Viruses Must Die: Home Edition

Notes on my first case of Covid

Last month my husband and I finally became normal. We both caught Covid like everybody else. While stuck at home, I did a lot of useful thinking about Covid biology and I developed a revised list of strategies I’ll employ the next time Covid darkens our door. I’m working on several posts that will cover the new thinking in more detail.

Meantime, here’s the executive summary:

1. The highest goal of surviving the pandemic without permanent disability¹ is avoiding infection (N95 masks, air filters, avoiding unmasked crowds).

2. The second highest priority is to improve the odds that, if I do get infected, the infection remains bottled up in my sinuses and is eradicated before it can break out and damage vital organs (mRNA vaccine booster dose every 4-6 months, day-to-day mint/quercetin/curcumin).

3. If the infection does break out of my sinuses, it’s important to lead my immune system away from damaging forms of allergic inflammation (metformin, famotidine, azelastine, melatonin). Under my new thinking, the less-allergic immune response should be more effective for clearing the infection and should also help generate a better memory response that will protect me against future infections.

4. It’s increasingly clear to me that coronaviruses are using a trick called latency - where the virus goes to sleep and waits for immune responses to blow over so the virus can live to fight another day. Latency has important implications for how long to quarantine and how best to fight the infection. I’ve also begun brainstorming a second-generation vaccine strategy that would target genes expressed during latency.

1. My rebounding infection has coincided with President Biden’s recently announced infection. I share Representative Wendy Thomas’ hunch that Biden may be showing us what Covid disability can sometimes look like. The grim drama has been a powerful motivator behind my new thinking about how I can best deal with this virus.