Home Again

We managed to evade Covid for nearly 2 years.  We'd been moderately careful, wearing masks more often than most in our area, but we were still traveling and spending time in public, etc.  Just when I was beginning to wonder if we were invincible to the powers of Covid, and think that we might escape the pandemic unscathed, we got it.  Three in our family were having symptoms when we arrived home from our trip, so they got tested the following day, a Monday.  It took until Thursday morning to get all the results, which were mixed.  Jack was positive but Ben and Cat were negative.  So Jack was quarantined to his room for a while, and Luke got out the measuring tape to make sure he stayed 6 feet away from the door.

If everyone had been positive, I would have assumed we were all sick, but since some tested negative (a result I now view with skepticism), the other three of us got tested.  We managed to get our hands on some rapid tests, and the rest of us tested positive, with Ben and Cat still testing negative.  How we'd been together almost literally 24 hours a day for the last 11 days and the two of them didn't catch the virus, and yet still had symptoms, I don't understand.  I do have theories, though.

All of us had experienced symptoms, but for the younger three it was literally just a bit of a cough that lasted less than a day.  Cat and I both had full-blown cold symptoms for a few days, and Ben's stomach bug may or may not have been Covid.  (Is it possible to get over it quickly enough that you test negative 48 hours later?)

Teachers didn't send home any extra homework, which I appreciated, so our days of isolation were pretty laid back.  We hung out, the kids helped me put Christmas decorations away, Eliza made fondant, there was lots of reading, and we spent some time enjoying the unseasonably warm weather.  Jack finished the big LEGO set he got for Christmas and had fun taking pictures of it from different perspectives.  We also tried out the cool indoor marshmallow roasting appliance Pops sent us for Christmas.

Cat was so thankful for all of her negative Covid tests (she would take 4 in the period of a week) because it meant that she was able to go on a trip to California with her Winterim class.  Not knowing how in the world she'd tested negative at all, she decided to exercise extra caution moving forward by wearing a mask at home, and not spending as much time with the rest of us as usual.  She continued to go to school, but was masked the whole time.  I like this picture of Cat trying to get some fresh air while doing school work that week.  I think Waffles wanted to some of Cat's sandwich.  Or all of it.

I had mixed feelings about coming down with Covid.  After feeling like we were some of the more cautious people we knew, it was kind of embarrassing.  And I really hate knowing that we infected my family in Vegas (though everyone had been vaccinated and nobody got it really bad), and possibly others we don't know about.  But I also felt relieved.  I have never been afraid that Covid would put me or anyone in my family in the hospital - we're all very healthy and well outside the at-risk age range - I've also heard about some people getting hit pretty hard, and I really didn't want to lose my sense of taste or smell for months, as some people have.  But we caught Covid, and it was quite mild, and for at least a couple of months, we should be safe from catching it again (unless another variant emerges).

We were sick at the time that Omicron was really taking hold of the country, and the case counts in Utah would soon be ridiculously high.  A week after we tested positive, the 7-day average number of cases in Utah was over 10,000 - once approaching 14,000 - and the lines and processing times for PCR tests were so long that the governor told everyone that if you're sick, just stay home and don't even worry about getting tested.  (During the November 2020 - January 2021 surge, the 7-day average was 3,000 cases.)  It seems like everyone we know was sick with Covid between December and January, and if they weren't, they definitely know someone who was.  The high numbers and the quick dropoff in the last few weeks give me hope that with vaccination + herd immunity + variants becoming less severe.... maybe the pandemic is ending?  Maybe it won't be much longer before we all see Covid-19 as just another virus that circulates like the flu.