Like many Americans, I was tired of worrying about COVID. Then my family and I caught it
After two years of taking every precaution, including vaxxing and double-boosting, I finally got COVID at the end of a family vacation last month.
All four of us in our family had worn masks on multiple airplanes for the long journey from California to Hawaii and back. Still, we noticed that most other passengers eschewed masks on crowded planes and in the long airport lines.
It was as though many believed the pandemic was over even as new subvariants of the virus were driving waves of new cases. My family learned that the hard way on our first night back when one of our children tested positive. The next day, our other child tested positive. The day after that, I did. Two days later, my spouse did.
It’s common now to hear about the “mild symptoms” of COVID, but that was not our experience — unless being in bed for days with body aches and fever is considered mild.
This was the sickest I had felt in two decades. On the first day after I tested positive, I slept all afternoon, feeling groggy and bone-tired.
At one point, as I made myself a cup of coffee, I noticed that our coffee machine was making a strange sound as it poured my drink. It turns out I had forgotten to place a cup in the machine to catch the coffee, which spilled all over the kitchen counter. I had never done that before, but I was in such a fog that I didn’t notice my error until I had a big mess to clean up and hardly any energy to do it.
One of my daughters had a fever that would rise as high as 103 for three days, which caused my spouse and me far more stress than our own condition.
Even now, after following Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines that call for five days of isolation followed by five more days of wearing a mask in public, my energy levels are nowhere near normal. My sleep patterns are disrupted, and my dreams are vivid and intense.
Was I hospitalized? No. Are my lingering symptoms “mild”? No.
This pandemic is hopelessly politicized to the point where many liberals and conservatives are acting as if it’s over for their own partisan reasons. Politics have vanquished science.
We’ve seemingly given up on reducing transmission. And that means we’ve given up on looking out for each other.
Someday social scientists will have a field day studying how shared sacrifice was dumped in favor of falsehoods about the virus.
My purely agnostic response is this: Contracting COVID is no joke. It’s not a simple cold or standard flu. And there is no guarantee that my case is going to protect me from future infections because scientists say the new subvariants have evolved to the point where they are evading immunity.
Eric Topol, a professor of molecular medicine at Scripps Research, said this to the Washington Post: “The BA.5 subvariant is the worst version of the virus we’ve seen. “
How are we dealing with this? We’re not. On Monday, Topol told CNN what other scientists believe: that new COVID cases are drastically under-reported because many people are either testing at home or not testing at all. The CDC has been reporting an average of 100,000 positive tests a day, but Topol thinks that number could be as high as a million.
Across the globe, transmissions — and, yes, deaths and hospitalizations — are trending upward.
As Topol himself wondered on Twitter, what if new subvariants begin eluding Paxlovid, the antiviral medication that broke my fever? I shudder to think what would have happened to me or my wife if Paxlovid had not worked for us.
Our vaccines, our boosters, and Paxlovid likely kept us out of the hospital. Yet the experience was miserable and unnerving just the same.
Meanwhile, wearing effective masks indoors and committing ourselves to reduce transmission has become too much of an inconvenience for many.
We can’t be bothered with COVID anymore because we are fed up and want to “live our lives.” I get it. I had COVID fatigue myself until my family got COVID.
Now I won’t walk into a Kings game or any other indoor crowd without a mask. And it’s going to be a while before I get on a plane again.
I don’t want this virus again. You don’t either.
This story was originally published July 13, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
