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A little more common sense

Jeanne Sager - Columnist
Posted 3/2/20

All I heard were the words “can't breathe.” Immediately my chest tightened. My cheeks reddened.

I could see myself in a hospital somewhere, surrounded by plastic sheeting and strangers in …

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A little more common sense

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All I heard were the words “can't breathe.” Immediately my chest tightened. My cheeks reddened.

I could see myself in a hospital somewhere, surrounded by plastic sheeting and strangers in HazMat suits.

Clearly, I was overreacting.

I'm fine.

I don't know about the woman on the airplane. Her seatmates alerted the flight attendants to her breathing difficulties less than an hour after we'd taken off from a California airport. Seated right in front of me, she would soon be joined by a physician drawn to our part of the plane by a plea over the intercom for a medical professional onboard to please help.

For nearly five hours over America's heartland, the doctor and flight attendant scurried around, fitting her with an oxygen mask, checking her blood pressure, placing calls to the airline from which she'd disembarked before climbing aboard our cross-country flight.

I'm not sure if it was a good thing or a bad thing that the WiFi was out on our airplane. I couldn't look up symptoms of the coronavirus to see if I should really be worried. Then again, I couldn't look up symptoms of the coronavirus and work myself into a panic.

That's what we do, isn't it?

A hangnail becomes cancer when we search the internet.

A diagnosis of a patient two and half hours south of us, a patient who had direct ties to the virus in another country and who was immediately quarantined, becomes an imminent threat.

We get scared.

Then we get unreasonable.

I should know. One “can't breathe,” and I visioned myself into a full-on outbreak situation.

But I'm fine.

I wash my hands. I avoid touching my face. I sneeze into my elbow, and I wash my reusable grocery bags.

I use common sense.

We all could use with a little more common sense and a little less fearmongering.

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