Confessions of a COVID virgin
I am one of a smallish — it may be as small as 18 percent — group of U.S. “COVID virgins,” people who have never been infected by SARS-CoV-2.
I object to the term. Losing one’s virginity is implicitly (although not universally) fun. Getting COVID, not so much.
But “COVID virgin” also contains a sneaky undertone. If you’re a virgin, you have not crossed the red velvet rope line beyond which waits a Studio 54 of adult pleasures and practices.
If you’re a COVID virgin, you’re probably not out in the restaurants and indoor rock concerts and parties. Otherwise, you would have gotten sick by now. You’re probably that lone masked weirdo in an otherwise mask-less setting. There’s a hint (and sometimes more) of the idea that you’re not fully grown up, because the grown-up thing to do is to get back to normal and get sick.
Guilty, I guess.
My son is immunosuppressed. My partner went into the hospital for something else, was infected with COVID and didn’t come home for 10.5 months. I don’t want to bring the virus to them. I also — at 68 — would really prefer not to take my chances with getting sick.
At the moment, I don’t want to have anything happen to me or my loved ones that would involve a trip to the hospital, where overwhelmed ERs can result in 8-to-20 hour waits, where ICUS (especially pediatric ones) are at or beyond capacity, where the staff is overwhelmed, overworked, over-infected.
Such is the long-term effect of COVID, compounded by RSV (the virus, not the King James alternative) and flu, which all but disappeared in 2020 and 2021.
(This is becoming a cherished American tradition. Syphilis was perched on the lip of eradication from about 1998 to 2000. Instead of knocking it out, we let it take a mandatory 8-count, shake off the cobwebs and get back in the fight. Condom use is down. Syphilis and other STDs are up. Way to go.)
The triple-demic. Everybody knows about the triple-demic, and everybody knows the hospitals are swamped right now, with every reason to think that Thanksgiving travel and gatherings will turn people’s upper airways into brothels of joyously replicating viruses.
Hmmmm. What could we possibly do about that? Hmmmm. That’s a toughie.
Lockdowns, restrictions and mandates are all off the table. We are a kindergarten with no rules, where one kid is doing rhythm band and another is crayoning the wall and another is emitting a series of high-pitched screams, just to test out his voice.
Of course, you don’t need as many rules if you have unspoken community values that emphasize our responsibilities toward one another, but we don’t have those either. School of Rogan libertarians like to bring up Sweden as a place where the government opted for relative non-interference with minimal consequences. But Sweden has consistently been at least 20 percentage points ahead of the United States in boostedness.
Because, you know, if people care about each other and aren’t stupid about science, they’ll do these things on their own. I get it.
But I also don’t get it.
Why, with a triple-demic crashing our health care system, are there not more warnings about the risks of indoor gatherings and about the rewards of masks?
I went to a Broadway show — Tom Stoppard’s “Leopoldstadt” — a few weeks ago. I wore an N95. Around 40 to 50 percent of the audience — because Broadway crowds at shows that do not involve singing genies are older — was masked. I felt safe.
Last spring, I taught my seminar in a fairly small lower level room in Yale’s poli sci building. I wore an N95. The students were masked. The students were conscientious about isolating after direct exposures and quarantining while infected. I never got infected.
I go to the CT Public building to do my radio show four or five days a week. I stay masked until I’m alone in my studio.
I go masked to Big Y, Costco, CVS, the wine store, the pet food store, hair salons, medical appointments and, to get takeout for my son, into restaurants several times a week.
I’ll probably get massively sick minutes after typing these words, but my last infectious disease was a bad cold in September 2019.
Not everyone has the opportunity to live the way I do, and most people wouldn’t want to.
But I can’t shake the idea that, as a society, we’ve done a poor job of talking through the risks and benefits. It wouldn’t be hard for political and scientific leaders to say, “You know what? We’re probably not masking enough right now. You know what? We’re starting to see hints that second and third infections may result in higher rates of organ damage, brain fog, chronic fatigue. Maybe be a little more careful. Maybe don’t keep getting infected.”
Most of the thought leaders seem afraid to press down even a little bit harder on the gas pedal of pre-exposure caution. They act like flustered and flummoxed substitute teachers who have capitulated to an unruly class.
Ironically, many of us may reap the benefits of the COVID non-policy policy. Even though BQ.1.1, the variant most likely to succeed at the moment, has superpowers that enable it to slip past immune defenses and leap over monoclonal antibodies at a single bound, we don’t seem to be paying a steep body count price.
The best guess seems to be that we’ve developed a haphazard wall of folks who are once, twice or three times infected, folks who’ve had anywhere from one to five vaccinations, often mixing brands (heterologous is the medical term), folks who have been both vaccinated and infected.
The Great Wall of Virus. Maybe it’ll hold.
If so, infected people, thank you for your service.