Got my first Covid shot one year ago today … the second, two months later … followed by a booster in the fall. Today, I gladly wear a mask in public for the protection of others whom I might unknowingly infect in the event of an asymptomatic breakthrough infection. Sixty-odd years after waiting with classmates on the breezeway at Lillian C. Ruediger Elementary School to get our polio vaccines , none of this seems anything but neighborly to me — the sort of thing we do to keep each other safe in extraordinary times.
Meanwhile, the seven-day rolling average of Covid deaths in my country is more than 2,500. Were that to hold steady, that would be additional 750,000 US Covid deaths by the end of this year ... more than a million-and-a-half lives lost to something I stopped worrying about for myself — just as I stopped worrying about exposure to polio as a child — once I completed a simple act for the good of my community.
That frame of mind does not seem either heroic or cowardly to me. Just seems neighborly.
