Two Years Later, I Finally Caught COVID
Reflections from a scientist who tried really hard to avoid it
Pandemic day… 825
Well, after a pretty solid run of hide-and-seek, I finally got around to catching COVID in May. My case was a fairly “mild” one. The progression for me went from fatigue to a sore throat, some congestion, and then a cough. For each symptom, I’ve definitely experienced worse versions of each of them during previous illnesses. What made this one noticeably different was an absolutely debilitating week-long case of brain fog.
In the midst of the fog, I found it difficult to think, write, work, or enjoy doing much of anything, really. The fog has since lifted, but left in its wake nearly daily headaches and sensitivity to lights that I’m still dealing with a month later. These are mild enough to just be annoying, but fit the description of post-COVID migraines. Looks like I’m one of the unlucky ones.
Do I have any regrets? Not really. My case originated from a relatively small indoor gathering of fully-vaccinated people, attended by an unknowingly infected pre-symptomatic person. So, all it took for my number to get called was hanging around a few maskless people inside. Making day-to-day decisions during a pandemic is a numbers game; a matter of weighing the cost/benefit analysis for all of the risks you choose to take.
After a certain point, increasing your personal COVID-avoidance precautions will have diminishing returns for your physical health, at an unreasonable cost to your mental wellbeing and happiness. Unless you’re willing to live the rest of your life in total isolation, the bottom line is that all of us will be getting COVID sooner or later.
While we should have some sense of acceptance about the inevitability of catching COVID, we shouldn’t throw all caution to the wind. In my view, everyone should still continue to follow simple low-cost/high-benefit precautions, like wearing facemasks (ideally N-95s) in indoor settings wherever feasible.
Here are a few other reflections and revelations from my experience:
1) On the 5th day post-exposure I tested positive from a PCR test, but surprisingly, I tested negative with at-home test kits on both the 3rd and 4th days, even after I was pretty certain I had COVID based on my symptoms and confirmed exposure. What gives? It seems that Omicron infections tend to reside more in the throat than in previous variants, and so they can be more difficult to detect using at-home nasal swabs. I had a sore throat at the time, with no sneezing or nasal congestion, so evidently, the viral load in my nose was too low to detect using the at-home rapid antigen test. PCR testing, meanwhile, is much more sensitive.
What this means is that you should take negative at-home test results with a grain of salt. If you’ve been exposed to someone with COVID, or if you have COVID-like symptoms, the safest thing to do is assume you have COVID, quarantine yourself, and if necessary get a PCR test to be certain.
2) It’s stunning just how contagious this virus is. It’s not enough to only quarantine yourself when you start feeling sick — the data shows that we’re most contagious 1–2 days prior to symptoms developing. So, even if you’re fully vaccinated and feeling healthy, it’s possible for you to unknowingly infect others while you’re in the pre-symptomatic phase. No wonder this thing is so hard to contain!
So how can infections be minimized? We need to shift our understanding of how to responsibly slow the spread of COVID. It’s obviously not realistic to ban indoor gatherings, nor is it feasible to take PCR tests every time before we see each other, but what we can and should do is be particularly careful about attending large indoor events. For example…
Oh, you’re going to a wedding this summer? The most prudent thing to do is isolate yourself for several days before traveling, to help minimize your chances of catching COVID and unknowingly spreading it to others during the highly contagious and asymptomatic stage of infection.
If everyone followed this advice, reducing the likelihood of turning large indoor gatherings into “superspreader events” would go a long way toward lowering case numbers.
3) I’m fully vaccinated and boosted (#TeamPfizer), but getting COVID was still shitty. (0/10, would not recommend.) I feel that this experience has retroactively justified all of the (mildly) obsessive precautions I took to avoid infection thus far, particularly during the early days before vaccines were widely available in the US.
I also feel incredibly fortunate I was able to access vaccines as easily and as quickly as I did. While I’ll never know for sure what would have happened, had I contracted COVID back in 2020 before getting vaccinated, I suspect I could’ve ended up hospitalized or worse.
Getting vaccinated is like the human version of when your computer downloads the latest system updates to protect against newly discovered vulnerabilities. If you’ve already been vaccinated, and even if you’ve already had COVID, there is no reason to hesitate in getting the latest boosters as soon as they become available.
And if you haven’t gotten vaccinated yet, it’s never too late to start! It’s the single most important thing you can do to protect yourself and others. Tired as we all are, the pandemic is not over, especially for immunocompromised people and frontline healthcare workers, for whom the virus remains a constant dance with death.
