Happy days are here again in Indiana. New Covid cases have plummeted in the past few weeks, Hospital ICUs are back to normal, and the governor said we don’t have to wear masks in public, unless we want to. That being said, I no longer felt the necessity to wear a mask when shopping at the local supermarket. I also noticed that people had begun to buy less, perhaps due to inflated food prices. Wait lines at the checkout were shorter and everyone seemed more relaxed. And then, on March 25, Biden made another one of his self-fulfilling prophecies, and announced that we would have war related food shortages. The following Tuesday, I went to grocery store on a usually quiet afternoon, and walked into a mob scene. Shoppers were scurrying around the store, filling their food carts to the brim. The man in front of me at the checkout had a bill of $229. I waited patiently, while the line behind me deepened. The hoarders were out in full force. The next morning, I woke up sneezing. I didn’t have a fever or cough. But I knew what it was: the return of the common cold.
I haven’t had a cold since February of 2020, before the start of the covid-19 pandemic. After that, most everyone started wearing masks, using hand sanitizers, and social distancing.. Whether or not that helped prevent the spread of Covid has yet to be determined. But all of a sudden, hardly any flu cases were reported, and most of us stopped getting colds.
If you google information about the common cold on the internet, you’ll see that the average person gets two or three colds per year. Mostly between September and May. I was certainly no exception. When the temperature dropped in the fall, I usually came down with a cold. Around the holidays, my immunity would wear off, and I’d have another one. And of course, the cold rainy days, and up and down temperatures in the spring always triggered another miserable cold. I’d actually forgotten about all of that. Until this week.
When I left the supermarket that day, it had begun to rain and the wind was around 15 miles per hour. The temperature was near freezing. I shivered as I loaded my cart, while the viruses I had inhaled while shopping happily invaded my nasal passages.