COVID Schmovid
I have just travelled through seven different global airports on eight different flights, spending some fifty hours in airplane cabins with their recirculated air, over the past few weeks. We stayed in seven different hotels and ate in something like thirty different restaurants ranging from an elegant Middle Eastern Lebanese restaurant on the Nile to Tre Scalini on the Piazza Navonna in Rome, all the way to a Martian Dome eating hall at a Glamping desert camp in Wadi Rum, Jordan, shared with 150 Spring Break kids from Berkeley, California. We walked into 4,000 year-old Egyptian tombs with other tourists, breathing the warm air of antiquity, stopped for a bathroom break at the Abu Simbel equivalent of the Star Wars Cantina on Tatouine with characters out of a bad Joan Wilder romance novel, and wandered through the Borghese Gardens with all manner of Roman tourists. In other words, we were out in the world at large and exposing ourselves biologically to all the germs the world wanted to throw at us from Asian tourist buses, nose-picking high school students, Bedouins who bathe at least weekly whether they need it or not and a whole souk-full of Coptic Cairo residents at that crowded bazaar. And let me think, how often did I wear a mask…oh yeah…never. How often did I wash my hands and use hand sanitizer…once in a while. How often did I stick to only boiled or distilled water…like to help you!
And what was the result of taking all this biological risk in the era of the new age pandemic hiding around each social media post? I got a mild case of Delhi Belly on about day 14 and then flew home on day 18 with a sniffle that blossomed into a positive COVID test on the first morning after at home. I spent a day and a half lazing in bed, using my infection as an excuse to relax after a long trip with 11,000 step days almost every day (a to for this sorry ass). I lost any semblance of COVID symptoms within 48 hours and while I am still testing positive and probably will for another few days (Not my first COVID rodeo), I really am totally recovered from anything that found its way into my system while we were traveling. In other words, this trip and its biological aftermath is no different than almost any other trip I have been on over the last fifty years. Yes, I’m older and recovery time may be a bit slower, but there really isn’t much appreciable difference in my perception of the medical risk to me of going out into the wild world (and Egypt is pretty wild given its Risk Level 3 rating from the U.S. State Department) than there ever was. The pandemic of COVID-19, which really lasted for 2020, 2021 and 2022 (wow, that really is a long time when I look at it that way) is almost as distant a memory in terms of travel impact as the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic at this point.
When I used to travel to Asia in the good old days before COVID, especially in high-density places like Tokyo, I would see people in crowded places like the Ginza or the Tokyo Subway, wearing surgical masks. They always seemed like they might either be ill or ilmmuno-compromised sorts that needed a layer of extraordinary protection. In late 2019 in lower Manhattan at my then-office, I remember remember the Brazilian shoe shine guy coming around with a face mask and I assumed he too was sick or something. I later had more respect for his omniscience since he seemed to know that a pandemic was just around the corner and that he was interacting with too many different people in a day to expose himself so much. Now, as I travelled half-way around the world to both sophisticated and rather remote places alike, I saw fewer than a handful of masks anywhere, even among the generally older set that tends to do stuff like cruise down the Nile River. We have all immunized ourselves to the big bad risk of this particular brand of respiratory virus.
I guess that’s what we, as humans, do with risk. We get used to it. Every once in awhile I catch myself driving down the road at 70 miles an hour and think to myself that this is a speed that would have scared the horse and buggy set to distraction and I’m certain any of us would have said that thinking we could control a vehicle at that speed was nothing short of careless risk-taking. And yet, most of us do that every day and think nothing of it. In fact we do it with one hand on the wheel, listening to some favorite oldie on the streaming radio station. So it is, with something we all contemplated never doing again as recently at 2020, traveling with abandon with one hand on the proverbial wheel of fate.
I know there are lots of specialists who got all revved up with wisdom to preach to us on cable TV and in daily news blasts over the internet about how to manage our exposure risk to COVID as we hunkered down at home. Then they expanded their repertoire for going out into the community and reestablishing normal life a rebound home, and eventually about how we should approach traveling for some mandatory visit or gathering. Now they occasionally try to tell us that we still need to worry about COVID or, better yet, the next big pandemic, but most of us are simply not buying it. We are done with pandemics in our lifetime (at least us Baby Boomers are) on the theory that these things come around every 100 years and we won’t be here for the next one. Then again, that’s what we always say about those 500-year floods that hit us five years in a row to our amazement.
And here’s the worst part about it. I am one of the liberal folks that believed it was important to take this whole thing very seriously and for everyone to get immunized and boosted and masked and even locked-down when need be. It was the only sensible thing to do for the common good. that means that we still have lots of home test kits around and tons of N95 masks (not to mention the inferior but no so inexpensive nice cloth wines we all bought along the way). When I got back with the sniffle I knew I was supposed to test and I did the very first morning. When the result was positive, I immediately put on my mask and Kim dutifully moved out to the guest bedroom. I stayed away from everyone for a whopping day and half until the symptoms went away. When I woke up on day 3 with no symptoms at all, I even stopped taking NyQuil and DayQuil, my go-to drugs of choice whenever a glimmer of sniffle comes on. They are below my sink as we speak, ready for my next bout of whatever might keep me up at night with congestion.
This COVID thing is hard to respect any more. I know it has killed 6.9 million people globally and 1.1 million Americans, but that was mostly back a while ago. Now COVID takes 1,800 Americans per week where traffic accidents take about 1,000, so its on par with needing to look both ways before crossing the street. And after what was really only 36 hours of stuffy nose and mild headache, its hard to get too worried about contracting the beast, much less surviving it at this point. In fact, the only real inconvenience is the need to test and the need to quarantine (remember us responsible liberals do feel that is still an important thing to do for the greater good). So, at this point, I must admit, if someone asked me about COVID, my reaction would be that old ethnic comment, COVID Schmovid.