A friend came to visit recently and joked: what goes well with Corona, Lyme!

Sometimes a little humor helps calm a frustrating situation and I am most definitely a little frustrated. Not because I don’t think we should be making the pandemic important, but because I don’t understand why Lyme isn’t taken more seriously.

Today the worldwide number of COVID-19 cases stands at 266,073.

Did you know there over 300,000 cases of Lyme disease in the US alone every year? Many of whom develop serious complications or long term, debilitating illness.

And yet the CDC and IDSA have been fighting for years to limit diagnosis and treatment of Lyme and other tickborne infections.

I’m thrilled to see we can come together across the world to conquer disease. But quite frankly, seeing how well we can work together to stop an outbreak stirs up anger in me even more so knowing that the very people who are uniting to stop COVID-19 strongly oppose helping those of us with tick disease.

The financial obstacles and the bureaucracy for Lyme treatment need to be removed just as they are for COVID-19.

We are better than this. We are proving that right now in the way we are handling this pandemic.