1. Those with Covid-19 will experience long-term or life-long lung damage.

Anderson Cooper, the anchor of CNN's Anderson Cooper 360 newscast, talked with William Haseltine, a professor at Harvard Medical School, about just how serious COVID-19 really is. On the newscast that was released on July 2nd, Professor Haseltine said:

"And another aspect of this epidemic that people aren't focused on is the wounded. We count the dying, but in any battle you count the wounded and a lot more - maybe five times as many people - are injured for the rest of their life because of this infection. This is deadly serious and I hope we begin, all of us, to exert our responsibility to take it seriously."

He then continued later on in the newscast saying:

"Recent studies have shown that even though somebody may feel entirely well, if you do a chest x-ray, up to 60% have ground-glass opacities in their lungs. That means, they're not very well. I talked a little bit before about the wounded; there may be long-term health consequences. [It's] a little bit like smoking. When you're young, you get it when you're older. These [young] people are not immune. Not only are a lot of them getting sick and filling up the hospitals, but they are inflicting long-term damage, as well as infecting their friends, their families, and the whole society. This is not healthy for our country."

In an article from Vox, it states:

"On CT scans, while normal lungs appear black, Covid-19 patients' lungs frequently have lighter gray patches, called 'ground-glass opacities' - which may not heal." These ground-glass opacities are signs of lung scarring. Once this happens, "the pulmonary function [the function of the lungs] never comes back; their ability to do normal activities never goes back to baseline."

2. A recent mutation causes COVID-19 to spread easier from person to person.

In the same newscast from Anderson Cooper, Professor Haseltine also spoke about a certain mutation and how it changed the virus. He said:

"People know that as viruses go from one place to another they change a little bit, but what was concerning is one particular mutation started to spread and took over the rest of the world. It took over China. It took over Europe. And spread all throughout the United States... students actually looked at that in great detail and discovered that the envelope of that protein - the outside, the spike protein - is a little bit different, which makes the virus ten times more transmissible than it used to be. That helps explain why it's spreading so fast. It takes one-tenth the amount of virus it did at the beginning of this epidemic [for an infected person to infect other people]."

Sanjay Gupta, CNN's chief medical correspondent, added:

"I don't think it's mutated enough to potentially make a vaccine more problematic."

So, although this mutation isn't an immediate threat (as to making the development of a vaccine more problematic) itt doesn't mean it isn't a threat at all. The easier it is for Covid-19 to spread from one person to another, the easier it is for it to spread within a community. Initially, it makes the rate at which this virus infects people higher than what it was before this mutation. This leads to an increase in cases, which then leads to an increase in hospitalizations, and unfortunately leads to an increase in deaths.

3. Don't start caring once you or a loved one gets Covid-19. Start caring now so neither of you get it, gets hit hard by it, and possibly dies from it.

In a recently deleted podcast from BBC World Service that was titled "WHO: Pandemic will get 'worse and worse' if health advice ignored" that was released on July 12, the host said:

"A doctor in Texas says a man in his thirties who thought coronavirus was a hoax has died after attending a Covid-19 party hosted by an infected person. The chief medical officer at the Methodist Hospital in San Antonio, Jane Appleby, said the victim regretted his actions."

Appleby then said:

"Just before the patient died they looked at their nurse and they said, 'I think I made a mistake. I thought this was a hoax, but it's not.'"

You do not want to die, or lose someone close to you, from a cause that could've been preventable. Just imagine this on a much larger scale - the amount of unnecessary deaths that this country has already seen and will continue to see because of people's disbelief. I have seen classmates of mine who only begin to care about the health of themselves and those around them once someone they know is hit hard by Covid-19. My screen-recording of this podcast is proof of what can happen once it's too late to start caring. So, to prevent any more unnecessary deaths and life-long injuries from this virus, we as a country must prudently use the guidelines that public health officials have laid out for us - wear a mask, social distance, and frequently wash your hands.

4. It is not a battle between those who care about "public health" and "economy." We should take public health regulations seriously so we CAN reopen the economy.

It's not about the opposing forces.

Howard Bauchner, Editor-in-Chief of Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA) and JAMA Network, interviewed Dr. Fauci. He spoke about the two forces: the public health forces and the open-up the country forces. He said:

"Rather than the mindset of the opposing forces - there's the public health forces and there's the open-up the country, let's get back to normal forces - they're not opposing. The best way as a vehicle to opening the country in a safe way is to prudently use public health measures. So, it's not public health against opening; it's the public health measures to help you to open. And I think we have to keep stressing that, as opposed to being opposing forces. You know, they're complimentary forces in so many respects."

He continued later on in the interview, saying:

"On one hand, you have people who are understandably concerned about the economy and how if we let the economy crash they're going to be more deleterious effects on some people than others. And at the same time, when you're dealing with a very serious public health issue and you don't want to balance lives against economy, but you have people who think in one direction and those who think in the other. And you're trying to get people to understand that we're all in the same boat together, so let's get public health to help us get the economy open as opposed to two opposing forces."

5. It is not a race to find a vaccine.

In the same interview, Dr. Fauci also talked about what is going on in his mind when he thinks about successful vaccine(s) for Covid-19. He stated:

"When you have two or three companies, which you hope would be successful, they are going to be making a vaccine not only for their own country but for availability in other countries. There's this misperception that everybody's racing to be THE winner. There's not going to be A winner. I would imagine from what we see that several of these vaccines are going to be very similar in their effect, and hopefully more than one of them will be successful. If so, we hope, as we should, that there would be some degree of equitable distribution so that people in a part of the world that can't afford it or don't do their own vaccine trial will have a fair accessibility to doses of the vaccine."