Getting Covid in 2022 is so retro

Welp, it finally happened to me. Yesterday morning I tested positive for COVID-19.

How does it feel?

Physically, it has progressed very much like a cold, and felt like one, too. I felt abnormally tired on Sunday after finishing up my calls with my friends, an unsettling awareness of post-nasal drip. Perhaps I’m just tired, the natural consequence of a week of nonstop social excitement. Then in bed that evening I had a terrible fever and a fitful half-sleep, waking up inflamed at ungodly hours of that liminal space between the night and the morning. This persisted through Monday but has abated in favour of a persistent sore throat, although activities that are even slightly physically strenuous still start me sweating all over my body. The sore throat has left me half-unable to speak (and completely wrecked my singing range), and has made sneezing a bit more painful, in a strange way—it’s almost as if I welcome the painful sneezes, the sheer force of them which, if strong enough, could dislodge the bad bits of phlegm hanging around inside my throat, but they never do, and all I feel is a buzzy sort of flapping, and I think, well, that sneeze wasn’t strong enough, but maybe the next one….

Emotionally, I’m not sure. Ever since COVID-19 ground Society to a halt and became the Biggest News Story of the Decade, I had always kind of accorded it a weird kind of reverence. Other silent killers were mundane, but this one, this one was perversely exciting. Every time a celebrity contracted COVID-19, it was a news story. And so every time someone I personally knew contracted COVID-19, it felt like a news story to me, the kind you receive with a hush and an “I’m afraid I have some bad news to share”. And I could feel the tension ratcheting with every friend who bore this news, closer and closer to me in the social graph. In 2020 it was a smattering of distant relatives; in 2021 it was a selection of close friends. And in 2022 it was everyone—my mum got it in April, and I figured, well it’s only a matter of time before it reaches me.

And so the moment COVID-19 finally got me should have felt momentous: the grand surrender, the week my luck finally ran out, the culmination of all this pathogen’s efforts to breach my system. But instead it’s felt sort of mundane. Perhaps this is because it’s already gotten almost everyone. Back in July, my friend and I were discussing an article about COVID virgins, which offhandedly mentioned that 82% of Americans have already had the coronavirus. Or perhaps this is because the newer variants of COVID, naturally selected more for transmissibility than for severity, are milder compared to the ones that were kicking around in 2020. I’d guess I have some variation of Omicron-BA.5, based on my timing. Or perhaps it’s because I’ve already had two close brushes with COVID-19 (one in April/May, when I fell ill in LA with a disease that felt exactly like this but was not COVID, and one in late June, when I had a positive antigen test but it did not replicate and I had no symptoms), so I was already emotionally prepared for the prospect of having COVID-19.

So now it’s no big deal. The worst part now, it feels, is the pain of having to cancel or reschedule all the social events I had planned for through the weekend. No hike to Mission Peak to-night, no barbershop chorus at the Palo Alto Farmers Market, no Crepevine lunch on Sunday. Ah well. The flipside of that, though, is that I can start work anew—I’d felt hopelessly behind at work all of the previous week, but the fact of having had COVID-19 gives me cover to reset where I am with all my work-related anxieties. Hopefully I don’t blow it this time.

Yesterday I wanted to record a short jingle about my new development, a 15-second video to send to people who inquired, “How are you doing?” It would have been a mere eight bars, involved three-part falsetto harmony over the Classic R&B Chord Progression, and featured the following lyrics:

This did not end up happening, because my sore throat prevented me from reaching those notes. What a tragedy.