It’s been a long year. Yes, a year. On January 21, Washington State reached the one-year mark since the first case of COVID-19 was reported. Since then, we’ve faced closures of schools, playgrounds and have gone mostly virtual.
Let’s face it. The past few weeks have been especially taxing on our collective emotional and mental health. With the culmination of a pandemic, world events and inclement winter weather, it’s more important than ever to take time to consider your mental health and that of your family and friends, too.
There is a great deal of information coming out about the new COVID-19 vaccines. With a lot of information comes a lot of questions. Some of these questions can be answered by health authorities and some simply don’t have answers right now. Two major concerns we would like to talk about are safety and when everybody will get the vaccine.
We’ve made it through a lot this year! We’ve realized how important friends and family are, we’ve learned to express gratitude for the hard work of so many workers we’ve taken for granted, and we’ve learned just how connected we are to each other. Now that the holiday season is here, we can use those lessons to make this a season to remember. Get creative and have some fun with it!
So many words have been added to our everyday language this year and it can get confusing. Contact tracing is a new set of words that many people are just beginning to understand. However, it is not a new concept in public health. It has been utilized in epidemiology for decades and is something SRHD has always done with STDs, TB, and other infectious diseases. Contract tracing is an important part of investigating how a disease spreads.
