Mild cold symptoms are novel, after sixteen months of being exposed to very few germs. When I start getting a sore throat and stuffy nose on a Friday night I think, this makes sense – I’ve been seeing more people, going more places, and less and less frequently in situations where everyone is masked. It’s logical that I’m being exposed to the common cold again.
I take my precautions, though – I get a COVID test the next morning, and I tell my friends and family who I’ve been around in the previous days that I’m feeling under the weather, just a head’s up. Then I cocoon in my house with Ricola and lotion tissues and tea, because I have plans to go visit friends out of state the following week, and I really want to be well for that.
Then, on Monday, I get an automated call informing me that I’ve tested positive for COVID.
I’ve been vaccinated for five months. I still wear a mask inside grocery stores. I haven’t been knowingly exposed to anyone with COVID. None of that matters, though – the test says I have it.
“I can’t believe this happened to you, of all people,” my friend says, and I have to agree with her. After over a year of social distancing, after working in a school that had in-person classes, after being the first person I knew to get access to a vaccine – somehow I avoided the virus through all that, but get it now. Lurking in the back of my mind is the suspicion that I didn’t catch it, that somehow some test tubes got mixed up and the lab sent me the wrong results. Every half hour or so throughout the day, I remember again that I have COVID, and I can’t help but laugh at the absurdity.
Beyond the initial tears when I realize that I will not be going to Virginia to reunite with my college friends, most of whom I have not seen in person in years, I’m surprised by how quickly I come to accept this reality. I text the group to let them know. I cancel my flights. I feel disappointed, but not devastated. Maybe I have just become so accustomed to cancelling plans, so used to things going wrong, that it doesn’t phase me so much anymore.
I reach out again to my parents, my sister, my friends who I’d had dinner with the night before I started feeling sick, and tell them all the bad news. I’m more afraid that I’ve passed it on to someone else than I am for my own wellbeing. When I tell a friend about the experience, I make the comparison of contacting sexual partners after finding out that you have an STI (not, fortunately, that I’ve ever had to do that) - I’ve had to contact everyone I saw in the last few days and shamefully say, “hey, sorry, I may have passed a disease onto you, you should probably get tested.” Mostly it was my close friends and family I had to tell, so they were very understanding. The worst one was an old work friend who I hadn’t seen in years, but had run into at a bar the night before I started developing symptoms. We’d only talked for a few minutes, but we’d been indoors and unmasked, and I knew the responsible thing to do was tell them that I might have exposed them. (They were also very understanding, by the way, even though I felt much more awkward sending that text message).
When I have to tell people who aren’t close to me – such as my employers – that I’ve tested positive, I’m sure to emphasize that I don’t think it’ll be serious, because I’m vaccinated. I want them to know that I’m a responsible person who just got unlucky, and not someone who’s vaccine-averse.
I stay home, lie on the couch, blow my nose a lot. My aim at throwing tissues into the wastebasket does not improve over time. The few times I do manage to toss one in across the room, I confidently shout Kobe! out loud. No one else is around to hear me; it does not matter.
It’s a little disheartening how similar my life in isolation is to my life before isolation. I’d already been living by myself, working from home, putting very little effort into the meals I ate, watching a lot of TV. The only difference now is that when I run out of moisturizer, I’m not allowed to go to the store to buy more.
On the fifth day after I started developing symptoms, I wake up to discover that my house has been invaded by flies. Dozens of flies, congregated mostly around the kitchen windows, and mostly very large, horse-fly sized. I call my friend Joslyn, who I’ve already inconvenienced by potentially exposing her to this disease, and ask if she can bring me 409 and also whatever the store has to catch or kill flies.
Joslyn, my hero, not only brings me 409 and insecticide and multiple fly traps, but also homemade brownies and an iced vanilla latte. We talk – her outside my door, both of us masked, distanced – and it’s so nice to see her. For the rest of the day I alternate between hiding in the large closet that functions as my bedroom, and venturing out into the fly-filled kitchen and living room, killing them whenever I can.
Flypocalypse, day two. I should be on a plane to Washington, DC to visit my college friends, but instead I awake to discover that the flies are even more numerous than before. I put on shoes, and then dart around my kitchen like a quick-draw shooter with a spray bottle of 409. It makes it so the flies can’t – you know, fly. The chemicals also kill them, but I usually whack them with the cardboard box from a Stouffer’s frozen meal once they’re down, just to be sure (I do not own a fly swatter). Scores of fly corpses litter the floor, windowsills, counters. Before I paused to do a round of clean-up, I’d killed over forty. By the time I’ve thrown away all the dead flies, washed my hands, and decided to take a break to have tea and a croissant, I realize that I don’t even really feel sick. Maybe the slightest hint of congestion still lingers, but otherwise I’m fine.
As I eat breakfast, I consider that I’d caught the pestilence, then my house was overrun by flies. I worry mildly that I’m in a biblical-plague scenario. My one consolation on this day is that everyone I potentially exposed is in the clear – all of their tests came back negative, no one has started feeling sick. I wasn’t patient zero for my loved ones, which is a huge relief.
The following day I get a message in the group text with my college friends: “would you wanna chat and watch Fast and Furious, or would that just make you sad?”
So in the evening I join a Zoom call with my friends, across the country and all gathered together without me, and we watch Fast and Furious 6 (we’ve been making our way through the franchise together for a couple months. Not because we particularly enjoy the movies, but just because it’s a big stupid series that we can watch together). We comment and laugh and shout during the movie, and then afterwards I stay on the call until midnight, my time (3am for them), having slumber party conversations. “We’ve mostly just been hanging out and talking,” they tell me. “You could call in tomorrow, too.”
We Zoom again the next day, and I spend six hours on the call. It’s not as good as being there in person, of course, but it’s still a hell of a lot of fun. We play games and discuss hypothetical ethical quandaries and psychoanalyze each other. It feels good to be known by these people, in some deep and unassailable sense. Even if we don’t all know the minute details of each other’s lives anymore, living in different cities, we’ve been friends for over five years now, and shared some core experiences that will always connect us. Just seeing them all together, and talking with them for so long over a video call, makes me feel warm and happy. “We’ll just have to come visit you next,” they insist.
Today is my first day out of isolation, and everything seems fine, for now. The flies have retreated. I haven’t had symptoms for several days – I never even developed a cough. If I hadn’t gotten tested, just to be extra safe, I never would have imagined that I had COVID. I’d just have assumed it was a mild cold.
Today, 140 new cases of COVID were reported in my county. Over the whole pandemic, we’ve only had two days with more than that. I don’t know how many of those cases are unvaccinated people (only 56% of adults here have gotten vaccinated), and how many are breakthroughs like me. I don’t know how bad the fallout would have been if I hadn’t been tested, had just acted like I had a cold – would I have passed it on to anyone else? Would it have been any worse to anyone than when a typical cold virus goes around?
Ostensibly, as someone who is vaccinated and has now had my immune system go up against SARS-CoV-2 and win, I am double protected. Still, I think I’m likely to remain cautious. I am grateful that, as annoying and inconvenient as this was, my experience was unremarkable. I am hopeful for the day when COVID becomes only as dangerous as a cold for everyone.
I don’t have any grand conclusions to draw from this – I can’t predict the future, and I’m not an epidemiologist. It is always a scary world out there, but now more than ever. My hope is the same as it has been for this whole pandemic, and maybe for my whole life: that people just do what they can to be kind to other people, to think about others with compassion. So very much is out of our control, but the small things we do matter. I just hope they matter enough.
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