To the Editor:

I was going to write about gun control again, but the rising cases of the COVID Ba.5 variant demand more attention right now.

Full disclosure: I got COVID and then Long COVID. For two years and three months I had kept my wife and I free of COVID. Then on Feb. 21, Boris Johnson, the British prime minister, lifted all restrictions, so I made the bad assumption England was relatively safe. My sister-in-law had died in 2020 in a nursing home in England from COVID and her ashes were still on the shelf, awaiting proper burial, and her estate needed to be settled. So my wife and I decided to go to England in May, staying in an isolated country cottage for most of the time.

W e had to leave the cottage four days before returning to the U.S., and on the day we left the cottage, I caught COVID. I recovered from that phase of the disease spectrum, only to get into the Long COVID phase and suffer a quasi-stroke. I recovered from that too.

The various scans of my brain showed totally normal cerebral (brain) arteries, except for one tiny plaque at the origin of the left common carotid artery — inconsequential according to the consultants, and not bad for a 79-year-old.

I was fully vaccinated and double boosted and this still happened to me. Had I been unvaccinated/unboosted, I probably would have died.

To those readers who think that COVID is just a case of bad flu, I urge you to think again. Cardiovascular event with COVID and Long COVID are not uncommon and if what happened to me happens to you, you may well be dead or paralyzed — or if not you,then one of your loved ones.

Make your own decision, but remember your decision my well have devastating effects on your loved ones.

Also remember that we will never get out of this pandemic until the COVID virus stops mutating, and that won’t happen until there are so few un-immune people out there that the virus can no longer find new people to infect (which is when the virus mutates to newer more vaccine resistant forms). This is what happens when political inactivity and/or “jackman” attitudes get in the way of proper medical therapy.

W.E. Feeman Jr., MD

Bowling Green