I mean, we'd have to know where you lived, how many people you talked to, have half a sense of where they worked ...
If I were to guess you lived in Ohio, purely by your fandom, 799 people have died in that state. Not knowing a single medical professional who was somewhat close to those doesn't seem so surprising.
Shoot, we've had the flu numbers thrown around, but how often does someone directly tell you about flu deaths (I suppose they're less interesting).
But if you want to help with those jobs and dreams, you can donate to all manner of organizations buying local to feed whoever. Or eat takeout every meal. Or get takeout and donate that too.
I do have friends that work here in Ohio in the medical profession. One is a supervisor of nursing at a hospital in Lorain, Ohio which is just west of Cleveland. According to this person, they number of people being coded as having Covid is much greater than those that actually have the virus. If someone is admitted with ANY of the symptoms, they are immediately coded as having the virus. I asked why this was the case and they confirmed what I had thought all along. Because the hospital gets more federal money for a higher number of Covid patients.
Therefore, if a patient with stage IV cancer is admitted and has a fever, they are coded with Covid. If they die, they are added to the list of those that died from Covid when in fact it was the Cancer that caused the death.
Now that is simply 1 hospital in Ohio. However, based on Dr. Brix stating that they are encouraging hospitals to engage in this practice, what are the odds that other hospitals are doing the same?
This is why I don't trust ANY of the numbers that the government or many others are putting out. There is such a wide range of opinion in the medical profession as to what constitutes a Covid infection vs what doesn't. And with the government incentivizing hospitals to increase their Covid numbers, how much can we really trust this data?
As for donating or supporting local businesses, we have been doing that since day 1. However, that does little to help small business owners of businesses that are not deemed essential and cannot operate. It also does little for the part time servers at restaurants that are not working and do not qualify for unemployment compensation. My youngest daughter is one of them. She is a full time student at the Univ of Toledo and now back home. She had a part time job as a server at a local restaurant and used that money to help pay for her living expenses. She was planning on working full time this summer (with agreement with the owner) to save enough money to pay for her rent and other living expenses for the fall semester. Now that plan is down the drain. But hey, at least she didn't get a cough.