In an earlier post, I wrote that I had been stricken with COVID, days before Thanksgiving; The Excellent Wife (TEW) has as well. I found it a weird concurrence to be infected weeks after Trump, who so mismanaged the pandemic in 2020, was re-elected.
The truth is that I've sought out and received every COVID vaccine that's been offered since they were first available (in fact, it was a requirement of my last job at Rutgers/UMDNJ that I do so for the first three or four). And in 2024, COVID is far less threatening or frightening than it was four years ago. (Trump, if anything, is even more frightening than he was.) Both my wife and I have started a course of Paxlovid (we are blessed with one of the best medical insurance offerings in the state of New Jersey), and, while she (as many do) is having some gastric distress as a side effect of the medication cocktail, we are finding the Paxlovid safe and effective. I had one bad day and two bad nights, and am now tired but generally improved (I am, however, producing urine such that I'm comparing myself to Moses striking the rock at Meribah in Exodus 17, producing water where there was none).
I'm in a high-risk group: men over 65 with hypertension. The high-risk-group thing appears to be far less of a concern than it once was, and there is no longer talk of "long-COVID" in these cases, or the permanent loss of taste; the doctor at the doc-in-the-box compared my case to being like flu or bronchitis (and, indeed, I've had cases of both of the latter, with much worse effects than what I'm suffering now with the COVID). Still, we're medicating, quarantining, and masking when we do have to go out, because while we have comparatively mild cases, it's not clear that people we might infect would have the same experience, especially if they either did not have access to the vaccine, or refused to take it.
(We'll not get started on the shared responsibility for the severity of illness for people who refused the vaccine.)
So my concern when I saw the deep red line on my COVID test indicating my positive result was, perhaps, unfounded. Despite it being Thanksgiving Day, I'm not ready to say I'm grateful about any of this (an omnipotent, benevolent god might have ensured that COVID never developed in the first place). But I'll admit it could have been worse, and I'm glad for my privileged position, my excellent wife, my few healthy habits.
