Ceramic sculpture | 34 x 13 x 13″ | $2500 Contact Artist to Purchase
© 2021 Karl Rohrkemper
In late December of 2019, a contagious and deadly human transmittable virus came to America from Huwan, the capital city of Hubei Province in central China.
SARS-Cov-2, referred as COVID-19, is a severe acute respiratory syndrome.
It came with little warning, a stowaway in the lungs of infected air travelers from China and Europe. The World Health Organization and the Center for Disease Control knew of the outbreak in China but were assured by the Chinese government that it was under control.
This information was deadly wrong.
COVID-19 is like a cerberus with three distinct phases.
The first phase is transmission.
The second phase is the pulmonary occurrence.
The third phase is the hyper inflammatory phase.
As January and February came upon us, the infected numbers throughout the world were skyrocketing. With no vaccine available, the WHO and CDC recommended N95 face masks, surgical gloves, social distancing and washing your hands.
However, the world, in whole, was desperately short of N95 masks, gloves and hand sanitizer. This immediately resulted in a mad rush to produce them. A distribution challenge along with limited availability resulted in excessive pricing.
The world had been outsourcing these PPE supplies ( masks, gloves and sanitizer ) for years to China. However, as infection numbers grew in China, their PPE items were being supplied to their own population. This created an incredible worldwide shortage. The world’s manufacturers scrambled and the emphasis on speed of production and availability overruled quality. As a result, there was an influx of untested, faulty and fake products being distributed worldwide.
Social distancing became the norm. However, worldwide, there was no clear mandate on how to accomplish that. Within the United States, every state took on the voice and direction of recommendations on their own. This created confusion and lacked cohesive national leadership.
As people stayed home and out of their vehicles, road usage was down an estimated 35-40 percent. As demand for oil products dropped, so did gasoline prices. In California, gas prices fell by 80 cents per gallon.
Parents and guardians were juggling priorities, between their children’s needs and their job’s requirements. Videotelephony and online chat became the preferred way to teleconference and address distance learning and work. The preferred leader in this technology space was a San Jose based company called Zoom. People were dressing up, from the waist up, in order to be presentable to the other Zoom participants while secretly living in their sweatpants.
As new effective vaccines are developed and administered, the world is racing to achieve herd vaccination of at least 75% before COVID-19 mutates beyond the effectiveness of our current vaccines.