POTUS contracted COVID

 Once news broke out that President Donald Trump contracted Coronavirus after he posted a tweet saying he is starting his quarantine with the First Lady, there was of course a lot of speculation. Many even jumped straight to wondering if he would survive the illness given his age. People wondered what would happen with the election if he died. Then of course came the conspiracies. Is this a publicity stunt for people to have sympathy for him? Was it pulled to tell people the virus is real so that he didn’t have to say so himself?

    There was a lot of situations that brought on these kinds of thoughts. The main thing being that the night before, the President had made a sort of back handed comment about Joe Biden always wearing a mask during their debate. Another thing being that at the beginning of this pandemic, the President even went as far as saying that the virus was a hoax. It seemed almost inevitable that he would be infected with the virus at some point because he often has ignored or pushed away the warnings of many qualified scientists. The responses in the media were all over the place. I even saw many on social media making a joke of the matter and even wishing death upon the President of the United States. I would never wish death upon anyone, but I did find it ironic that President Trump contracted the virus after he had ignored the facts of it for so long. 

UK and Fayette county

 I have experienced two different sides of Kentucky and Lexington’s success of keeping the pandemic under control. While school was not in session Kentucky was actually one of the States that had the best precautions put in place by the local government that was keeping cases down. Well, when college students (including me) moved back in to Universities like UK, WKU, UofL, EKU, KSU, etc. cases began to rise and are almost exponentially since. 

    We are seeing the effects of this first hand at UK with the notices we have been sent from the University  . They have seen that off campus partying has become very wide spread and have asked members of Fayette County that are not affiliated with the University to send in photos of these parties so campus authorities can crack down on the people who are attending and hosting this parties that are causing cases to rise heavily. The university has even threatened to expel students caught at parties by Law Enforcement. I have even heard of some people I know coming in face to face contact with police officers while they were out. This definitely does scare some into staying in. 

    It is very important for these college campuses to keep things maintained as best they can because not only does it affect the University, but it affects the state and counties that the college is within severely as well. 

Black Lives Matter Protests durning the Pandemic

     The Black Lives Matter Protests that occurred in late May and early June continuing on now caused a lot of concern within the pandemic and had a lot of people calling hypocrisy on others. I personally attended one of these peaceful protests in Lexington, Ky and can explain from experience what was going through the heads of the many others that attended these protests. 

Photo taken by me from the protest I attended in Lexington

    Many people that were not in favor of these protests called hypocrisy on the protesters of the BLM movement because previously some of the people associated with the BLM movement shook their heads at protesters against lockdown and mask wearing rules gathering in large crowds which are often associated with those that are against the Black Lives Matter Movement. In my experience at this protest that I have pictured, I saw almost no one without a mask on and people were passing out more hand sanitizer than I have ever seen. Not to say that there wasn’t still risk, but the majority of the people involved in the black lives matter protests, including me, were not blatantly ignoring the fact that a pandemic was going on. Now, I was still cautious after I attended and even had some anxiety while I was at the protest, but I will get to why others and I still decided to attend the protests. First, here is a visual of the mask wearing and non-mask wearing at the different protests that I have found on Google images. 

Black Lives Matter protest

Protest against coronavirus lockdowns 

    I am sure that people at the Black Lives Matter Protests contracted Covid-19 from attending, thankfully I was not one of them, but there was much higher risk and actual higher case increases from the protests full of people who chose not to wear masks. 

    The general consensus of the people who attended the BLM protests amidst this pandemic agree that fighting for justice within this historically and currently oppressed community is worth being infected with the virus. I believed this as well because I was so angry about the recent events of police brutality and racism against the people of my community. I say this, and I still want to acknowledge that the protesters of the lockdowns are completely allowed to protest however they would like, but there were key differences (mask wearing and hand sanitizing) in how the protests were run that made the majority of the BLM protests more safe in regards to the pandemic in comparison to the others. 

Covid and learning

    The Covid-19 pandemic has made a lot of things a lot more difficult, a main difficulty being the way we learn. Moving almost everything online has been a challenge for everyone, and now that I have experienced both within this pandemic, I believe that learning in college classes online is much harder than learning in high school classes online. Not to say that learning online in high school isn’t hard. I think the stakes are just much higher in college, so it makes it much more scary and almost exhausting. I’m going to base this response around the difficulties of online learning in college. 

