Every Day, Every Individual, Every Environment ... Healthy

If you are a high school or college student living in the U.S. or are otherwise delightfully young (15-24 years old), 190 of you died of COVID-19 between February and July of 2020 while 14,810 of you died overall (from COVID-19 and all other causes).  That amounts to a 0.00044% COVID-19 mortality (death) rate for all 42.97 million of you in the U.S.  Roughly, your age group accounted for a meager 0.15% of deaths due to COVID-19 in the U.S. If you are aged 25-34, 935 of you died from COVID-19 in that same time period while 30,885 of you died overall.  That amounts to a 0.002% COVID-19 mortality rate for all 45.7 million of you in the U.S.  Your age group accounted for a mere 0.72% of deaths due to COVID-19.  If you are young, you are doing a lousy job of dying from COVID-19.  In some circles, that may justify hanging out in bars, going to large parties, hitting the nightclubs several times a week, strolling through the grocery store with ease... all without a face mask or face covering.

If you are a college student, you likely had one odd and unforgettable spring this year.   Maybe, you struggled to get up on time for class, sleeping in a little later every day.  And, even though your class started after noon, it was still hard to log on to Zoom on time.  You may have reasoned that your professor surely wouldn't be taking the time to scroll through all the participants to see who was and was not attending on a particular day.  After all, you could always watch the recorded lecture later... Maybe, you had trouble finishing your homework. Despite the fact that your courses had all of the same deadlines as before COVID-19 struck, those deadlines seemed distant and seemingly irrelevant as the whole world went online.   Maybe you were unusually frustrated, because before the pandemic, you relied heavily on study groups, just hanging out and working through homework and preparing for exams together.  And during the pandemic in the spring, you did your homework alone, ta

In the time of COVID-19, simple decisions have become harder.  While I used to be in autopilot on Sunday morning to roll out of bed, stumble into the car, and head off to church, that decision is no longer easy or simple. If you are thinking of going to church while COVID-19 is still raging across the United States or if you are part of a church leadership team trying to decide how and when to offer services, I hope that the information in this blog is useful. At church,  one of the highest risks of spreading COVID-19 comes from those who are singing or speaking, particularly those who are doing so for any significant length of time.  While the risk of spreading COVID-19 from singing or speaking is minimized by wearing a mask, the reality of the situation is that masks tend to muffle speech and distort singing, so the temptation for singers and speakers to remove their masks while singing and speaking will be high.  Even in a church that requires face masks for everyone, exposure risk