I’m not sure which variant of COVID I got. For past two weeks, I’ve been experiencing worst feelings I’ve ever known. I was/am constantly tired, full of pain and unable to taste or smell stuff. I’ve been hospitalized for past four days and it’s the first day I’m off of hospital.

I’m better now. I got Remdesivir as medical treatment and doctors took a good care of me. Currently, I get tired after few minutes of activity but doctors say it’s normal. They ask me to drink liquids a lot, specially juice and water, and get Vitamin C.

They also asked me to get rest a lot and eat food (even if I’m not hungry because of the virus) because it’s essential to regain my energy.

One thing that helped me a lot during this time was my health insurance. My previous insurance was expired starting this year (Persian Jalali calendar) and I was not insured. The previous one was from family company but starting this year I was not eligible for it and I forgot to get public insurance until I was about to get hospitalized.

However, lucky us, there’s a great insurance system in this country. Every person is eligible to get medically insured by government. There are different types of insurance and people can choose between them, paying different fees based on your need but the basic plan which covers all public hospitals is free.

I signed up for the basic plan the day before I went to hospital and my insurance started the day I went to the hospital. All my bills were covered by government and I paid only 20% of the costs because of the insurance. The treatment was expensive and I would’ve face some difficulties paying all the bills without insurance.

Many people are facing a lot of difficulties during these times. The economic situation in whole world is pretty messed up and many are unemployed, facing trouble to live a normal life yet to be able to pay for expensive treatments for COVID.

I always advocated for public health insurance from government. I don’t care how some rich people may oppose it or how some people throw shitty “economic” reasons in the conversation but everybody deserves health insurance and nobody should be forced to pay a lot of money to get taken care of in hospital. Nobody should be full of stress about whether one can pay for one’s health or not.

I am proud that I live in a country with public health insurance and I will encourage everyone to vote for such system if there’s none where one lives. It’s basic human right and it’s needed for all.

A girl had a fight with her boyfriend and told him that she’s leaving. But she didn’t really want to leave and she was wasting time. The boy asked her “why aren’t you leaving?” and she responded “I’m watering the flowers”. The boy responded “sorry I though you left”. The girl immediately asked “did you said you’re sorry?” “I forgive you honey. Let’s go out for dinner”.

This is a great example for deliberate misconception. Some people do this only to show that their opinion is right no matter what. Avoid those people, they’re dangerous. Some of them are stupid but some are dangerously smart.

I read a post on Bill Gates’ blog about polio. It talks about how vaccines helped us survive the disease and easily walk. Thousands of people were infected with polio during time and lost ability to walk or even stand. The suggested cure for polio was a metal tank, an iron lung, a mechanical respirator.

Polio attacks the body’s nervous system, crippling patients. In the worst cases, the disease paralyzes their respiratory muscles and makes it difficult for them to breathe, sometimes resulting in death.

Using changes in air pressure, the iron lung pulls air in and out of a patient’s lungs, allowing them to breathe and stay alive. During the height of the polio epidemic in the U.S. in the 1940s and 1950s, rows of iron lungs filled hospital wards to treat thousands of polio patients, most of them children.

Today, we don’t need iron lungs anymore as there’s an effective vaccine for it. Every person now gets vaccinated against polio and, since 1988, the world decided to eradicate the disease. Polio cases dropped since then by nearly 100 percent.

Before vaccines, more than 350 thousand people were infected in a year, facing horrible consequences and difficulties in their life but now there’s fewer than 200 cases yearly only in two countries, Afghanistan and Pakistan, in which extremists force people to avoid vaccines using religious propaganda.

Today, some people are spreading false information about vaccines claiming a vaccine is a conspiracy to turn people to something other than a human or vaccines are tools to impose surveillance on people. Of course some vaccines are not effective, we’ve seen them, but to induce that vaccines in general are harming people, that makes no sense.

I’ve seen the effect of vaccines on people. From influenza to polio to tetanus and Meningococcal vaccines, I’ve seen how they help people live and be healthy and I’ve seen how without them people are harmed and face difficulties, even death.

I’m not yet vaccinated against coronavirus (COVID-19) but I will be when it’s time for people my age. My grandparents and some relatives are vaccinated. They didn’t face any aftereffects. One of my relatives was vaccinated while his family were not, and I’ve seen how all of his family members got sick but he were OK. All of them recovered, happily.

Vaccines are results of scientific works, and I believe in science. People say science is always changing and is not reliable but that’s one reason I support it. Science always changes and gets updated for better. That’s why I rely on it. When it comes to vaccines, science is proven to be always working to get better, from iron lungs to polio vaccines, it’s always working to help people.

Part of this post is taken from gatesnotes.com. Check their terms of use/copyright notice.

One of the problems we have about activists is that they don’t follow up on issues. A lot of people are aware of the problems but less and less people are trying to complete a task of problem-solving.

Many people are only listening and collecting some basic information about problems but they mostly get tired of repeated concerns. Because of social networks, people are now used to diverse ‘material’ that expresses things in a completely superficial, raw, and non-specific way. And it is only suitable for entertainment, not informative exchange.

We see less and less people who focus on a problem and try their best to finally solve it. Of course we can’t, nor we have the right, to stop people who want to be active in different fields but without guiding them, the bigger problem still remains.

Many of our audiences are tired of us repeating problems and us to go through one problem after another without actually doing anything about them. Some seem to expect the problems to be solved only by mentioning them.

The thing is that mentioning and talking about a problem is one thing, and actually trying to fix it is another. We can’t fix problems by talking about them. If you talk about math problems a lot, you won’t be a mathematician. The only way to fix those problems is to learn math and actually trying.

However, I should mention that gaining people’s attention about a problem is one way to fix it.

With public knowledge and global attention, we can have the power of people to change something. For example, in the matter of privacy, people’s attention is something that can fix the problem for good. It’s not enough of course but it’s an important precondition.

Anyway, many of us can’t stay active on one thing. We want to have activity and impact on various stuff and it can only, well not only but mostly, lead to being unsuccessful on all of them.

A good journalist is someone who does not give up a story until the whole truth is revealed, not someone who covers 100 different stories. Pick a problem, or even 5 problems if you can, and follow up on those issues till you do something effective, and don’t give up.

We don’t need to be a person who can do a lot of things, we should be a person who does one thing very good.