Quote Posted by Renzatic
A celebrity dying would make it feel more immediate to some people, but they'll also take notice when a few of their friends and family start dropping dead around them too.
You know, the one thing that made this feel truly serious to me was when I got one of my taco cravings a couple days ago. Usually, all I have to do is run down to the local Mexican place to grab a couple three. Ain't no thing. This time? I wanted my tacos, but the place was closed down due to the virus. Even if it wasn't, I was gambling with a small, but still very real risk of death were I to go for them.
That was when it started feeling real to me, the moment when I couldn't easily get my tacos.
Unfortunately, it seems that to a lot of people it takes a death or a near death to get the message across:
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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/19/us/politics/coronavirus-heaven-frilot-mark-frilot.html)
[...]Mark Frilot — 45 years old, “never, ever sick” — came home with a fever.
In the haze of days that followed, Ms. Frilot, a 43-year-old oil-and-gas analyst, occupied one world, the rest of her community in Kenner, La., another. She saw her friends making jokes on social media about the coronavirus — eye-roll emojis, Fox News talking points, Rush Limbaugh quotes writing off the threat. And then one person asked if anyone really had this thing.
Ms. Frilot had an answer to that.
“I have been seeing a lot of posts about people taking this virus lightly and joking about it,” she began in a Facebook post. “Mark has tested positive for the coronavirus.”
Days earlier, it never occurred to Ms. Frilot (pronounced FREE-low) that her husband's fever that Friday — 99 point something or another, low enough that she teased him for being a wuss — would lead to this, even as his condition rapidly worsened.
By March 8, a Sunday, his temperature was 101.9. The flu, urgent-care doctors in Kenner told him.
Wednesday night, and the fever had worsened. “I just couldn't break it,” Ms. Frilot said, remembering how she alternated between Tylenol and Advil, just as the doctor prescribed. She found her husband sitting on the edge of the bathtub, wrapped in a towel, talking to himself.
Thursday morning, emergency room. Thursday night, ICU. Friday morning, intubation. Saturday, coronavirus test results: positive.
[...]
Crises are political only until they are personal. As news of Mr. Frilot's diagnosis spread, among his friends and on Nola.com, his story was no longer just that of a young, healthy person who caught a virus that young, healthy people had been told they were not supposed to catch. It was a revelation for the conservative suburbs of New Orleans, where many had written off the pandemic as liberal fear-mongering. Mr. Frilot, a registered Republican, and his family are generally apolitical, and were not thinking much about the virus — whether as a fiction or anything else — before he got sick. But many in their community had opinions on it from the start.
The language they used was the language politicians and media figures were also using. On March 8, when Mr. Frilot first went to urgent care, President Trump retweeted a joke from his White House social media director about Nero fiddling as Rome burned. The next night, Sean Hannity said on his prime time Fox News show that the virus was the media's attempt to “bludgeon” Mr. Trump with “this new hoax.”
After Ms. Frilot shared her husband's experience, she saw social-media musings about the virus as a liberal plot to tank the stock market come to a halt, toilet-paper jokes no longer rack up likes. Several people have called her “to pass on to me that everyone has been awakened,” Ms. Frilot said. “Because everyone knows Mark.”
[...]
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https://www.nola.com/news/coronavirus/article_bdc4e802-6b90-11ea-a747-832e94bc7f56.html)
On March 10, Natasha Ott, 39, felt the beginnings of a cold coming on.
She had a slight fever. CrescentCare, the medical clinic where she worked, had only a handful of tests for the new strain of coronavirus on hand. She initially passed on the chance to take one, after being told she was low-risk for the serious disease.
When her symptoms didn't shake, she did take the test on Monday. By Thursday, she felt "something in her lungs," she told longtime partner Josh Anderson. But she still felt well enough by then to join Anderson as the pair walked her dog.
On Friday, Anderson found Ott dead in her kitchen.
[...]
Speaking in an interview Saturday, after his social media post recounting Ott's experience was shared hundreds of times, he said the dearth of tests shows how ill-equipped New Orleans is to handle a pandemic that has already claimed 16 lives and infected nearly 600 people across the state.
"She could have gotten a test last Friday, but they only had five tests, and she didn't want to use one of them," Anderson said.
Less than a week ago, he was one of those who believed younger, relatively healthy people like Ott and himself would be fine amid the outbreak.
"I believed that people should stay home, but I don't think I fully understood what the consequences could be if they didn't," he said.
[...]
