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From the time she was a little girl, Abby Recker loved helping people. Her parents kept her stocked up with first-aid supplies so she could spend hours playing with her dolls, making up stories of ballet injuries and carefully wrapping “broken” arms and legs.

Recker fondly describes her hometown of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, as a simple place where people are kind to one another. There’s even a term for it—“Iowa nice”—describing an overall sense of agreeableness and emotional trust shown by people who are otherwise strangers.

Abby | Heroes Behind the Masks presented by CeraVewww.youtube.com

Driven by passion and the encouragement of her parents, Recker attended nursing school, graduating just one year before the unthinkable happened: a global pandemic. One year into her career as an emergency and labor and delivery nurse, everything she thought she knew about the medical field got turned upside down. That period of time was tough on everyone, and Nurse Recker was no exception.

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In a time of widespread pain, loss, and grief, a country needs compassionate leadership. Partisan prejudices aside, Joe Biden is probably the most personally qualified to lead the nation through our most painful period of the pandemic.

What you see in the photo above is 30-year-old Joe Biden sitting by a hospital bed with his two young sons a week before Christmas in 1972. His wife Neilia had been driving the boys and their baby sister to get a Christmas tree when their car was struck by a tractor-trailer. The boys—almost 4-year-old Beau and almost 3-year-old Hunter—were seriously injured. Neilia and Naomi, the 13-month-old baby, were pronounced dead on arrival.

So here was a man who just lost his wife and baby girl, looking at his two young sons, trying to cope with the overwhelming grief and shock of it all. The loss itself is hard to fathom. The whole new reality of immediately becoming a single father of two young sons had to have been daunting.

It's extra tragic when we add that Biden had been elected to the U.S. Senate just six weeks before. This was supposed to be a holiday of extra celebration for the Bidens as they embarked on a whole new journey as a family.

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Since the beginning of the pandemic, guidelines and restrictions and mandates have come at us in a dizzying fashion. Each state has done things differently, and in most states each county has its own approach as well. And while some of the mitigation measures make perfect sense, others seem questionable or downright silly.

Some criticisms are certainly legitimate. Allowing certain indoor gatherings while closing down outdoor park spaces, for example, is an approach that has been panned by prominent experts in epidemiology who rightly point out that outdoor spaces are safer. But that doesn't mean that all measures that seem odd to us aren't based in solid reasoning.

A nurse on Facebook offered a response to a post that's been going around asking why certain measures have been put into place when the people who are charged with carrying them out don't know how to explain them. Marking her answers to the points with two asterisks, the nurse explained why what might seem illogical from a lay perspective actually has solid grounding in virology expertise.

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The human cost of the coronavirus pandemic can be measured in many ways. Illness and death top the list, of course, but the mental, emotional, and economic toll must be acknowledged as well. Though the woefully inconsistent and inadequate U.S. response has led to far more suffering than necessary, and although better control of the pandemic would have saved us from a lot of it, some struggles were inevitable.

One industry that was going to be hit hard one way or the other is the airline industry. With people being advised to stay home and avoid close proximity with others, especially in enclosed spaces, airplane travel has been out. And seven months in, the ongoing hit has become unsustainable. As of October 1, 40,000 airline employees have been furloughed.

One flight attendant's heartfelt farewell as she crewed her final flight has been shared by ABC's Sam Sweeney, and phew, it's a doozy. She holds back tears as she explains how American Airlines has been forced to reduce flights, which has resulted in job cuts and how much she has loved working as a flight attendant.

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