Category: Opinion

Once upon a time, I was married to a hospital pharmacist where I learned a lot about a profession I knew little about. We’re all familiar with the drugstore pharmacist who fills our prescriptions and many hospitals have a pharmacy on the first floor which is a popular place to get your meds upon discharge from the hospital or during a trip to see your doctor who may be located in the hospital building.

Few of us interact with the pharmacist who distributes the meds for the patients of the hospital. It’s easy to not give any thought to where the little cup of pills the nurse brings you comes from. It’s the hospital pharmacist that make that happen.

Working several years in a refinery and other industrial settings qualified me to watch endless hours of safety videos; many over & over again. There’s one video that I remember more than all the rest and it metaphorically relates to the need for social distancing during the coronavirus.

This video instructs on the dangers of working in a confined space like an empty tank or vessel. It usually starts with methods on purging dangerous gases, testing to make sure it’s safe to go in, and keeping someone outside the vessel to watch you in case something goes wrong. Of course, since it’s a safety video, something goes wrong. 

The media can make anything scarier than it really is. Using words like ‘infected with the virus’ and ‘died from the virus’ is technically correct but is making people ashamed to admit they have it. This is dangerous.

I listened to a doctor who is on the front line of COVID-19 care say getting coronavirus is the same as catching a cold. I have to admit, that sounded a little too casual, but his point was coronavirus is the same bad guy that gives us colds, but this coronavirus we’re dealing with today is new and different in many ways. Still, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. You’re catching it in much the same way you catch a cold and all this talk about washing your hands and social distancing would greatly reduce common colds and flus if we took the same measures every cold season.