Comorbidities

• I'm hypertensive, pre-diabetic, obese, and old.

• These factors, especially obesity, are all listed on the CDC's website as factors that can significantly increase the severity of the disease.

• It's amazing to me that there was not some kind of national informational warning blast about the risks of being overweight and contracting COVID.

• For the most part, your weight is something you can control, yet people weren't told to lose weight during the pandemic. Somewhere between 35% - 45% of people in the U.S. are obese.

Severity of Effects

• If I do catch COVID-19, I don't want the effects to be severe, and if I'm vaccinated and fully boosted, my immune system should be more prepared to handle the virus.

• The infinitesimally small risk of an adverse reaction or medical issue resulting from the mRNA vaccine is much less than the risks associated with getting COVID-19.

Immunocompromised Loved Ones

• My beautiful girlfriend is immunocompromised, and while I won't go into the reasons here to protect her privacy, the last thing I want to do is to catch COVID and transmit it to her with her weakened immune system.

Masking

• Although it can be argued that cloth masks are not very effective, they have to be better than wearing no mask at all.

• If you notice, nobody is wearing a mask anymore. It's almost like COVID-19 doesn't exist.

• On the contrary, we are at approximately 74,000 new cases daily, and that number is going up.

• Hospital admissions are at 2,500 daily and also rising.

I'm lucky--I work from home and can afford to have food and other necessities delivered, but I'm still concerned about COVID-19, and will continue to take the steps I feel necessary to avoid getting the disease.