Christopher Ridgeway Stone Clinical Laboratories: COVID-19

A year later, COVID-19 is still here and we’re all still dealing with it. Asfounder and CEO of Stone Clinical Laboratories, I deal with this everyday. It’s affected all of our lives in so many ways and we’ve had to adapt accordingly. Home school, work from home zoom calls, and the sort. Industries such as restaurants, hotels and airlines have been impacted like they couldn’t have imagined in their wildest nightmares.

It’s been a difficult year for so many with significant life events not happening like they were meant to. Whether it was a dream wedding, vacation of a lifetime or special birthday celebrations, none of them could happen in the way they were planned. Life has gone on – people have got married in these times but the celebrations just haven’t been the same. How could they be?

In so many ways we were kept apart, unable to attend, celebrate and commemorate significant life milestones.

The virus is still doing this. The Olympics were postponed a year and they just announced that overseas spectators won’t be able to attend. Imagine the pride a parent would have to watch their child compete. From the age of 6 they drove them to practice and competitions every weekend. They were with them every step of the way through the bumps, bruises, triumphs and trials. It’s difficult not to see them become an Olympian and see them fulfill their lifelong dreams. If they compete in a lower profile sport such as fencing, archery or wrestling, chances are they’re not going to be shown on TV. Hopefully there will be feeds for the parents to watch.

Health has obviously been a concern and the issue of mental health has never been more of a priority. These times are stressful in an unprecedented way and there is nothing reach with reaching out because of this.

Hopefully we are closer to the end of this but who knows. Every time it seems like we have a hold of these, there’s a spike here or an outbreak there.

Now people are getting vaccinated and this may give the sense that it’s the beginning of the end, but with talks of variant strains we need to be patient until it’s officially eradicated.

It’s important that we stay the course and get through the other side of this. It’s been so long, it’s difficult to remember what life was before this when we didn’t have to worry about masks and social distancing. Hopefully we can reacquaint ourselves with it shortly.