I feel like a leper, separated from human contact, a thousand miles from home.
Toward the end of last week in Austin, Texas, celebrating Thanksgiving with my wife’s family, I got sick. A cough so raspy it grated my vocal chords, a throat so sore it hurt to swallow.
And then came the test.
At the beginning I didn’t even think about Covid. After all, everyone gets sick, and although since the pandemic started I’ve been more careful than I’ve ever been before about what I touch, where I go, how I wash, even what I breathe, sickness was bound to strike.
Still, it seemed prudent the day before flying home to take the Covid test. Swab both nostrils, swirl the swab in a chemical concoction, drip the fluid in a small diagnostic device, wait 15 minutes, and you’re finished. I’ve done it a dozen times before, simply as precaution before being part of a public gathering, and it always has been negative. So, uncomfortable though I was with the cough and the throat, I didn’t expect this one to be any different. I mean, it always happens to someone else, right?
Until it happens to you. Instead of just one bar under the letter “C” for “control,” there was a second one under “T” for “test” (as in, sorry, this test isn’t good).
I was positive for Covid. Not a happy sight.
But as a sister-in-law pointed out, these home Covid tests aren’t perfect. A “false negative” is more dangerous than a “false positive” because it can mislead someone into thinking they don’t have Covid when in fact they do. But a “false positive” is a possibility too, misleading you into thinking you have Covid when you don’t. Statistics I looked up varied but somewhere between one-half of one percent and a full five percent of tests are false positives. So the consensus was, do a second test.
An unhappier sight. Nothing false about the second reading.
It was unhappy, but not cause for panic. The family flew home, but consistent with government guidelines, I didn’t. I took a room at an airport hotel and have hardly left. That’s why I feel like a leper. But it’s a far sight better than how things were during the worst parts of the pandemic when people who caught Covid went to a hospital, not a hotel. The virus in those days could be a death sentence and for almost 1.1-million unlucky Americans, it was.
None of us is likely to forget the harrowing nights in U.S. cities filled with the sounds of sirens, the semi-trucks converted into mobile morgues, the loved ones unable to give their last hugs and say their last goodbyes. Some people suffocated so fast, they didn’t need a 15-minute test to find out they were next.
Today, much of the world has returned to normal. Not all of it, as news from China attests. But most of us in the U.S. are vaccinated (although most aren’t boosted), which means we can still get sick but that’s as far as it’s likely to go. On the other hand, from what I see, most of us aren’t masking every moment of the day anymore. Personally, my wife and I still wore masks flying to Austin on Thanksgiving day, but when I try to pinpoint where I caught Covid, I realize that I spent time in a few stores, at a few restaurants, and in family gatherings with as many as 18 people. Unmasked for all of it. The virus was floating around out there somewhere.
And it is still floating around. It’s no longer headline news but people continue to die from Covid. The 7-day average for Covid deaths in Thanksgiving week was higher than you might think: 314 every day.
However, we are well past the terrible time when U.S. death tolls shot up past 4,000 a day, and we’re not likely to go back. That’s thanks to the vaccines rapidly developed under President Trump, the tests and shots rapidly administered under President Biden, and now, what I’m counting on: the anti-viral drug Paxlovid, which hadn’t even been a dream in a chemist’s mind before Covid hit.
There’s an interesting story behind that. On the day I continue unaffectionately to refer to as Friday the 13th— the 13th of March, 2020– the Pfizer pharmaceutical company did what most of America did: it sent everyone home. The lockdown began. But it gave an urgent assignment to a man named Dafydd Owen, one of the medicinal chemists who went home: develop a team to think about an oral drug designed not to prevent Covid— vaccines for which Pfizer would also help develop— but to fight it.
For 13 months in his makeshift home office, while his kids made chaos all around him and his team scattered all over the map, Owen with his team’s help created molecular compound after molecular compound, some 20 in all, and when they came up with the antiviral molecular structure of Paxlovid, it worked.
For many infected Americans so far, it has been a miracle. Now I’m hoping it’s a miracle for me. So I can go home.
Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 36-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
Hope Paxlovid worked better for you. I had a bad reaction and had horrible stomach issues. If I get Covid again, I’ll just skip Paxlovid. Trust you are over it and back home. Happy Holidays to you and Carol!
Hi Greg.. I’m hoping that you are back to feeling normal by now .. I’ve been fortunate.. traveled at Thanks giving , out and about .. but so far so good .. fingers crossed.. and hope you carol and family have a happy and HEALTHY Christmas!!🎄 Betty Fitzpatrick