After six and a half weeks (I counted), two doctor’s visits, 3 bottles of NyQuil, more cough drops than I can remember, a prescription decongestant and a 5-day course of antibiotics – plus the medications I already take everyday – I’m finally almost done being sick.
No, it wasn’t Covid-19, at least not according to those two different doctors, a nurse who asked about symptoms before they started doing more intense screening, and the other nurse who ran me through the official intake checklist they started having to do between the first time I went in and the second. It was “just” a flu or some similar viral cold, which became a lung infection (or is the reason I was susceptible to a separate lung infection), and a horrible wracking cough that wrecked my voice and bruised my ribs. It wasn’t this plague that’s circling the Earth. It wasn’t anything I couldn’t have caught any other day of the year, any other year. The novel coronovirus is at least as contagious and much deadlier than “just the flu”. What happens when I catch that?
We’re staying at home at much as we can now. Working from home, not going out for coffee or to see friends or even to shop. The goal isn’t to keep me from ever getting Covid-19, but to keep me from getting it now. The longer I can put it off, the more chance there is that there’ll be a vaccine, or a cure, or a tested protocol that keeps folks alive long enough for those things to be developed. That’s the point of shutting down Spring Break, the NBA season, Times Square, destination weddings, and your family reunion. It isn’t to be cruel. It isn’t paranoia or overreacting. It’s slow this thing down before it does to your family what it’s done to too many others. The more precautions we take now, the fewer people die. We hope.
Stay home, and stay safe.