The Covid pandemic makes cholera seem almost quaint, doesn’t it? I wonder if Gabriel García Márquez would rethink Love in the Time of Cholera (El amor en los tiempos del cólera) if he were writing it in 2022. Nah, maybe not. There’s a wordplay in Spanish about the word cólera that has nothing to do with the acute illness caused by a bacterial intestinal infection.

And as horrible as cholera sounds (and it’s pretty bad), Melissa notes in this seven-card Covid series that it’s a rare-to-nonexistent postcard that contains the words “vomiting and diarrhea.” Yes, Melissa, I have to say this is the first one I’ve seen. We might need to get Mark Routh to comment on this. Mark has the world class, category-defining collection of Covid postcards and ephemera (approaching 5,000 items at last count).

Many thanks to Melissa for this series. (Images are from the CDC and the postcards were printed by NeckahNeck Forest Arts Collective.)

Did you read Love in the Time of Cholera? Or see the movie? Here’s the theatrical trailer.

Writing this made me think about all the hand washing I’ve done over the past two years of the pandemic. I commented in Episode 126 about how many people had died during the Influenza Pandemic of 1918, and somehow I got that number right (50 million worldwide; 675,00 in the U.S.). As of February 1, 2022, there have been 5.7 million people who died of Covid worldwide, with 881,000 dead in the United States. I’m gonna keep washing my hands, wearing my masks, and getting boosters. Meanwhile, I’ll stay home and look at these new additions to my Covid postcard collection.

UPDATE: Just as I was ready to push publish on this post, I got a postcard from Kristen that said “Wash Your Hands.” How’s that for timing? And that made me think I should make a demo about proper hand washing technique. So I did that this morning as a public service.