Pandemic Essay

Dear Protesters, with all Due Respect to Your Rights to Free Speech, for the Love of Humanity, Could You Please Wear a Mask and Not Stand Quite So Close Together?

I had COVID-19 and I did not go out in public for six weeks because I could not face possibly infecting anyone else. I simply ask for a similar courtesy from you.

Free speech is a fundamental American right. I get it. It’s not the protesting that upsets me. It’s the sight of so many (not all, I realize this) protesters crammed shoulder-to-shoulder without masks that strikes terror in my heart.

My mother lives in a nursing home. Her home is safe for the moment. But I was following a thread, written on Facebook by a doctor friend of mine who is working in the COVID units. The other day, a protestor jumped in and started screaming (you know how that goes — when someone uses all capital letters). His point, which apparently seemed logical to him, was that the infection rate in the area was zero because there were no infections at the nursing home in which he worked.

My heart dropped. How could someone like that be working in a nursing home? Several other frontline doctors, who were also on this thread tried to persuade him otherwise and even tried to get him to say, with no success, which nursing home he worked for.

I have been a yoga teacher for over twenty years now. I hike three to six miles a day. I ran a half-marathon in an hour and forty-eight minutes. And COVID-19 took me down, hard.

I think that a lot of people still don’t understand that we are wearing masks in public places, not for directly protecting ourselves, but to prevent the spread of the virus to others. We might have contracted it and not know it yet. Or we might have it and be asymptomatic. The mask, homemade or otherwise, likely does not have pores small enough to keep the virus from getting through. But it does reduce the spray of droplets from a sneeze, cough or shout. The protesters are definitely shouting.

Despite what you may be hearing, this is NOT the same as the Flu.

My husband and I were in the early wave of people who got COVID-19 in March. We most likely contracted it on a plane flight home from the Dominican Republic on March 8th.

So, to the man I saw in a video wearing a mask with the face-covering cut out and a roll of toilet paper on a rope around his neck, shoving his grocery cart up against a scared woman in line ahead of him, I really wish you no ill, but I do really wish that you would be more respectful of other people. This is not all about you. This is about humanity and decency. You are not the only one who has rights.

My lungs still feel like they are lined with shards of glass. I wake up in the night with a fear that I have a fever again. I worry that my lungs will never be the same as they were “before.”

I have been a yoga teacher for over twenty years now. I hike three to six miles a day. I ran a half-marathon in an hour and forty-eight minutes. And COVID-19 took me down, hard.

This happened to me. It could happen to you too. Or it could happen to your mother, or to your friend’s kid with asthma, or to your older neighbors across the street.

I keep hearing protestors say this this is just a “Flu.”

Just to be clear, this is not the Flu.

I’ve had pneumonia before. I remember having a temperature of 104.2° F and being pretty delirious, thinking that I just might die. COVID-19 was worse, a lot worse.

Yes, some people will be asymptomatic. A lot of people will have mild symptoms. And some people will die.

But, even if you are one of the lucky ones who has no symptoms, before you even have any idea that you have been infected, you can spread this virus to the lady in line at the grocery store in front of you — the one with three kids at home and a husband with an unknown heart condition, or to the man who works in my mother’s nursing home.

So, to the man I saw in a video wearing a mask with the face-covering cut out and a roll of toilet paper on a rope around his neck, shoving his grocery cart up against a scared woman in line ahead of him, I really wish you no ill, but I do really wish that you would be more respectful of other people. This is not all about you. This is about humanity and decency. You are not the only one who has rights.

I don’t agree with most of what the protestors are saying.

But, honestly, it doesn’t really matter. You have a right to have your voice heard, just as I do too.

I just ask you to do it more safely, without putting other people in danger.

Because, otherwise, you are obstructing other peoples’ rights.

This morning, I saw an article about a gathering of protestors in Arizona who joined hands and sang “Amazing Grace” together. All I can say is that if they, or someone they loved, had lain in bed with a temperature of 104.7° F for five days straight, after eleven days of symptoms, and could only breathe out of the top 1/5 of their lungs because the bottom part wasn’t quite working right, or had completely lost their sense of taste and smell, or had nearly passed out just trying to go downstairs (because of hypoxia), they probably wouldn’t be holding hands quite so tightly.

My husband rides his bicycle at least one hundred miles a week. He does at least one “century” a year. His first ride after having COVID-19, he rode fourteen miles and almost couldn’t get home.

He’s pretty much back to full health now. But I got sicker than him, and I still wake up every morning with lungs that don’t feel right. I get in the pool and the pressure against my chest makes my heart race — like I am getting sick all over again.

I wouldn’t wish this on anyone.

And I choose to believe that you wouldn’t either.

Let’s move forward with compassion and respect for one another.

Things are easing now in parts of California, where I live. We are approaching a gradual re-opening. But things are going to look different for at least a while. We have entered a new paradigm.

We are not all going to agree on how the future should look. Tensions will be high. Diversity is one of the fundamental tenets upon which this country was built. I don’t ask anybody else to believe exactly what I believe in. I understand that your opinions might be very different than mine. I also believe you have the right to express them.

But I do not believe that anyone has the right to jeopardize other people’s safety.

If we all cooperate with one another, we can ease back into some semblance of a new “normal.” We really have to — for the love of humanity. There are so many issues, such as famine and increased domestic abuse which are by-products of the societal shut-down. I just hope that we can all move forward with compassion and respect as we march into this new reality.

Erika Burkhalter is a yogi, neurophilosopher, cat-mom, photographer, and lover of travel and nature, spreading her love and amazement for Mother Earth’s glories, one photo, poem or story at a time. (MS Neuropsychology, MA Yoga Studies). Erika is also an editor for Dharma Talk.

Story and photo ©Erika Burkhalter. All right reserved.