Don’t Drop Your Mask Just Yet

Scientists suspect microbes are unresponsive to our whims.

Photo by Laura Paraschivescu on Unsplash

Last weekend my wife and I traveled to New York City to see our daughter. On the train my wife wore a mask. I did not. In New York we got around on subways. My wife wore a mask. I did not.

I present these facts only to paint the picture of a man fully confident in his body’s strong immune response, buttressed mightily by six vaccinations and boosters in total, traveling in the company of a woman willing to sacrifice personal comfort for some abstract sense of healthcare caution.

See the picture? Okay, now you can rip it to shreds. Three days after our return from New York, we each took Covid tests. I tested positive. My wife did not.

Let me state, in a tribute to her enormous restraint, she never once said, “I told you so.”

What drove me to take the Covid home test was a pair of unusual symptoms – an incessant cough and an extremely sore throat. It took me a day to reach my doctor, who promptly prescribed me a five-day regimen of Paxlovid, the incredibly expensive Covid wonder drug (at no cost to me, thanks be to Medicare!).

I will not bore you with the blow-by-blow of my worsening and recovering condition. If you have had Covid, you know. If you have not, you really don’t want to know. The brief topline summary: your physical energy evaporates. Your lungs are wracked by spasmic coughing. Your throat feels so sore that swallowing is painful, and you avoid any food with sharp edges. Your imagination carries you into a bleak future in which you subsist on a diet of mashed potatoes and Jello. Thanks to the medicine, a strong, bitter aftertaste with a slight bouquet of tin can lingers in your mouth for hours, suppressing your appetite.

The Great Divide

What may be more intriguing is how this illness slices through a tranquil scene of domestic bliss like a tornado. My wife (Remember her? The safety-conscious one?) instituted defensive measures immediately to safeguard her own health. In an act of mercy, she allowed me to remain in our bed while she decamped to the semi-comfortable sofa bed in her office. All shared meals ceased; she took over all cooking and served my meals separately. We maintained at least 10 feet of physical distance at all times.

We also instituted Dish Apartheid. I washed my dishes and silverware in hot water and soap (the dishwasher is on the fritz) and stacked separately on the counter. Under no circumstances was I to permit their reintegration into the cabinet for the length of the quarantine.

There have been times when I might have scoffed at these extreme measures, but as the one who didn’t wear his mask on the subway, I have no standing.

I am entering my eighth day of house arrest, as my last home Covid test still turned up positive. I feel great, except for some lingering chest congestion. The CDC suggests I might be contagious for five days after my five-day treatment routine. I haven’t missed being outdoors in frigid temperatures, but I was forced to miss a grandchild’s birthday celebration. As compensation, I submitted a short work of doggerel on the theme of “I have a gift and you don’t want it.”

But that is not the end of the story.

Are We There Yet?

In the past two months I have seen hundreds of people shopping, eating out, attending indoor events, worshipping, and performing all manner of activities, unmasked and unconcerned. Until this week I was among them. I get it. We are all so over it! We have been masking and isolating and taking countermeasures for three years already and it’s just too much. We want to be back to normal. So we act as though things are normal and hope that our actions, and maybe some affirmations and energy manifestations, will make it so.

Here’s what I need to say about that: It ain’t over ‘til it’s over, and it ain’t over yet!

You may be tired of Covid, but those damned microbes are still out there, doing the breaststroke in the air and mutating like fruit flies on amphetamines, and they do not respond to human emotions. They don’t care about our feelings. They just want our bodies to host them.

For your own health and the love of your fellow human beings, keep wearing your mask. Please. It matters.