As the streets of Hartford, Conn., filled with people, I lay in a hospital bed, forcing myself to breathe.
In, out. I told myself. In, out.
I tried to keep time with a monitor beeping at my side, and every so often, I called for a nurse’s help. Two hours had gone by without anyone checking on me, but the hallways were crammed with patients. People lay, masked and still, in the middle of the COVID-19 section of the emergency room at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan. No one could hear me. Though I had been sick with COVID-19 for nearly a month, the virus had recently taken a turn, attacking my lungs and my body in an entirely new way.
In, out. I thought. In, out.
Still, I was better off than thousands who had come before me and the thousands who will come after. The virus was making its way through my system, but I was OK, and I was going home. But the mask on my face made it hard to breathe, and I felt constricted with a pulse oximeter on my finger, a needle in my hand and a blood pressure band on my arm.
In, out. I said. In, out. Your health is not more important than my liberties.
At the same time, in Connecticut — my home state — hundreds of people gathered in the capital city. American flags were billowing. Signs were flailing. Red hats were everywhere. I had no idea this was happening, but by the time I got home from the hospital, the photos were all over the internet.
“Your health is not more important than my liberties,” someone had scribbled on a car window. The pain in my chest — which had persisted and grown throughout the last eight days — was now compounded by something else.
I couldn’t believe the state of my country. I couldn’t believe what my fellow Americans were doing to one another and not only how easily but how savagely they wanted to tear each other down.
I know that this virus is terrifying in more ways than one, and I know that the outbreak has caused unparalleled economic loss. An unfathomable number of people have been left without a job, an income or an ability to pay rent. Each of those individuals is experiencing a devastating loss in their own way.
Still, the only thing more important than our livelihoods is our lives — and each and every one of us needs to do our part to ease the country into a new normal.
When I saw those photographs, I knew that those protesters, like countless others across the United States, were talking to me. They were talking to the nearly 1 million other Americans who have contracted COVID-19 over the past few months.
Were they also talking about the nearly 50,000 people whose lives were stolen by this virus in America alone so far? The sisters, mothers, grandmothers; the brothers, fathers, grandfathers; all dead because of COVID-19?
Yes. They were. And they are.
