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                Dear Great Grandsons
By Bernadine Starken Heron Point
June 2020
Dear Great Grandsons Declan and Ari:
When you become high school students and study American history, the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic will be but a paragraph, but those of us who lived through it thought it would never end. We were sheltering in our homes and listened to the President of the United States telling the American people this will pass. Yet the national Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said it would last until we developed a vaccine, which would take a year. Already we had a conflict between politics and the health experts.
The first order of business by President Trump was to close our border. He felt business people, government people and tourists were carrying the virus into the United States therefore no one could enter nor could anyone leave the country, which shut down the airlines and shipping businesses.
Each fall the Food and Drug Administration approves a vaccine for whatever the flu strain would be for that particular year, but it was not prepared for the coronavirus. Without a vaccine, the CDC gave the American people instructions to wash our hands for twenty seconds and keep our hands away from our face as the virus will attack through our eyes, nose, or mouth and move into our lungs. All non-essential businesses and sporting events as well as the whole school system plus colleges were closed or canceled or moved online; everyone was to stay home.
The virus caused the United States to implement different rules and laws to govern its people. To divide the country of 330 million people into manageable segments the President turned the management of the pandemic rules over to a federal Coronavirus Task Force and each state governor. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was
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