     First off, Covid-19 has done anything but provided an equal opportunity for learning. I have even faced some of these difficulties first hand. Coming in to UK, I was provided a “free” iPad to complete my school work. I came to realize that even with the iPad I still need a laptop which I do not own at the moment. Consequentially, it had become increasingly difficult to complete some of my online labs, take notes, multi-task during lecture zooms, etc. I currently do not have the money to pay for a laptop right now, and I am sure this is an issue for many other students. There absolutely should be a hardship clause for education during this pandemic and not just for this reason. 

    I have found for myself and others that learning in college online is almost equivalent to teaching the content to yourself. This makes it much more difficult to complete homework and other assignments in a timely manner because teaching yourself is known to take a lot longer than being taught to in regards to retaining specific important information that you didn’t know before. I know that for at least most of the general chemistry classes at UK there isn’t even a zoom lecture. The class is what they call ‘asynchronous’, so we are instructed to watch videos that “teach” the content, but there is one big problem with these videos that I and many others have experienced. There is not way to ask questions during this type of lecture, AND there are questions that pop up in the middle of the video about the content you learned 10 seconds before that you must answer before moving on to the rest of the video. And it gets worse... IT IS GRADED. This makes it extremely hard to maintain a high grade in these classes because it is really hard to answer some of these questions right after you have learned the content without being able to ask questions while you are doing it. There aren’t usually many questions embedded within each video, so if you miss one or two, you are already at or below a 50% for the assignment which really shouldn’t be an assignment because it is supposed to be a form of lecture for the class. 

    Other issues come into play when we look at people with ADD or ADHD. A lot of times it is extremely difficult for these people to sit in the same place and stare at the same monotonous screen all day. It makes it extremely hard to focus and therefore increasingly difficult to retain information. And, I assume this isn’t just an issue for people that have learning disabilities or anything else.

    It is really almost enraging seeing many other countries being able to continue with face to face classes because their governments are doing better at keeping the virus under control. I hope that the US will be able to start to control things better so that we don’t have to suffer from the many difficulties of learning and teaching ourselves online. I am afraid that it may make this generation less competitive for careers in the future, but then again, maybe we are developing more individual skills that those before us didn’t have because we are learning more independently. This is something we can’t really predict right now; I think we will have to wait and see what the results come of this. 

 

UK Core Issue: How Do We Distribute COVID Vaccines?

The way that Fayette county (or anywhere else) distributes the Covid vaccine when it becomes available is going to be essential to maximizing its competency. It is going to have to be very well thought out, and I think a good place to start is thinking about who is most susceptible to complications of the virus and who comes in contact with the virus the most. 

Using much of the commonly known data that has been collected from research since the pandemic started, we can see that the elderly and people with co-morbid diseases are the most at risk of contracting the virus and having severe complications. It is safe to say that these people should be at the top of the list for receiving the vaccine first, or at least close to the top. You also have to keep in mind the people who come into contact with the virus the most. There is pretty solid research that shows that viral load is a strong factor in the severity of an individual’s infection. People who are exposed longer or come into contact with a high viral load have a larger chance of contracting the virus and having worse complications as well, no matter how healthy they are. These people will most definitely be healthcare workers; especially those that work in the Covid care units and emergency wings. These people should be at or near the top of the list as well. Our country is not so much in as severe a lockdown anymore, but if it were or if it comes back to that circumstance, you have to think of essential workers. These might be people who work in grocery stores, restaurants, or any essential service location. After these people receive the vaccine, the distributions can trickle down to the rest of the population. This way the people who are more susceptible will have a better chance at staying healthy while the others still have not received the vaccine. 

If there is only enough vaccine for a third of the population of Fayette county, this theory is the most feasible. If there is little chance that the other two thirds of the population will be able to receive the vaccine then the result of that will be less severe than if the populations I mentioned before do not receive the vaccine. There will be a much higher amount of death if the elderly and people with co-morbid diseases do not receive the vaccine, and if the healthcare workers do not receive that vaccine, there will be less amounts of people available to work in the hospitals to handle major outbreaks. It is safe to say that the younger populations that are not immune compromised will not develop severe symptoms if they are staying at least semi-safe regarding the virus. There is also chance that these people can develop some immunity on their own for about three months after they have had it, so this may help with control in the younger populations in and of itself. 

