Day #29 Writing Through COVID-19: Good News; Not-So-Good News

On Wednesday, nine days into my brother-in-law's intubation and induced coma, he was given plasma from a recovered COVID-19 donor. Today, two days later, his medical team was able to reduce the oxygen level of his ventilator from 50 to 40 percent. He is still very sick. My sister and her children have not seen him for 11 days. There is a lot of uncertainty and waiting ahead. But this is the first good news we've had in almost two weeks. We'll take it.

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Also today: At the end of our daily AHS English Lockdown (ZOOM class), one student lingered longer than the others. She was angry that this morning Governor Reynolds announced Iowa schools would not reopen this year. Several districts had already made that call on their own. "It's not fair," she said. "This isn't even real. My parents said people are just having heart attacks and dying of the flu and people are just saying it's Coronavirus."

I was stunned to silence, but my best-ever colleagues spoke up. They directed the student to seek out trustworthy information from the CDC and reliable science and news sources. They told her that people are very sick and dying from COVID-19, and we must be sure the information we are relying on is from quality sources. The girl again asserted her parents as her end-all-be-all source of information.

"Good-bye," we said. "See you Monday."