I’ve been thinking a lot about mountains recently. We’ve been trapped inside for what seems like an eternity, and our mountains are beckoning. Time to get outside! It’s a beautiful spring-like week, after all.
What could go wrong? Yet New Hampshire mountains have been in the news a lot lately for the treacherous conditions they can whip up for the unsuspecting and experienced hikers alike among us.
These are the times when hikes can – and do – go awry, with tragic consequences for the unprepared.
I’m reminded of this springtime treachery when I think of the pandemic mountain which has been looming right outside our door for the past year. An end is in sight! Our impulses say to ditch the masks and get back to living. We are so done with this mess! But the pandemic mountain is even more dangerous this spring than our actual White Mountains for those of us blinded by impatience, unrealistic optimism, or misinformation. We still need to be careful. We can’t listen to anyone trying to say otherwise.
There are still figurative mountains out there before we can get back to doing the things we love in the way we want to do them. I was looking at the New Hampshire COVID-19 dashboard today, and every graphic looked to me like a mountain range. There were the spring, Thanksgiving, and winter holiday peaks in COVID cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. Ominously, after steep declines in these in the past few weeks, these are again climbing. People let down their guard, lulled into thinking that precautions are passé, and here we go again. Masking, social distancing, and hand hygiene still need to be our mantra.
There is good news, and as we repeat our mantra and do what we need to do to avoid falling ill or spreading the virus, we can take encouragement from that. We can believe the experts when they tell us that vaccines work, and they are safe. The development and testing phases were thorough and carefully done. No shortcuts in safety were taken. The next mountain to climb will be to get shots into the arms of every one of us. This is no time for skepticism.
Supplies are increasing daily, so that we will all be able to avail ourselves of them soon. I’m delighted to say I’ve now joined the ranks of the fully vaccinated. The process went smoothly, and the side effects were far milder than an actual case of COVID-19 would have been. I thought of them as a small reminder of how fortunate I have been to avoid the worst of this global scourge. I’ve signed up personally to become a vaccinator, and welcome the chance to get this pandemic mountain behind us for good.
(Millie LaFontaine of Concord is a retired neurologist.)