As many of you know, I lost two friends to COVID-19 last year. One in May and one in August. Some people didn’t believe me when I wrote about this, said it was all a hoax. With all the death and illness since then, I suspect many of those doubters have now been silenced. Unfortunately, that won’t bring back any of those who lost their lives to this horrible virus.

Sadly, last week I learned that the publisher of The Cuenca Dispatch lost a close relative to the virus. Jony Mogrovejo’s cousin died on Christmas day from COVID-19.

Lorena Mogrovejo was only 39 years old. She was a nurse at Fundacion Municipal de la Mujer, Cuenca’s municipal hospital for women and children. She’d been a nurse for over 10 years.

She was also a wife and mother. Besides her husband, she leaves behind two sons, one only 2 years old. They will all now not remember Christmas day as a holiday to celebrate. It instead will be a reminder that they lost their wife and mother to a horrible disease because she decided to continue to care for sick people.

Her friends and family say that Lorena was an extremely happy person who loved to make others laugh. Some of her colleagues called her Patch Adams.

Now, she is just one of the many health care workers worldwide who have lost their lives to COVID-19 because they had no choice but to be on the front lines in dealing with this disease. They chose to be healthcare professionals—but that does not mean that they chose to be confronted with this disease every day for almost a year because some people wanted to ignore the seriousness of it.

In the beginning, all the people who called it a hoax and ignored the science of it, were probably doing so just to challenge authority. Or to take a political stand. Or some other reason that I, as a former healthcare professional, simply cannot understand.

Now it’s time for all of that to stop. For all the conspiracy theories to stop. It’s time to let science guide rational thought, and to face the fact that this horrible disease will not go away on its own. It’s time to actually put in the effort to learn about vaccines and stop letting stupid Facebook or Twitter posts guide thinking.

This isn’t a game, it never was. This is a serious pandemic that will continue to kill people every day unless we, as intelligent beings, open our eyes to the truth and stop letting foolish people guide foolish thoughts and behaviors.

Innocent people like Lorena are dying every day from COVID-19. And if you aren’t wearing a mask—to protect other people—and you are spreading false facts about the vaccine, then you are not innocent, you are complicit and putting other people in danger.

Lorena’s children will now grow up without their mother. They will feel that pain every Christmas day for the rest of their lives as they remember a woman who was taken from them at much to young of an age. Countless other families will do the same; almost twelve-thousand people in the world died from COVID-19 on Christmas day.

If you are one of those people who continue to say this is all a hoax, and that the vaccine will change your DNA, I want you to imagine if one of those people was in your family. To imagine that your sister, or your wife, or your mother died from the disease like Lorena did.

Would you take back all the crazy stuff you said? Would you start to really investigate the science behind the disease, behind the spread of the virus, and behind the vaccine that could actually stop it from continuing to ravage the world? I think you would.

So, is that what it’s going to take for everyone to come to their senses? Is everyone going to have to lose a loved one to this disease before this craziness stops? For God’s sake I hope not.

No one should have to go thru what Lorena’s family is going through now. Certainly, not from something that common sense can stop.

My thoughts and prayers go out to Lorena’s family and friends and hope they can take some comfort in knowing that she will be remembered as the extremely happy person who helped save other people’s lives.