The Original Meaning of Quarantine Was Forty Days
We were a lot more careful than the official guidance on Covid. It was nowhere near good enough.
Our household’s first Covid ordeal is in its 48th day. Every few days we celebrated turning some corner or another and over and over we realized we had foolishly underestimated Covid. Again. Although neither my husband nor I had any symptoms beyond a little mild coughing and an occasional slight drippy nose, watching our Covid-infected President descend into so-called “brain fog” put an upsetting exclamation point on the possible hidden consequences of our bad guesses.
So here’s how our local outbreak went down. The first week in June, my husband woke up with a little bit of mild coughing and, out of an abundance of caution, he took a highly sensitive Lucira molecular Covid test. When it came back positive, I hightailed it to the hotel across the street for a week and I went and got a Moderna boost. During the second week of June, we carefully isolated at home. By carefully, I mean we hardly ever occupied the same room and when we did we both used high-quality N95 masks. We opened windows as much as Maryland summer weather would allow and when the windows were closed we set our HVAC fans to remain on so the furnace hepafilters I installed could continuously clear the air. We also set Consumer Reports’ top pick mega-scale air filter to run continuously. We drank buckets of mint tea. By the end of week two we were both testing Lucira negative and we started to relax.
I got tired of nagging about asymptomatic testing, but then when I heard my husband coughing one morning at the end of week three I demanded a rapid antigen test. It instantaneously came back with a flaming red hot rebound band. I didn’t know it that morning, but it turns out I was already infected. A few days later I felt a slight soreness deep in my sinuses. I tested positive for a few days then I tested negative for about a week. Then I rebounded to positive again for a few days, then negative for about a week. Then I rebounded again for a few days. I’ve now been negative for a week, but as God is my witness I will never underestimate Covid again1. Our final checkout will be a Lucira test on day 52 of the ordeal - when we’re scheduled to fly to visit our favorite mountain on Earth, Mount Rainier. Fingers crossed.
The only bright side to the story is that we never had any signs of systemic infection (no fever, upset stomach, low pulsox, fatigue, muscle pain, loss of smell, or headaches). We occasionally went the extra mile to test throat and anus swabs and they always came back dead negative. My sense is that my infection was exclusively localized to one small patch deep in my left sinus. This inference fits the idea that the surface of the sinus epithelium has almost no IgG antibodies. The rest of my body, in contrast, is most likely awash in neutralizing antibodies induced by many rounds of Covid booster shots (including the booster dose I got a mere two weeks prior to getting infected). It’s possible I’m engaged in wishful thinking - the idea of a sinus-restricted infection is incredibly shiny because my sinuses can quickly recover. My brain, not so much.
Why the hell didn’t anybody warn us something like this might happen? More importantly, how the hell did Covid pull off this insidious feat? In tomorrow’s post, “Bullfighting Covid,” I’ll entertain the idea that Covid may be flummoxing the immune system by waving a red cape of histamines. In “Latency, Long Covid, and the Dreaded Rererebound” I’ll explore the growing suspicion that Covid is using a crafty virological trick called latency to temporarily hide from the immune system. If Covid does have a latency program, it will require us to develop a new set of battleplans to permanently defeat it. I’ll sketch out some new plans in “Covid Just Messed with the Wrong Team.” I’ll close the epic war story with, “What I’ll Do the Next Time Covid Darkens My Door.”
Update: As of mid-August I’m still periodically feeling a faint sore patch at the back of my left sinus, but I have continued to test negative.
The AI image generator spelled "quarantine" wrong (not to be *that* person). I would also love to hear insights about other insidious infectious diseases, such as cryptosporidiosis.