I have noticed something about people’s reactions to the COVID–19 virus. It was something I had seen before. It seemed so familiar. I knew it was anxiety. The cause? It took me a while to realize the last time I had seen it was 55 years ago in Vietnam. The anxiety then was you were not sure if you were going to live. COVID–19 does claim lives. The percentage of people who die has not been fixed as a percentage of the number of people who are infected with COVID–19. I have seen numbers ranging from 2 to 11%. It seemed younger people were less likely to die, but this morning on the news they were saying that might not be true. The uncertainty about the lethality of COVID-19 only adds to the anxiety that the people feel. We never got over the anxiety of dying in Vietnam. We had a saying “It was a good day today because no one tried to kill me.” In real bad times, the saying got slightly changed to “It was a good day yesterday because no one tried to kill me.” You didn’t know if today was a good day or not at those times.
The lesson we all learned all those years ago was that you can’t control what happens. You can take precautions. You can avoid taking risks, but those are the only two things you can do. You can do the same for the COVID–19 virus. Unfortunately, it does little to lower the level of anxiety.
