After almost 2.5 years of somehow successfully avoiding the coronavirus without having to resort to extreme social isolation, my household finally got COVID.
Now that I come to think of it, it’s been a wonder how we haven’t gotten it earlier. Although my wife and kids stayed home for almost 2 whole years, completely going to work and school from home, I was back in a face-to-face office whilst it was peak lockdown, when there were still checkpoints between the cities of the Metro Bacolod area, because I worked in what was considered an essential industry.
I don’t know if it was luck, if we were just good at being careful, or a combination of both. But although our tiny bubble was already semi-compromised early on, with a family member breaking it every day to go to work in a virus-ridden world, we somehow managed to avoid infection for two and a half years.
I don’t think we did anything special. We just practiced social distancing, masked up and got vaccinated and boostered as soon as it became available. My wife and I even had conflicting opinions when it came to fomites. She still believed that everything that touched the outside world was a threat to our home while I didn’t necessarily subscribe to that school of thought. That of course led to many quarrels whenever I would forget to immediately take off my outside clothes upon breaking the sanctity of our inner sanctum. Based on experience, I daresay that our experience with avoiding COVID for as long as we did probably backs up my theory a bit more.
When the world started to open up again early this year, our tenuous bubble that had managed to survive so far became even more vulnerable when the WFH era ended and both parents went back to work in the real world. For my wife, this meant the return of constant traveling.
What made our bubble even more vulnerable was my wife’s asthma manifesting in recent months. This made coughing fits no longer worrisome for us and quite possibly lowered the guard that we had managed to keep up for so long.
Last week, on day zero of our COVID experience, the wife remembers feeling a little bit feverish after returning from a regular trip to Cebu. As usual, she had her asthma coughing fits, which didn’t bother us, but missing her being feverish was probably the biggest biosecurity mistake we made over the past 800-something days.
She is already double-boostered, and the feverish feeling didn’t last long, so the panic button that had been waiting for more than 2 years was not activated. The day after (Day 1), everyone was fine, and I even took half day off work to get my 2nd booster shot.
Day 2, like Day 1, was fine. I felt a bit of sore throat but having been just recently booster jabbed, I thought it was just a side effect.
Day 3 was when we realized we messed up. By the time I get back from work, the kids were complaining of being feverish and having sore throats. It was only at this point that we pressed the panic button and the whole house went into isolation.
Our best friends became the thermometer gun, the oximeter, and even the BP monitor. The paracetamol, Lagundi, Difflam lozenges and Kamillosan spray we had stocked up was finally unpacked.
The sore throat that I blamed on the booster wasn’t going away by then, which made me assume that I also got hit, even if my feverish feeling never really crossed into a proper fever.
Our daughter had fever for almost 2 days, our son almost 3 days. Our throats were all sore, which made us cough a lot, while some noses sniffled. We were constantly checking our temperatures and were generally uncomfortable, but were never really worried that our health situation was getting any worse.
Our lone helper, whose room is outside the main house, was not affected, probably because our system in the house is not really helper-centric. We called in a lot of food delivery and watched a lot of Netflix during those days, and while we were in isolation, the work didn’t stop. It still trickled through the online crevices.
Our self-quarantine will hopefully end this week, when we get the go signal of our consulting doctors, but because we didn’t bother to get RT-PCR tests, our case, probably just like thousands of similar ones all over the country, will not be recorded and was managed on a DIY level. We simply dealt with it as responsibly as we could by isolating as soon as we realized we were infected.
In a world where some people still won’t get themselves jabbed for their own protection, I don’t think everyone is as ready and willing to impose the self-isolation protocols my family subjected ourselves to upon suspecting we were infected. My recent COVID experience has made me realize that there are most likely a lot of infected people still out there in the wild, implementing their own DIY version of protocols which could be of varying levels of strictness and compliance.
Those of us who are trying to avoid the hassle of catching COVID will have to be more vigilant and cautious whenever we notice that cases are surging once more.*