COVID-19 and social media

 

This is a video I found on TikTok which has been one of the main outlets for this generation to express their emotions about current events. This video was posted on April 4th, 2020 when I came across it around that time, it was the same time when my school was finalizing cancellations he to covid and the media was raging with memes and content about the virus. I resonated with this video when I saw it so I saved it immediately. I liked how it had a tune to a song that mostly everyone knows that kind of has the same kind of mood that us seniors in high school had about the pandemic and the loss of our senior year. In this TikTok, the creator mentions how “the other grades think it’s funny”. This was something that the seniors in high school were having trouble with during this time because we felt we had a special situation as we had our last finalizing moments of high school taken away from us and the lower classes kind of took it as a joke and couldn’t understand why we were so upset because they still theoretically had time to experience their most important milestones in high school. 

This photo is something that I have found on Instagram, and have seen a lot of in general. In America, I feel like the media shows us a lot of the successes of other countries with COVID-19. This is almost comforting, but then I think about it more and I remember that the US has cut ties with the World Health Organization (WHO). This makes me worried that if a working vaccine is developed in another country, it will be hard for the U.S. to access it. I feel like a lot of people can tell that the US is kind of far behind and we are almost digging ourselves in to a deeper hole by not creating national lockdown laws strict enough an blind siding international health resources. This has been something that frustrates me the most during this pandemic. 

Covid and food

     When my family was staying in for the National quarantine, our relationship with food got kind of weird as a whole. I remember it was hard to find what we normally keep in the house because people were stock piling everything like it was an apocalypse. One of the main things that was hard for us to find was chicken which we ate a lot. We ended up eating more beef and pork for a while for our dinners. We tried to make things that would last a while because we knew it would be better for us to have leftovers than to have to struggle to find more items more frequently at the grocery store. My family didn’t find it necessary to buy out the grocery store as many others did because we figured the government would have warned us if we weren’t going to be able to even go to grocery stores. There was a lot of confusion, but we didn’t let it make us go crazy. 

I remember being scared to do take out orders, but my family didn’t have the same anxiety about it that I did. We ended up doing takeout at least twice a week because our governor encouraged us to try and keep up the local businesses and restaurants. When we did order take out we made sure we re-plated and reheated our food before eating it. Now, we know more about how the virus spreads and we don’t do this anymore, but during the time it made me appreciated my food more because it did take longer to prepare. I also personally took the time to try and eat healthier because I had more time on my hands to prepare healthy meals and snacks. My family bought lots of fresh fruits and vegetables when they were available and I made them the main parts in my meals. Being in the house almost 24/7 did make me want to snack a lot though, and that was something that my whole family dealt with. When you see food you want to eat it.  I would say during the lockdown my choices in food became better and as a whole my family was introduced to more of a variety of foods and meals because we couldn’t buy the same things we normally did, so in general I would say we actually had a healthier diet. Now, I know that can’t be the case for some because as things ran out and prices went up, people with a lower income probably had a harder time finding things they could afford. I remember there were sources through public schools that my family tried to help out with that provided food for kids who were own free and reduced lunch plans. I also saw many resources advertised on television with numbers you could call and websites to visit to get help if you were in a food crisis during the lockdown. Overall, it didn’t matter what socio-economic status you had, everything was flipped upside down. 

Parties during COVID

 I’ve heard of Covid parties people had back in quarantine that people would go to and see if they would get the virus. These usually resulted in all of the attendees testing positive. People used to host these for chicken. Pox, but just so their kids could get “immune” to chicken pox. Not very smart. Many college kids have been partying as well. Not for purposes of catching covid, but because they really don’t want to be in college and not go out. It is still very unsafe. Police have been trying to crack down as much as they can,  but at UK especially it is really hard because the campus is so big. 

Friends have covid

 Recently a few of my close friends at UK tested positive for COVID. I personally do not have any symptoms, but I am getting tested soon. My other friend that we hang out with a lot tested as well, but she was negative. We are thinking she must have antibodies, and I am thinking I have antibodies as well. 

Back in the beginning of March I got really sick, I had a high fever and could not breath well. This was before COVID had even hit Kentucky, statistically at least. But, I went to urgent care and got tested for flu and strep and they both came back negative. There has also been a few times where I have been around people that have been exposed and I did not get the virus. 

I will update you guys after I get my test and see if I am positive and symptomatic, or I still have antibodies from March. 

Where do I get information about the pandemic?

