At the end of November, COVID-19 struck my household of five and hit my younger sister first. The symptoms were mild and not as serious compared to other cases. No one else caught the virus because we were rigorous with keeping distance from her and cleaning everything she touched. This was a stressful time because my house was not large enough nor built to handle a virus. Therefore, it was difficult to social distance when there wasn’t enough room. I had to quarantine for a month and missed much of school and life in general.

Quarantine passed in a flash and everything went back to the new normal. I returned to school and caught up on all my work. When I thought that life was going smoothly, I suddenly woke up with an excruciating headache and dry cough, but still attended school to take a test. This wasn’t nothing new that I haven’t experienced so I took some medicine in hopes of recovering in a few hours. I didn’t and it only got worse from there as I began losing my sense of taste and smell. At that moment, I feared the fact that I possibly caught COVID and later tested positive.

My entire body began aching soon after testing positive. It felt as if I was beaten up because of how sore my muscle were. Eating became nauseating as I lost my sense of taste. All I could taste was texture and that itself is stomach-turning. One can’t imagine what it’s like to eat tasteless food until it happens to them. Even to this day, I still haven’t regained my full senses back.

Also, this time, COVID spread to all my family members. While I was in pain due to the worsening symptoms, it was nothing compared to my mom’s experience where she couldn’t even get out of bed. I was full with fear that something worse could happen especially since both my parents are high-risk. Luckily, my parents fully recovered but this is not the case for thousands of Americans.

I cannot express enough how important it is to take care of yourself and others by wearing a mask, social distancing, and cleaning your hands and areas. It is maddening to see people not take precautions as they are the reason why we cannot progress from this pandemic. Even a year later, I hear of many people who don’t believe this virus is real, or are not wearing a mask, and that is a slap in the face to those who have lost loved ones to COVID. To be privileged enough to decide whether to protect others or not by refusing to abide by the CDC guidelines during a pandemic is extremely selfish and should be addressed.

Several may argue that their rights are being violated because of mask mandates. However, this is a deadly pandemic and the mask mandate is to protect each other from potentially catching the virus. It is not a violation as a mask doesn’t impede your right to speak, but rather a protection of public health.

Recently, the CDC has conducted experiment in which results show that double masking and knotted and tucked masks increases effectiveness of protection from the virus. Double masking is putting a cloth mask over a medical procedure mask. Also, the tighter the mask is, the more effective it becomes.

Throughout this time, I also learned something new. As a blood donor, I went to my local blood drive to donate like I do every two months. However, I lately discovered that blood donations from fully recovered COVID-19 patients have COVID antibodies that can help others fight off the disease. These antibodies provide a way for the immune system to fight the virus when a person is sick, therefore, blood plasma can become extremely helpful to current COVID patients. If you have COVID antibodies, I urge you to donate blood to assist others the way your antibodies helped you recover.

Overall, having COVID and seeing my family suffer through it was an extremely difficult and frightening time. I wouldn’t want this to happen to anyone else which is why I push for everyone to use precautions. Otherwise, this is going to be a long pandemic.