An Update On The Coronavirus Outbreak

The number changes so quickly even the news outlets on Youtube seem to have a hard time catching up with the latest.  I'm worried of course because there are 2 cases cofirmed in a matter of 2 days where I live.  I've been following this since day one when my friend in Hong Kong started gossiping about this on social media back in November 2019.  I brushed her off back then and told her she followed too much fake news. I just didn't expect it was real and it would get here this fast because it was just last Wednesday that I went to the drug store to buy masks to ship "Express" to my friend in HK when she told me she and her family couldn't find any mask in HK....I went to my local drugstore, emptied the shelf of masks (all made in China), to ship  to Hong Kong. What an irony when Hong Kong is a city of China, and now I can't find masks to buy for myself because everywhere is so far telling me they are pending for re-stocking.

Now as I watched China's real time data tracking of this global epidemic (82 deaths so far and Tibet is the only province in China that doesn't have a case yet), I've become too anxious to even want to go to my doctor's appointment tomorrow for my back pain... My doctor is in a building that has a lot of Primary Care doctors and it's a building where lots of people always walk around coughing and sneezing in open air. I didn't think too much  about such norms before, but now I'm too freaked out to even want to be around anyone who is sneezing with a mask on , let alone the fact that I had never seen any patient in that building ever wore a mask, no matter how bad their runny noses were and how red and watery their eyes were.  I had got a very nasty cold last winter after a visit to my doctor for physcial. It was the worst cold I ever had and I had fever on and off, I fully recovered after 2 months. I knew I got the bug either in the hallway, the waitnig room or the elevatoor because all these places had people walking around coughing and sneezing openly.  It was horrible, I had terrible coughs and serious cases of shortness of breath, fever that came and went. But I pulled through without going to a doctor, just by laying low and drinkig lots of juices and chicken broth and eating lots of veggies, chicken, eggs, and fruits.   My brother who is a doctor himself monitored me over the phone.  He told me that there was no cure for colds no matter how serious I felt my cold symptoms were.  My brother told me that unless I was really having tremendous difficulty in breathing and high fever, I just had to suck it up.  I did.

I certainly don't want to experience another cold of that magnitude, let alone the latest Coronavirus from China.  So tomorrow, I'm going to be a no-show at my orthopaedic....I don't want to take the chance to go to a place where sick people congregate, when I'm afraid to even  go out to a grocery store or a restaurant.