Ever since March of 2020 the world has turned upside down because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Letty Zepeda, health administrator for Porter County Health Department, believes that staying inside and getting vaccinated are the best things we can do to stay healthy.
“I'm fully vaccinated. I got my booster back in October as soon as I could get it," Zepeda said. "If you have some sort of health issues which I do, then you kind of run a fear about trying to make sure you don't catch the virus. When we can all anticipate how we think our bodies are going to fight it, but nobody knows for sure. The last thing you want to do is find out at the last minute 'oops', I thought I was stronger than this.”
Zepeda does what she can to inform people on what they can do to be safe during the pandemic.
“My thing is to make sure that I try to educate people by giving them their options and see if it's sticking with them to recall this,” said Zepeda.
Zepeda compares the safety of getting vaccinated to the safety of putting your seatbelt on in the car.
“If I don't put my seatbelt on when I'm driving and I get into a car accident, most likely it means it’s me who is going to get hurt,” said Zepeda.
Zepeda believes that there is a problem when other individuals do not want to protect the people around them by getting vaccinated.
“The problem with people not being vaccinated, or wearing a mask, or not social distancing, is that they are now affecting others around them. Those are innocent victims, the ones that don't know you're not vaccinated. They are in public and may be carrying the virus because not everybody experiences symptoms,” said Zepeda.
After getting COVID in December of 2019, Zepeda expresses that she would not want anyone to re-live the sickness she had.
“I feel I have an insight as to how it feels to have COVID and I don't want to experience that again. And I wish people would understand that getting the vaccine is not necessarily a personal choice. Your decision to not get the vaccine is affecting others,” said Zepeda.
Zepeda has also noticed that the numbers for the flu were decreased due to the fact that everyone was sanitizing and washing their hands.
“We're telling everybody to mask up in companies, wash your hands, and sanitize everything around you. People were so focused on washing their hands and wearing a mask it actually kept flu numbers down,” said Zepeda
Zepeda has noticed that some people are not taking COVID as seriously as they should. Many people are tired of having to deal with this virus, but instead of doing nothing about COVID Zepeda believes that there are ways that we can control it.
“I hear a lot of people are tired, they don't want to play COVID anymore, but it's not a game that you can just quit. COVID may be here for a long time. We have to learn how to control it, how to get a handle on it,” said Zepeda.