Where I find my Covid Information

When the coronavirus was first announced and schools closed I got my information generally from my parents and my friends. I‘ve never paid much attention to any broad public concerns, just did what I was told I had to do and went about my business. Overtime as the pandemic became a larger and more pressing issue I began to only rely on the information I found on my own. My parents began to believe that the whole pandemic was a government scheme and wasn’t real. A large majority of my friends felt it was real but never cared much about it beyond that and had a tendency to fight the safety regulations that got put into place. 

My belief that the coronavirus is a real issue and my parents lack of belief in it caused minor issues in our relationship. When the coronavirus was announced I was working in a grocery store and we required all customers to wear their masks inside the building, by law we had to do so, and my parents would give me loads of grief over this saying it was a violation of their rights to be required to wear one. In the end they always put one on before going in and kept it on while shopping seeing as it was that or they would be kicked out. The longer these rules were in place the less they argued and complained about doing it but the more annoyed they got about doing anything which made it increasingly harder to do anything near them. It also sparked a variety of arguments during dinnertime on all the “stupid” rules that we were all required to follow. I personally enjoyed the social distancing rules, I liked having my own space. I also like the masks because I tend to talk to myself and with a mask on you can’t tell. 

My parents rely heavily on political leaders for their information while I have always more relied on medical professionals and those licensed in dealing with things like this. I don’t see, or understand, why political leaders have a say in what to do during this situation seeing as their field of expertise is in politics and not in public health or safety. 

Over the months that Covid has been around it has become heavily politicized when that should have never been the case. The coronavirus is a very real virus and it has made thousands of people extremely sick and also resulted in the deaths of thousands of people. However, once the coronavirus was pulled into politics the numbers of people sick/dying of it sky rocketed because people started reporting any illness/death that occurred as related to Covid and due to that people began to aggressively doubt the legitimacy of the disease. 

I think in the long run that the way the pandemic has become politicized and the pandemic itself are going to be nearly equally dangerous. The virus itself has caused the deaths of thousands but at the same time the way it’s been so heavily involved in politics has also resulted in a number of those deaths that maybe wouldn’t have happened if it had remained out of it. 

For college students in particular the CDC has some tips that are pretty basic but it’s definitely better to be safe than sorry in times like these. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/downloads/College-Poster-COVID-Tips-for-Students.pdf

I also try to regularly check on the amount of cases there are, how active the spread is in the areas around me, see how testing is going and a few other things. https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#cases_totalcases