A close friend, who was also a patient, once told me (after he was diagnosed with melanoma) that, when a child, his father, a physician, was also diagnosed with a terminal illness, but was strangely calm and collected about it. When my friend asked him about it, he replied that ‘a frightened person dies a hundred times, but a brave person has to die only once.’
Keep that in mind. The other 99 deaths are unnecessary. No good ever comes from them.
Don’t let anxiety and fear play their games in your imagination. Limit media news coverage to 30 minutes a day. Don’t interrogate every little bump and grind for signs of Covid19.
Exercise. Eat well. Laugh.
You’re gonna be fine.
And today’s bit of good news:
The novel coronavirus does not appear to be mutating in a manner that indicates that immune strategies, such as vaccines, would not be effective. There are subtle differences in the viral genome that appear to differentiate the strands of virus that hit the US Pacific NW from the one that hit Wuhan, but these differences don’t appear to have had an effect on the antigenicity of the virus. In fact coronavirus as a rule don’t tend to mutate as readily as other viruses; they have pretty good ‘proofreading’ capabilities so the random mutations that come from errors in replication are less common.
As soon as a redwood is cut down or burned, it sends up a crowd of eager, hopeful shoots, which, if allowed to grow, would in a few decades attain a height of a hundred feet, and the strongest of them would finally become giants as great as the original tree. –John Muir
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