant oxygen flow, those drugs are a desperate, last-ditch, Hail Mary, effort to stave off death -
if the drug itself doesn't kill them.
So, I promised a lesson on viruses that stay with us until death, so let's begin.

Chickenpox is a disease caused by the varicella-zoster virus.
Lots of people have had that disease, and probably don't think about it much once the initial illness has passed.
But the virus stays in your body and lives there forever, and maybe when you're older, you have debilitatingly painful outbreaks of shingles.
You don't just get over this virus in a few weeks, never to have another health effect.
The relationship between chickenpox and shingles was discovered in 1888; tge realization that both were caused by the varicella virus was not determined until 1943, thanks to Helmut Ruska. (His brother had invented the electron microscope in 1933, allowing such research about virus structure to even become possible. In 1939, H. Ruska used the device to determine the structure of the tobacco mosaic virus, the first substance to be called a virus.
By the way, the TMV is also a (+) ss RNA virus... just like the common cold virus and this latest novel coronavirus, but affecting plants.)
Yes, there is the varicella vaccine to prevent the virus from infecting a person and giving them chickenpox - but that vaccine has only been available in the USA since 1995.
That vaccine is part of the group of immunizations given to children.
Yes, there is the zoster vaccine to prevent the virus from causing shingles in adults who once had chickenpox; that vaccine has only been available in the USA since 2006.
We know all this because the disease been around since at least 1658 (when it first appears in the Oxford University dictionary), and has been studied medically for more than three hundred years.

Herpes is also a disease caused by a virus, the herpes simplex virus.
And once someone has been infected by one of the two strains of that virus, it stays in your body and lives there forever, and anytime they get a little run down or stressed-out they're going to have an outbreak of the disease.
Maybe every time you have a big event coming up (school pictures, job interview, big date), you're going to get a cold sore, on your mouth tissue or genital area.
For the rest of your life, until death do you part.
You don't just get over it in a few weeks.
Moreover, to date there is no vaccine to prevent infection by the virus, nor will there ever be; it is not curable.
We know this because it's been around for at least 2000 years, and has been studied medically for at least two hundred years.

AIDS is a collection of diseases caused by human immunodeficiency virus.
That causality link between the disease and the virus was established in 1983 by Robert Gallo.
The virus attacks the immune system and makes the carrier far more vulnerable to other illnesses.
Over time, that takes a toll on the body, putting people living with HIV at greater risk for health conditions such as cardiovascular disease, kidney disease, diabetes, bone disease, liver disease, cognitive disorders, and some types of cancer.
Once you have the virus, it stays in your body and lives there forever, for the rest of your life, until death do you part.
There is no cure, but there are drugs to keep the virus from developing into AIDS.
It was decades before viable treatments were developed that allowed people to live with a reasonable quality of life.
As of this time, there is no vaccine to prevent being infected by the virus.
We know this because it has been around for forty years, and has been studied medically for all of those forty years.

COVID-19 is a disease caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus, aka SARS-CoV-2, a novel virus that spreads rapidly and easily.
The full spectrum of symptoms and health effects is only just beginning to be cataloged, much less understood.
So far the symptoms may include:
Fever
Fatigue
Coughing
Pneumonia
Chills/Trembling
Acute respiratory distress
Lung damage (potentially permanent)
Loss of taste (a neurological symptom)
Sore throat
Headaches
Difficulty breathing
Mental confusion
Diarrhea
Nausea or vomiting
Loss of appetite
Strokes have also been reported in some people who have COVID-19 (even in the relatively young)
Swollen eyes
Blood clots
Seizures
Liver damage
Kidney damage
Rash
COVID toes (weird, right?)

People testing positive for COVID-19 have been documented to be sick even after 60 days.
Many people are sick for weeks, get better, and then experience a rapid and sudden flare up and get sick all over again.
COVID-19 may cause a more complex reaction in children.
Multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children, also called MIS-C, is a condition where different body parts can become inflamed, including the heart, lungs, kidneys, brain, skin, eyes, or gastrointestinal organs.
Children with MIS-C may have a fever and various symptoms, including abdominal pain, vomiting, diarrhea, neck pain, rash, bloodshot eyes, or feeling extra tired.
While rare, it has caused deaths.
Many, but not all, children with MIS-C test negative for a current infection with the virus that causes COVID-19.
Yet evidence indicates that many of these children were infected with the COVID-19 virus in the past, as shown by positive antibody test results.

COVID-19 has not been around for years.
It has basically been in existence for 7 months.
No one knows yet the long-term health effects, or how it may present itself years down the road for people who have been exposed.
We literally *do not know* what we do not know.
Will it be more like herpes, flaring up in an infected person's life ever time they are stressed?
Will it be more like AIDS, with an infected person more susceptible to death by rare cancers?
Will it be more like chickenpox, with a counterpart that shows up decades later in an infected person's life?
We do not know and will not know for many years.

So, that's the end of the lesson, y'all.

For those in our society who suggest that people being cautious are cowards, for people who refuse to take even the simplest of precautions to protect themselves and those around them, I want to ask, in all sincerity:
Won't you please reconsider your stance?

Literally no one knows who will be the lucky "mild symptoms" case, and who may fall ill and die.
Because while we know that some people are more susceptible to suffering a more serious case, we also know that 20 and 30-year-olds have died, marathon runners and fitness nuts have died, children and infants have died.

Medical experts acknowledge that there is so much we don't yet know, but with what we DO know, they are smart enough to be scared of how easily this is spread.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends baseline precautions.
Frequent hand-washing
Physical distancing
Reduced social/public contact or interaction
Mask wearing
Covering your cough or sneeze
Avoiding touching your face
Sanitizing frequently touched surfaces

These seem to be the same basic guidelines parents teach their children.
As adults, shouldn't we be able to accomplish these simple tasks?

The more things we can all do to mitigate our risk of exposure, the better off we all are.
By following those basic guidelines, we help flatten the curve for number of infected people versus time, heading toward the goal of no new cases.
By washing our hands and wearing a mask, we allow health care providers to maintain levels of service that aren't immediately and catastrophically overwhelmed.
By practicing social distancing, we reduce unnecessary suffering and deaths.
By reducing physical contact and avoiding crowds, we help buy time for the scientific community to study the virus in order to come to a more full understanding of the breadth of its impacts in both the short and long term.

We can do this, folks.
I'm doing my part to protect YOU.
I ask that yu please do the same to protect me.
Thank you.