<rant>
My wife has been an ICU nurse for 9 years. The first 4 were in a pulmonary ICU followed by 5 so far in the cardiac ICU. He works at one of the top 5 hospitals in the country for many specialties, so she gets some of the sickest of the sickest from all over. From April to late June she treated nothing but COVID patients. In the years she's been taking care of people, she said she's rarely seen anything ravage someone's bodies the way COVID has.
The thing is, there aren't a ton of interventions they can do for people. Some people can't handle sedation because they wouldn't survive. From what she's described, being on a vent with little to no sedation is akin to torture. Some end up needing new kidneys. Some need a new heart. Needing new lungs is a given. That's all provided you manage to get healthy enough to live through the surgery. People are treating it like you go in the hospital for a few days to a couple of weeks and go on your way.
That's not the case for many. For many, their struggle has really just begun and their quality of life is very different than before they got sick. She's confident in her skills, has adequate PPE, takes all of the precautions and everything else, but she said that's all pointless if some simpleton fuck in a grocery store or gas station coughs and one of us contracts it.
I'm immunocompromised. If I get this, there's a fairly good chance that I'll be completely screwed. That's not being hyperbolic. That's reality. Watching how people are acting makes her blood boil. As she's working tonight I'm making sure that all of my 2 factor authentication backup codes are in one place, along with account login info, etc.
Do I think I'll die of COVID? I honestly don't know. Not today, anyway. With as much as I'm in and out of doctor's offices, diagnostic labs and blood labs my chances of contracting it are pretty high - people there wear masks under their nose like morons. Dying from this would be more infuriating than some jackass texting and driving. Regardless, it will very likely be because of someone's selfish arrogance, willful ignorance and self-centered bullshit, not old age.
</rant>