%1

I’ve been thinking about a French horn teacher I once had.

I'm immunocompromised. My ability to attend worship has long been determined by the CDC.

(RNS) — As the COVID-19 pandemic grips the world at an exponential rate, many health care professionals are admitting that they are scared. “The sky is falling,” wrote one pediatric surgeon.

In 1918, the city of Philadelphia threw a parade that killed thousands of people. Ignoring warnings of influenza among soldiers preparing for World War I, the march to support the war effort drew 200,000 people who crammed together to watch the procession. Three days later, every bed in Philadelphia’s 31 hospitals was filled with sick and dying patients, infected by the Spanish flu.

When it came time to pass the peace at Pathway Baptist Church, senior pastor Mike Donald didn’t hesitate.

“Everybody, wave to the right,” Donald said.

In response, the hundreds of people at the Calvert Drive In Theatre in Calvert City, Kentucky, turned to their right and waved to the people sitting in the cars next to them.

If any locals still braving the streets walked past Boston’s John F. Kennedy Federal Building at the end of March, they may have found themselves staring at a huge black-and-white image of Anne Frank’s face.

“Anne Frank died of an infectious disease in a crowded detention center,” read the caption. The image was projected on a wall near the building, which houses the state’s federal immigration court, on March 22 by activists with the Jewish immigration group Never Again Action. “Governor Baker, release everyone in ICE detention before it’s too late.”

The Washington National Cathedral donated thousands of medical masks to two hospitals in the nation’s capital after discovering a trove of the much-needed protective equipment just feet from where Helen Keller and other prominent Americans lie in the cathedral’s underground crypts.

Bought in 2006 as a precaution during an outbreak of the H5N1 flu, the 5,000 plus N95 respiratory masks had been forgotten until early this month, when the cathedral’s chief stonemason, Joseph Alonso, remembered coming across them in an unfinished area of the crypt level.

The ACA never attempted the kind of structural reform our health-care system needs.