Living On Borrowed Time?

Can my wife and I outrun COVID-19...or are we kidding ourselves?

There are no winners in a pandemic. That said, if you’ve made it to the summer of 2022 without yet testing positive for the coronavirus, you might feel entitled to some bragging rights. Who’s still in the game at this point? Not Anthony S. Fauci. Not President Biden, who tested positive this week. Not Denzel Washington, Camila Cabello or Lionel Messi. Not your friend who’s even more cautious than you but who finally caught it last week. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that nearly 60 percent of Americans had contracted the virus at some point — and that was as of the end of February, before the extremely contagious BA.4 and BA.5 variants became rampant.

It was March 5, 2020. I’d spent the past few days in San Diego enjoying some much-needed R&R and visiting my college roommate. During my time in America’s Finest City, I’d heard rumblings about some type of contagious virus, but I wasn’t paying attention to the news. I was on vacation, after all. The point of it all was to get away from such things.

So while the world was quickly going to Hell behind my back, I drove around Coronado Island in my rental car and then up the southern California coast without a care in the world.

Then came March 5th. I was sitting on a plane at the San Diego airport, waiting to fly home to Portland. I was in my usual pre-flight daze until an entire family of ten boarded, all wearing facemasks. Shortly after, a woman (a nurse practitioner, I soon found out) sat in my row and pulled out a container of disinfectant wipes. She wiped down everything within reach and then offered the container to me. I politely declined, mostly because I didn’t know what was happening.

At that moment, though I wasn’t aware of the details, I knew things were about to get weird. What I didn’t realize was how correct I was in that assessment- and how long that weirdness would continue to consume the world.

All these months later, we’re still more or less here. Sure, we know more and have more and better tools to fight COVID-19, but life is nowhere near the same. I don’t know that it ever will be again.

You might suspect that you are special — immunologically superior, a super-dodger. You also might have come up with some bizarre theories about why you’ve lasted longer….

“I must have superhuman immunity or something,” mused Kathi Moss, a 63-year-old pediatric nurse from Southfield, Mich.

Scientists have found no conclusive evidence of innate genetic immunity. “It would be extremely unlikely that any innate immune system properties could protect against all infections,” said Eleanor Murray, an epidemiologist and professor at the Boston University School of Public Health. But Moss’s ability to duck the virus — to her knowledge, we should add; a disclaimer that applies to all these folks, since in theory they could have had asymptomatic cases at some point — does cry out for an explanation. Consider that she’s a pediatric nurse who has been staring covid in the face (while fully masked) for 2½ years now. And that she rode in a car with her ex-husband, with the windows up, three days before he tested positive. And that a woman at the camp where she works every summer gave Moss a henna tattoo one day and reported a positive coronavirus result the next.

So, good luck, good genes, good safety practices? Some of the above? All of the above?

It’s true; there are no winners in a pandemic. When you consider that we’ve lost more than a million of our fellow Americans, we’ve all lost- some more than others. Yet, despite death and disease surrounding us for two-and-a-half years, there are still those among us who’ve yet to contract COVID-19.

Whether through superior genetics, cautious conduct, or random blind luck (my guess), some folks- like my wife, Erin, and myself- have yet to be run down by COVID. I write that with my fingers and toes crossed because I know that could change at any time and for any reason (or no reason).

Erin is a nurse practitioner, but she’s in full PPE all day. She encounters COVID-19 almost every day. Thankfully, it’s no longer the giant, nasty, scary monster it was back in the day when COVID wards were full to overflowing, and COVID deniers were dying by the refrigerator truckload.

I know many people who’ve had COVID-19, and I can think of a couple of currently infected friends. Most people I’m around are fully vaccinated and boosted, so they end up with something like a bad cold. After 5-10 days of isolation, they re-integrate themselves back into the world, and life goes on.

It’s hard to know if Erin and I are just fortunate or perhaps something else is at work, but we’re grateful that we’ve managed to avoid infection thus far [author stops to KNOCK ON WOOD]. I saw a story on the news last week in which one doctor estimated that by the time all’s said and done, 96-98% of Americans will have been infected with COVID-19. I’m still hoping that Erin and I are among the 2-4% who somehow slide by somehow uninfected.

And it’s not as if we’ve been scrupulously careful, either. We generally don’t wear masks in public, though we went to an indoor concert last night at a crowded venue in downtown Portland. Yeah; we wore masks.

We’re not stupid. :-)

That said, we’ve gone out to restaurants and bars with friends, hung out at their houses, gone to soccer matches, and been on airplanes (usually masked but occasionally not). I at least think about being vigilant, but fall short more often than not. So how have we avoided COVID-19 thus far?

I wish I knew. We could do seminars and make beaucoup bucks, no? Damn, we could be bigger than Tony-freakin’-Robbins, knowhutimean?? If only we could discover the secret.

The problem, of course, is that there isn’t a secret- or at least one that medical science has been able to isolate. So some folks have been fortunate not to have COVID-19 call their number. Random blind luck, eh?

I’m confident that Erin and I have been exposed to COVID-19 on numerous occasions since March 2020. I can’t see how we couldn’t have been. For whatever reason(s), though, we’ve dodged that bullet.

I hope our great good fortune will continue and this won’t imperil us with the COVID gods. Whatever happens, though, we’ll continue trying to be careful and hoping for the best.

(And we’ll continue to hope that sacrificing goats and young virgins and drinking the blood of menstruating Peruvian llamas will keep us safe…but you didn’t hear that from me.)