2021 draws to a close with one last jab up the nose

Of course this is how 2021 would end: not with a party, but a mucus swab.

I was a fool to expect anything less. Remember this time last year, when we naively thought 2020 would go down as one of the worst on record, and that 2021 would assuredly mark a return to the blessed humdrum of normalcy? How could things get any worse? We were ready to climb atop a worthy steed, ride through the town center and cry out, “The vaccines are coming! The vaccines are coming!”

When the pandemic first hit Ohio, the state’s then-health director, Dr. Amy Acton, and epidemiologists at Ohio State University predicted the state could see around 10,000 new COVID-19 infections per day. Those projections didn’t materialize during Acton’s tenure, and she took considerable heat for it from some of Ohio’s more conspiratorial quarters.

Now here we are, the year 2021 inching to a close, and we barely blink as the Ohio Department of Health reports daily numbers of new COVID-19 cases that regularly top 10,000.

The vaccines are doing what they’re supposed to do, keeping lots of us out of the hospital, and hopefully more Ohioans come around to seeing it that way. But experts now are almost universal in their assessment that we’re stuck with COVID-19. It isn’t going away. We’re going to have to learn to live with it, year in, year out.

Joy.

So I guess I should get used to more weeks like this one, the last of 2021.

This year began in the Decker house with COVID-19 breaching our fortifications. My wife, deemed an essential employee at an animal hospital, brought home the virus in January. All four of us fell ill. The kids got away with mild and fleeting cases; my wife and I weren’t so lucky.

I got it the worst of it, and when I finally surfaced after a solid two weeks of misery, I pledged to pounce on whatever vaccine I could find whenever one became available.

We pounced on the boosters this fall, too, and it felt nice to gather Thanksgiving with my wife’s family in

Pittsburgh. So this is what it was like, PRE-COVID-19.

Enter omicron. Colleges have resumed the debate over in-class vs. remote learning. Ohio hit the nation’s highest, Covid-caused per capita hospitalization rate in the U.S.

The new wave plus the rising omicron variant led Dr. Carl Fichtenbaum, an infectious disease specialist at University of Cincinnati Health, to take one for the team and step into the role of official party pooper.

“Yeah, no parties. I would say no parties,” he told reporters at the Canton Repository. “If you care at all about people who work in hospitals and health care, and you don’t want us to quit our jobs and throw up our hands and go home, I would say no parties.”

Here in my house, no one feels much like partying anyway.

Over the weekend, my wife learned that a wave of COVID-19 had found some of her coworkers.

She had no symptoms, and a rapid test came back negative.

She went for a second test on Tuesday, which included a two-hour wait alongside a crush of other resigned Ohioans.

The nurse who tested her at the local urgent care said this surge is looking worse to her than the same time last year. Wielding the swab, she offered the caution so many of us have already heard upon taking a COVID test.

“I’ll try not to poke your brain.”

My last week of the year is shaping up to be all about COVID. I took my daughter for her booster shot on Monday afternoon, and she came out of it with mild fatigue and a few aches. I count it as a win.

My son goes for his booster on Friday morning, and I’m starting that day off bright and early with a test that I scheduled upon hearing of my wife’s potential exposure.

She’s still healthy and I’m showing no symptoms. I’ve thought about canceling the appointment if her second test comes back negative.

But I might end up keeping it. Somehow it feels right. What better way to end a year like 2021 than with one last caustic poke to the brain.

tdecker@dispatch.com

@Theodore_decker