October 2024 looks a lot different than October 2020 did. You don’t see a lot of people wearing masks in the grocery store these days. Fewer people are voting absentee (or voting early in states that have more expanded options than Mississippi) to avoid crowded polling places on Election Day. And thankfully, our newsrooms aren’t reporting daily on the horrors of hospitals running out of beds and death tolls skyrocketing.

But the novel coronavirus is still with us. People are still getting sick with COVID-19. I should know; I’m dealing with a case of it right now. In fact, my entire household of four has fallen ill with COVID-19 since last week.

Thankfully, we’ve all had our vaccines and boosters—none of which were yet available as of October 2020. We also have much better treatments now, like Paxlovid and Lagevrio. Getting COVID-19 in 2020 was a much scarier prospect, and I think it’s easy to take for granted now how far we’ve come. I avoided getting it for the first three years of the pandemic along with most of my immediate family, thanks to precautions we took.

Still, even though COVID-19 is no longer as deadly as it once was, it’s not fun to get it. It’s still a miserable experience. And it does still kill people—especially those who are unvaccinated and those with preexisting health conditions. CDC data show that more than 1,000 Americans died weekly throughout August 2024. Over the past three months, at least 190 Mississippi residents died of COVID-19.

So if you haven’t been vaccinated, get vaccinated for COVID-19 now. If you’ve had the initial vaccine but haven’t gotten the latest COVID-19 booster shot that the FDA approved in August, go get it now (and get your flu shot while you’re at it). You can find a location to get your COVID-19 vaccines and boosters at vaccines.gov.

And remember: If you have COVID-19, you should still stay home if you can and avoid exposing other people. That’s true of any contagious illness. You can get four free COVID-19 tests through the USPS right now by placing an order at this link.

Award-winning News Editor Ashton Pittman, a native of the South Mississippi Pine Belt, studied journalism and political science at the University of Southern Mississippi. Previously the state reporter at the Jackson Free Press, he drove national headlines and conversations with award-winning reporting about segregation academies. He has won numerous awards, including Outstanding New Journalist in the South, for his work covering immigration raids, abortion battles and even former Gov. Phil Bryant’s unusual work with “The Bad Boys of Brexit" at the Jackson Free Press. In 2021, as a Mississippi Free Press reporter, he was named the Diamond Journalist of the Year for seven southern U.S. states in the Society of Professional Journalists Diamond Awards. A trained photojournalist, Ashton lives in South Mississippi with his husband, William, and their two pit bulls, Dorothy and Dru.