2/ These holdouts sometimes tried to assure themselves and each other, in the quiet sterile substitute of online interactions, that wearing an #N95 was no big deal, that you could do pretty much everything like before excepted masked. But then in other postings on the same forums, they would speak of friends lost, families estranged, career opportunities missed.
There was a terrible cost to this vigilance. And yet it was a cost worth paying, because the #SARS2 virus charged a much higher price for its repeated visits to the bodies of its hosts.
3/ The highest price was paid by those infected early, before vaccines were developed to blunt the worst of the damage. Over a million people died in the U.S. alone, gasping for their final breaths on breathing machines, their loss all but forgotten just a few years later. The first wave of #LongCovid sent millions more to their beds, where all too many would remain for the rest of their lives. They too were quickly purged from the collective memory, inconvenient reminders of the terrible danger this airborne menace presented by the simple act of breathing somebody else’s air.