The Least Among Us, to Whom We Owe the Most: Our Elderly, at Greatest Coronavirus Risk, by John Zmirak

By John Zmirak, The Stream, March 14, 2020

John Zmirak is a Senior Editor of The Stream, and author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism.

As I wrote earlier this week, the Coronavirus crisis touches me close to home, since someone I love very much has a compromised immune system. In fact, several people do. And none of them are elderly. Two nephews half my age, for instance. They have medical conditions requiring drugs that suppress immunity as an unhappy side-effect. Now, most of those people live 1,000 or more miles away. So while I might worry about them, I don’t have to worry about picking up the virus and unknowingly infecting them. But the most important person on that list lives right here, and I see her every day.

So I have the duty to act as if I myself had a paper-thin immune system, too. The fear that haunts me (and makes it frankly hard sometimes for me to sleep, or think straight) is that I might pick up the illness without knowing it, and pass it on to her. I’d cough for a week or two. She’d quite likely die. How would I live with that in subsequent decades?  ….

Read more here:  https://stream.org/the-least-among-us-to-whom-we-owe-the-most-our-elderly-at-greatest-coronacvirus-risk/