A few days ago one of my co-workers started feeling ill in the middle of the day, left immediately and got a COVID test. It was positive.
I can’t say I wasn’t expecting it. COVID is burning its way through most large workplaces right now, and double-time at hospitals and medical facilities. Watching it creep closer and closer – first it’s on your floor, then it’s in your department and then it’s in the office with you – feels not unlike being chased through the forest by a slasher-film villain.
Now, I knew my chances of catching it from my colleague were small but not zero. We have all had our three-vaccine series, and we wear masks in the office, but it’s a small, poorly ventilated space, where there is not enough room to socially distance (or even regular distance). We’re in the fishbowl for eight hours a day together, and we do lift up our masks to drink water. (Or coffee. Mostly coffee.)
So when I got home that evening, I put on a N95 before entering the house and instituting what my family has been calling The Protocol. I immediately entered self-quarantine while in the house. I would remain that way for five days, and on the fifth day I would take a PCR test. I was maskless only in two rooms, and only when the doors were shut. Nobody could enter those rooms for at least three full hours after I left. If I left a quarantine room, I wore an N95 and my mom and roommate had to put on a mask if I entered the room they were in.
I am well aware this was an overreaction. I know the chances of my getting COVID and passing it on to my mom and roommate were small, considering everyone involved is fully vaccinated. But if anyone in my family did test positive, I knew that for my own peace of mind, I needed to be able to look myself in the eye and tell myself that I did everything I could to protect them.
And I’m terrible at lying to myself. It’s a weird trait for an alcoholic, I know. But it’s the truth. I’m not scared of catching COVID myself. But I am very scared of passing it on to other people; the idea of being an asymptomatic carrier is perhaps the scariest thing of all to me. It’s weird, working in health care right now, because all of our workplace COVID policies can be summed up as “no symptoms, no problem.” And then you talk to the doctor down the hall and they say yeah, you should be careful, you could transmit virus particles while being asymptomatic, or so lightly symptomatic that you chalk up your headache and fatigue as the result of drinking eight cups of coffee and no cups of water all day. For example.
I’ve had people – mostly well-meaning – tell me that I don’t need to live in fear. Well, here’s a breaking news alert from your local columnist: I already live in fear. I have an anxiety disorder. That’s a diagnostic way of saying I feel fear more frequently and intensely than the circumstances warrant. My risk perception, like my depth perception, is laughably terrible, and my tolerance for risk is like my tolerance for lactose: nonexistent. Amazingly, the fact that I was able to feel safe and comfortable around the house again after I received a negative PCR test represents progress in my life. There was a time when my brain would have convinced itself that the test was wrong; that I somehow had COVID that wasn’t picked up by the nasal swab; that I was sick without knowing it.
Fortunately, my co-worker is on the mend. Vaccines enable the immune system to respond quickly to particles of coronavirus, turning it into a nasty cold instead of lung-scarring pneumonia. And the layering of vaccines and masks worked: Nobody else in the office got sick.
But, like a moose, COVID is closer than you think and something we should still have a healthy fear of, particularly the 25 percent of Maine’s population who remain unvaccinated against it. I know it’s been a very long time since those first reports started trickling out of China, but the pandemic is still here, still raging and still filling our hospitals and overwhelming our health care workers.
The coronavirus doesn’t care whether or not you’re afraid of it. The coronavirus cares about one thing: entering a human body and multiplying. I urge you not to give it that chance.
Victoria Hugo-Vidal is a Maine millennial. She can be contacted at:
themainemillennial@gmail.com
Twitter: @mainemillennial
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