San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
COVID19 CAME TO OUR HOUSE
We don’t know how, and it doesn’t matter
I blame myself.
Not for the lapses in sanitizing — though these were surely legion. Not for any failure on the handwashing front, either, because by now I’ve scrubbed my hands so much that the texture on their backs has changed. It’s polished now, like the skin of a very old person, or a river stone.
No, I blame myself because when my fatherinlaw began complaining that the food was too salty, I rolled my eyes and dismissed it. “Dad, we’re just going to have to make do,” I said, from atop my high horse. This was around March 29. The grocery shelves no longer looked picked over by zombies, but I was avoiding them, as was most everyone who could afford to.
My fatherinlaw is gentle and kind, funny and fun, but he does have a flaw: He’s a finicky eater. Most of the year he spends in India, and when he’s with us, he wants all the food he can’t get there. I wouldn’t call it American cuisine, exactly. It’s more like ersatz Italian, ersatz Mexican and hamburgers. What my dadinlaw feens for, those long months in India, is the taste of premium fastcasual circa 1999.
This might be less of a problem if he did the cooking.
By the end of March, our little pandemic pod was practically in the clear. It had been almost 14 days since my fatherinlaw had flown into San Francisco on a direct flight from Delhi. He’d been “quarantined” as best we could manage, directed to take his supposedlytoosalty meals at the end of the counter, assigned a quarantine corner in the living room. All of this was awkward and not a little painful, especially not hugging him, especially on the day he turned 69. But Dad took the socialdistancing graciously: He didn’t want to get the virus from us, either. COVID19 can be brutal for older people.
The morning of March 31, Dad’s quarantine ended. We all traded hugs, at last, and congratulated ourselves on not giving one another the virus. That night the four of us — fatherinlaw, husband, daughter, me — clambered onto the couch to watch “March of the Penguins,” marveling at the literal lengths the birds go to care for their progeny. When the female penguin has laid her egg, she transfers it to her mate and goes off on a long trek to get fish for the family. It’s the proud, wouldbe papa who keeps the egg safe and warm, between his big belly and webby feet, until it hatches, two months later.
The movie shows a blistering Antarctic windstorm. The male penguins try to stay very still but inevitably some of them are bereft. It’s easy for a penguin egg to slip onto the ice and crack, or freeze instantly, and die.
“I didn’t realize the movie would be so sad,” said my fatherinlaw.
The next morning, a Wednesday, my husband and I woke up feeling a little off. A headache for him, a sore throat for me.
On Thursday, I was better and my husband was worse — achy, tired, a little feverish. “You should assume he has COVID,” said my sister, a physician in Southern California. “You need to watch him carefully.” He should be isolated to protect the rest of us, she said, especially my fatherinlaw.
On Friday, my husband looked like death and was running a fever. He couldn’t get out of bed. I called six medical supply stores and pharmacies, and the seventh, 20 miles away, had a pulse oximeter, which measures the oxygen level of your blood, in stock. Masked and gloved, I sped to the store and arrived three minutes before it closed, and sped back home, oximeter in hand.
“What should it be?” I asked my sister over the phone, waiting for a reading to pop up.
“It should be between 95 and 100. If it’s over 95, you’re fine.”
The oximeter said 93. Then 94. Then 93. Then 94. If he got really sick, he might have to go to the hospital, and then to the ICU, and I might never see him again. The thought was unthinkable. Against doctor’s orders, we slept in the same bed.
The next morning, he felt a little better, but I drove him to the respiratory clinic anyway, in a parking garage. We knew tests were scarce, so we weren’t surprised when the doctor said that although my husband almost certainly had COVID19, he might not merit a swab. But when we mentioned that an older person was staying with us, the doctor perked up. Did he have any symptoms? Any cough, fever, lethargy? No, we said, Dad seemed totally fine.
“Except that he says that everything tastes too salty,” I said. It was a casual aside but over her mask the doctor’s eyes gleamed, intent. We’d heard that one of COVID19’s signature symptoms was anosmia, or loss of taste and smell, but hadn’t connected it with Dad’s complaint. The doctor explained: To some people with anosmia, everything tastes too salty or sweet because salt and sweet are all they can taste.
Soon after, the doctor was leaning into the car and sticking the long thin probe up into the far reaches of my husband’s right nostril.
“But how do you think you got it?” my friends were asking a week later. By then all three adults in our house had tested positive for COVID19.
The question vexes me. How could we not have gotten the virus? After all, the authorities have been telling us for weeks that the virions are everywhere. They might live on doorknobs, food, hair, playground equipment, the milk and the mail. We need to be 6 feet apart, or maybe as many as 28. We have been trained to be scared: to hold our breath in the wake of joggers, to avoid touching anything, to flinch if a neighbor gets too close.
No one fixated on the MacGuffin of transmission more than my fatherinlaw. But there were more cases in Santa Clara County than in India! he would say, half to himself. But I wore a mask on the plane! The idea that he might have given his children the virus was so mortifying to him that he introduced a variety of epidemiologically unlikely countertheories. For instance, was it possible that we gave the virus to him — perhaps because we went to that funeral in Los Angeles in early March? And then we were asymptomatic for a while, and then we passed it to him, and then he passed it back to us? Or was it possible that we got it from our daughter, before schools closed?
When my husband began at last to get better, the theories stopped.
Now, a week after we’ve all recovered, what still astonishes me is not that we were infected but that we were able to get a firm diagnosis. (We weren’t able to get a test for our daughter, who is 8 and gloriously, abundantly, knockonwood, healthy.) A couple weeks ago, Palo Alto, where we live, was reporting 61 confirmed cases of COVID19. Our little family comprised 5 percent of them!
Clearly, we have a data problem. As I write, scientists are estimating that the actual number of infections in Santa Clara County, where we live, is 50 to 85 times greater than the official numbers. Tests have been in such short supply that in some areas of the country, you won’t get one unless you’re already so sick you have to be hospitalized. In the few places where there has been widespread testing, great numbers of those with infections have no symptoms.
And yet the diagnosis problem is but the tip of our giant epistemological iceberg. How long are we contagious? When in the course of the disease do we shed the most virus? How do viral loads correspond to the severity of the disease? When do we stop being threats to the vulnerable people and become potential assets, instead — people who can venture out into the virussaturated world and get groceries and staff food banks and so forth? Will we ever be able to help? Even as the good Dr. Fauci talks about “immunity certificates,” and others caution against immunoprivilege, we don’t actually know whether the virus behaves like others, conferring immunity on those who’ve had it, or not. Were those apparent reinfections in South Korea really just relapses? Can we reinfect one another? (If so, maybe my fatherinlaw was right about that funeral.)
It’s true what the doctors say. For now, at least, you don’t need a coronavirus test. Just assume that you have it. Because diagnosed or not, sick or not, immune or not, we all have COVID19. We all will for a very long time.
For now, my family, like many families, waits. While we wait, we count our blessings: That our illnesses were mild. That no one needed to go to the hospital. That we have a house to isolate in and food on the table.
My superhero sister has sent us some pretty batik masks. My husband and daughter are having handstand competitions.
As for my father in law — he’s finally comfortable enough in our house to do some of the cooking.