U.S. Will Survive COVID-19 as It Has Other Catastrophes

I feel lucky to be alive.

It’s not because I have so far escaped COVID-19, knock on wood. It is because I’ve survived numerous threats before.

I was born in 1955, the year a polio vaccine was introduced. Still, I got all of the common childhood diseases of that era including, most memorably, mumps and pertussis, a.k.a. whopping cough, simultaneously when I was 7 years old. I was afraid to go to sleep because I thought I wouldn’t wake up.