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Don’t Forget to Breathe: How to Stay Calm in the Midst of the Coronavirus Pandemic

David August
2 min readMar 14, 2020
photo by author

Don’t forget to breathe.

The long haul truck driver who is about to drive the food/medicine/sanitizer to your local store just had to scramble to get daycare for their child because the schools closed.

The cashier at the store had to do the same, and also keeps interacting with hundreds or thousands of strangers so they will still be able to afford to pay their rent, lest they and their elderly family members end up homeless during a pandemic that preys on our elders.

The pharmacist who has dedicated their professional life to trying to get people healthy worries the shipments might not come quickly and the prescriptions might not get filled so they won’t be able to help how they’ve been trained to.

The doctor is also worried, worried that a force of nature, something so small it can’t be seen with the naked eye, something that humanity didn’t know existed 5 months ago (and may not have) may hurt their patients, take their breaths away. They can only hope science and supply chains and luck hold out long enough that triage medicine isn’t all they get to practice in the face of it in the months to come.

We are all connected. We are all charged with helping everyone around us, because we can. And we will…

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David August
David August

Written by David August

Actor. May have been in that thing you saw that one time (Jimmy Kimmel Live, Ghost Town, 2nd City/Chicago Shakespeare) https://linktr.ee/davidaugust

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