Unpacking COVID
This will be my third story in a row about COVID, which tells you clearly that I am very self-focused since I’m infected by the beast (still positive this morning though symptoms are about gone). But then again, this is the most significant health issue we have all faced in our lives and it has quieted our every move for 2+ years, so I think a third story about it is justified. The basis of this story is a combination of events, conversations and texts I have been engaged in over the past day, so this is all based on true events and only has a bit a literary license associated with it.
Just to review the facts, I got COVID while on a motorcycle trip to Moab, Utah last week. I suspect I was exposed Monday, symptomatic by Thursday, tested positive on Friday night, returned home Saturday and recuperated Sunday. It is now Monday. The exposure facts are that I went through large swaths of the Navajo Nation (fully masked, but very virulent), where the bug is rampant, spent four days in one of the outdoorsmen paradises of the West where everyone mountain bikes, motorcycles, dune buggies and hikes each and every day and eats hearty fried food with a southwestern flair every night at the many restaurants (none of which use masks now). I was with twenty or so pals of both genders and there was plenty of interaction though the days were largely spent in the saddle, so to speak. We believe three were not vaxed and the rest were vaxed and boosted. Four of us rode home together on Friday in a car and a fifth joined us part-way due to cold on her hubby’s Harley. All six of us are fully vaxed. At the end of the drive home, I tested positive. Since then, three of the four in the car have gone positive. Only Kim, who is loaded with antibodies from a January bout with the beast, is still negative. The guy on the Harley is negative and we have heard nothing from any of the others in the group about infections though they all know of our status.
To begin with, its hard not to take note of the fact that the four of us who are infected were fully vaxed and boosted while the three who were not vaxed are still well and negative. To my observation, they interacted the same way we all did and took no added precautions. Life continues to deliver ironies to us.
As Kim and I were leaving Las Vegas (Kim looks more like Elizabeth Shue than I look like Nicholas Cage) we stopped for gas and to switch drivers as after 15 miles I was in day three grogginess with my system pumped up with over-the-counter cold meds. We did what one does when one gases up and turned the car off. When we tried to start it up we were back in Mercedes Benz 48-volt battery hell with nothing happening. While Kim fumbled with the key remote, I called MB Escondido service department and read them the riot act since I had had the car in for just this problem several weeks ago. I threw out California Lemon Law and every tactic I could imagine and then it occurred to me to tell them that I was sitting on the highway (actually a nice Las Vegas gas station) with a recently diagnosed case of COVID. I heard a gasp on the other end. That seemed to give the “break-the-camel’s-back” touch to the complaint that it needed to get serious attention. It was true, but I’m not sure my viral condition was worse than the electronic bug presenting itself in my $95,000, eleven-month-old car. It all worked with an added cough or two for effect to get me the sympathy from MB Escondido to look at taking me out of my car misery by swapping me into another new car. Not only did the salesman who sold me the car call be back with a sympathetic story that they were hard at work on the problem, but I got an email from CarFax telling me that the car had been added to their roster. That was no coincidence. The dealership is clearly teeing up my car to trade it out. I suspect my COVID played a part in that “Don’t make me come down there to spit all over you” way that works so well.
So far today I have had several COVID conversations. To start with there was the texting that has gone on amongst those of us that were in that car last Friday. Another two of the riders went positive and there was all the normal cycling theorizing about when they first felt punky and who they may have infected and who infected them. While everyone is pretty sure I was the Typhoid Mary of the car, we all pretty much did the same stuff in Moab and were with the same people, so the mysteries are keeping their secrets to themselves. Bug tracing is far less easy than they imply in the movies like Outbreak, where they show the atomization sequence of a cough or sneeze and then slow-motion the droplets of sputum from one person to the other people in the room. The going phrase this weekend with almost everyone I have spoken to from medical professionals to recent victims is simply, “This shit is EVERYwhere.” And while everyone is somewhat less scared of it and thinks its less the silver bullet, no one wants to get another dose and end up as a possible statistic to add to the one million list of deaths in the U.S. that has already been racked up. It has become a game of Russian Roulette with 1,000 chambers and one bullet, so the odds are lower of a fatality, but everyone knows this is bad shit that can go easy on you one time and then hit you hard the next.
The text story line among the car-born infected was that this is becoming a thing like the cold or flu that will be with us forever and regularly thin the really weak of the herd as it goes through us. People’s patience with that analysis only goes so far and one infectee just said a dismissive “fine”, which got called out as being very Darwinian in attitude. I suspect the survival aspect may have been as much about getting weary of the texting about COVID as much as with the virus itself.
Then I heard from my daughter who said she had taken my youngest granddaughter to the hospital ER during the night due to respiratory distress. This had only happened once an RN had listened to the six-year-old’s breathing over the phone and determined that a nebulizer was called for. The COVID test was negative onsite, but then so were all three of the last car riders who tested positive eventually. My daughter thinks she will test positive soon for COVID, but with all the bugs that can get at kids, she won’t know that until she knows that. In the meantime, as kids do so much better than us oldsters, she is moving on from the episode quickly.
It almost seems like COVID is running around the room like a chicken with its head cut off, causing us all a lot of distress and nightmares in its last gasp effort to prolong its viral existence. As one of my texting friends pointed out this morning, “Viruses really just want to survive and thrive. Killing their host is counter-productive. Each new variant does weaken. The weaker and more ignored variants will become the dominant strains only killing off the weakened among us occasionally. I suspect this is how we got our current strains of colds and flus…”. I don/t know how accurate that is, but it sounds logical, so I am expecting COVID to start unpacking its bags and staying for a while. Get used to it.