I got news recently that another friend had been hospitalized with COVID 19. They told me he was on a ventilator and had only a 10 percent chance of surviving.
He is not the first of my friends to get sick, and I suspect won’t be the last. I am reminded of the dark times of the 1980s, when friends were wasting away from the newly-diagnosed human immunodeficient virus — HIV — and the ensuing complications that made up the diagnosis of AIDS.
I watched far too many friends become ill and die and this latest pandemic is very reminiscent of the previous one. The big difference is that, in the 1980s when friends were dying in hospital beds hooked up to IV lines and machines, we could at least be with them.