     Personally, I have had a really hard time trusting any information about the pandemic. Since people in America seem to try and make everything so political, I feel really conflicted with the information I hear about the pandemic. I personally side more with democratic views, but I also contradicted myself a few times with what the stereotypical democratic views related to the virus were. There are also a lot of conspiracies about the pandemic that are honestly very believable with the “proof” they provide. I spend a lot of time on the social media platform, TikTok, and I have gotten a lot of my information from there including the majority of the conspiracy theories. 

Coronavirus Conspiracy Theories

    When there was a national quarantine, I got most of my trust worthy information from my governor, Andy Beshear. He would give daily updates at 5pm for a while. They were actually very comforting and allowed me to have knowledge about the pandemic without being extremely stressed about it. I was really getting so anxious because I would read every little bit of information that came up on Snapchat, instagram, and TikTok and my mom would get so mad at me because I was reading info that was very potentially invalid. That’s why after a while I would only occasionally watch the updates from the governor because my anxiety was getting out of hand. 

Will UK shut down before the semester is over?

 Recently, UK presented re-testing students in fraternities and sororities because they had 2% higher amounts of cases than the rest of the University. I rushed and just joined a sorority and I can see why their numbers are so high. There’s about 60+ girls living in each sorority house so I am sure it is hard to keep things under control there. As a university I feel like the numbers are actually starting to go up. I feel like recently I have actually known more than a few people come down with the virus and have to self isolate. It would make sense because the cases in Kentucky in general are going up a lot as well. 

Recent graph of cases in Kentucky

    As of now, I don’t see the university closing before the end of the semester. I think UK has done well at contact tracing and following health guidelines. I think they also have a good system with moving students out who have the virus to prevent more spread. The University is very big, so it will probably take a little longer for us to reach a high percentage of cases in the campus community. I do see that a few more classes may have to go online, but the ones that are in person now are safe to stay in person I believe.  

About Me!

 About Me!

    First of all, I’ll start by sharing my name. I am Hillary Johnson. I‘m a freshman at the University of Kentucky. Navigating this pandemic as new adult is kind of scary. I am taking charge of the choices I make for myself to ensure the safety of myself and others. Now, I don’t have to follow the rules of my parents regarding the pandemic and anything else. But, to me, it is still important to take precautions because this virus is a serious deal. I will still say though, in my experience the effects of the virus have been minute regarding the health of me and my family. 

    We took pretty severe precaution near the beginning of the national quarantine, but loosened up a bit around early June. My family became exhausted of our routine and staying inside. We decided to take a risk and go to Topsail Island North Carolina for a weeks getaway at the beach. It seemed necessary. We searched for so long to find somewhere that wasn’t going to be crowded and somewhere that would have beach access from a beach house so that we wouldn’t have to be around so many people at a hotel. In my family, my anxiety about the pandemic was probably the worst. After going to the beach and having slight contact with others, stepping out of the bubble of my home and neighborhood walking trails, and coming home with no virus in my family or the friend who came with me, my anxieties started to subsided. I thought, the virus is serious, but will basic health precautions such as hand washing including an extent of social distancing and mask wearing do the trick? A little after I returned from the beach, I also started my lifeguard job back up when the neighborhood pools opened back up in Lexington, Kentucky (where I am from) in early July. There were certain safety measures taken, but they did not compare to the precautions I had been taking at home previously.  There were a several people outside of my circle that I came in contact with without a mask, but still, I got tested before I moved in at UK and I was not positive for the virus. 

    To my family it was really important to stay safe during this time. We were hearing everywhere that the virus affects POC more negatively. As a biracial person, that worried me. I worried about myself, my brother, and my dad who is Black. I also still worried about my mom who is white because she does have underlying health conditions. Of course, then I worried about my extended family as well. Another thing that is also important to us is not living in fear and trusting in our faith. It was and still is hard to balance these two ideas. The pandemic has also affected my immediate and some extended family in ways not related to health. I would say my family is in the middle-low middle class economically. My dad’s barber shop business was closed for a long period of time and his hours at his other job were cut short. Thankfully my mom’s job allowed her to work completely from home, but it was really hard to lose half of our household income for at least a few months. We still were able to have things we needed, but things we wanted had to be thought about. Watching the news and everything did allow me to see that my family and I have it much better than many others during this time. No one in the family that I used to see frequently before all of this happened has had COVID or at least hasn’t become ill with it. I do know of a few friends that have it or have had it, but they have all powered through with mild symptoms. To say the least, I really can’t wait for this virus to stop having such a large impact in everyone’s lives, but right now it is still very important that we all do our part in protected ourselves and those around us.