If you are feeling helpless in an longer term health emergency like the coronavirus COVID-19 outbreak, take heart there are things you can do to help society and yourself:
1 – Buy A Nurse a Gift Card
If you know any nurses or doctors or fireman or paramedics or health professionals they will tell you they are stressed out and feeling alone. Many local businesses are also suffering serious hardships due to mandatory closures.
How can you help both of these struggling groups? Buy a $10 gift card ONLINE from a local business and send it to a nurse, doctor, paramedic… Better yet, buy 10 $10 gift cards online and send them all to your local health care professional so they can hand them out.
2 – Schedule A Loud Sound At the Noon
Use social media to start a campaign in your area to have everyone do something at the same time:
- Everyone honk your car horns at Noon in support of our medical staff and those afflicted with the virus
- Everyone go to their balcony or deck at 2pm and use your musical instrument of choice to play Happy Birthday!
You are not alone.
3 – Deliver Groceries or Pet Food
Call you local grocery store or vet and volunteer to deliver groceries to those who can’t come get them. You won’t have to collect money or touch anyone else. You can just pick up the groceries at your local store, drive to the required destination, call/text the person inside, put the groceries on their step, return to your car and watch them take their food inside.
4 – Donate Blood
Obviously you need to call your local blood doner clinic before you drive in and risk spreading the virus, but many blood banks get low during these times and would be happy to see you. You can save a life… or two.
5 – Share Some Happy Pictures
Create some art and share it on social media.
- Go for a walk in your neighborhood and take your camera with you. The fresh air and exercise will do you good and the pictures will make other happy
- Send your kids into the back yard and take some photos of them
- Make short video of how you make a gluten free cake… like my kid just did because she has celiac disease
- Make a snowman
6 – Reduce Your Video Quality
This one is a little counter intuitive. It turns out that because almost everyone is at home, the internet is getting overloaded. There are too many people working from home through the internet while others stream hiqh quality video. So much so that Netflix is reducing the quality of video for all people in some countries and regions like Europe and the UK. If you want to do your part to keep the economy moving, reduce the quality of you video streams.
7 – Fight COVID With Your Own Computer
Did you know that there are several distributed computing platforms that need YOUR unused computer cycles to fight the coronavirus. It is very easy to setup, just download an app and don’t power your computer off… that’s about it. Our sister site www.URTech.ca has more details and video explaining how your computer can help Folding@home beat these diseases.
8 – Volunteer at Your Local Food Bank
Many food banks are revamping the way they hand out food and they need more people to help. Call you local food bank to see what you can do.
9 – Smile
Remember that you affect the people around you, so when you are down, force yourself to smile and raise everyones happiness level.
It is now well established that simple act of smiling, even forced smiling when you are angry or sad, releases endorphins into your brain and will make you happier.
2 Comments
Help with COVID · August 30, 2021 at 11:11 am
I am in a position to help those in my local community and encourage everyone else to do the same. Thank you 🙂
Charlie T · August 26, 2024 at 5:06 am
Wow Thanks for this. There is always more regular people can do during emergencies.