This was my second go of COVID, and while it wasn’t too awful^[1], it still hurls an absolute fucking bowling ball through any sort of life. Supremely bummed about losing an entire week when there weren’t that many left in the year to spare.

The first time around, the whole house was sick together, but this time it seems like only I got dinged and had to try my best to keep it that way. No idea how I had the good sense to sequester myself in the guest room when I felt that weird little tickle in the back of my throat, but it was the right call. We managed to set the house up so I still had access to a bed and a desk and a bathroom and could have my meals dropped off at the door of my little isolation ward.

Primary symptom this time was a two-day fever where I was utterly convinced that my day job involved working on something called “The Device”, which was just a CAD model of a coffee cup that I rotated a lot in my mind. One day I will finish the work.

I dragged the projector I bought for backyard movie night in and watched a bunch of Succession and Mad Men on the ceiling while I barbecue-rolled in bed for a few days.

Also got to dust off a classic from the first two long-distance years of our relationship: we had a recurring date night where we’d both go to the grocery store, find a bottle of wine that was available in both places, and pick a movie on Netflix (from the “Watch Now” streaming section, in contrast to the main DVD-mailing business). We’d get on the phone, count “3-2-1-Go!” and watch together. I think there’s a bunch of technology to solve this problem now, but we know what we know, and can report that the old ways still work just fine.

So when does this end? The official guidance as it currently stands says:

You can go back to your normal activities when, for at least 24 hours, both are true:

1. Your symptoms are getting better overall, and
2. You have not had a fever (and are not using fever-reducing medication)

Skipping over “stop taking Tylenol to see if you are Ready for Commerce™” for a moment, there seems to be broad consensus that neither of those two bullets has any relationship to your ability to spread illness to other people^[2]. I was still emphatically positive on a rapid test for days after both the above points were satisfied for me.

Feeling pretty despondent about the you-do-you of it all. So bizarre to have developed incredible tools to detect infections and make indoor air cleaner and just sort of ignore them all because “get back to work.” When did we decide the job of public health was to try to predict everyone’s objections and bake in little carve outs versus just offering medical guidance? Let’s not forget that previous “isolate for five days” guidance was just a thing an airline CEO made up.

Even the steps in the right direction are just so half-assed. Every household in the U.S. can request four free tests – great! – though of course that isn’t even enough for each member of the average household of 2.6 people to perform a single round of repeat testing like the FDA has recommended for more than two years.

Decided that my own bar to avoid putting any parents or grandparents at risk is two consecutive negative tests 24 hours apart, which I currently have one of. Assuming the second looks good in the morning, Christmas is not cancelled. Fingers crossed.

Anyway, personally lucky to have access to pricier molecular tests (which gave me a positive result 18 hours earlier than the antigen tests and probably spared my wife and friends from being exposed) and good air purifiers and a house big enough to distance from each other and a decent employer who was understanding when I needed to just poof out of society for a week. But my biggest takeaway with this latest brush is that I just don’t understand what the plan is^[3] beyond “everyone keep weathering this forever, and try not to bitch about it too much.”

Apropos of everything, this stood out to me in Dan Luu’s “Why is it so hard to buy things that work well?”:

Something I find interesting about American society is how many people think that someone who gets the raw end of a deal because they failed to protect themselves against every contingency “deserves” what happened.