Thoughts on Covid - Now That I Have It

 So I lost my sense of taste a few days ago, and tested positive for covid the next morning.

 

The world has bought into the experiential basis of knowledge.  You don’t really know something until you have experienced it yourself, they say.  On one level this is true.  It’s hard for a Catholic priest who is single to give marriage advice.  On another level, this doesn’t work.  Men can accurately judge abortion to be the killing of a human life, even though they have never been pregnant or been through an abortion.

 

People expect your views on covid to change once you get it.  And I suppose that isn’t unreasonable.  In a way, I’ve been living as if covid didn’t exist, for about 17 months.  Going to the office.  No masks unless absolutely insisted upon in planes, hospitals, etc.  No vaccine.  Church life has been normal for that long, too.

 

The thing is, I haven’t been a covid denier all along, just because I was acting that way.  I know it’s no walk in the park for many.  But if you believe the media narrative, you’re either taking extreme precautions because you believe the science, or you ignore it with your head in the sand as a science and covid denier.

 

I’ve been neither.  I was just assessing statistical risk.  

If I caught it, I didn’t expect to be one of the 1% or less to succumb to covid in a hospital on a ventilator – my comorbidities weren’t that bad.  As the Delta variant hit, it was clear the virus was more pervasive but much less severe.  I figured there was a higher chance to catch it, but an even lower chance I’d be hospitalized for it.  I’m not in ideal physical shape, but decent enough that if covid found me I would likely fight it off with a mild case.

 

Now that I’ve got it, I think the same way.

 

I don’t believe this is recklessness.  I know plenty of acquaintances who have not fared so well.  Colleagues hospitalized.  Family of coworkers, young and healthy, whose life is taken tragically.  I don’t deny these realities, but remain thoroughly convinced they are outliers.  The anecdotal evidence is as strong on the other side: church members or family who get covid, and it’s so mild a case they don’t realize they have it, and it passes quickly with no lasting harm.

 

You may ask, if it’s 50-50-ish, anecdotally, why not get the vaccine to be sure?  It’s a fair question.  First, because the stats aren’t 50-50, at ALL, like the media tries to make you feel.  Getting covid is not a death sentence for most.  How many?  We don’t KNOW what the stats are, because so many contract covid without knowing it, or being tested – my guess is 90% of cases are not severe.  All the severe cases are reported, and most of the mild cases are NOT.

 

Second, I’m not one who thinks the vaccine is a Bill Gates conspiracy, or that it’s worse than the disease, or one who deeply suspects it because it’s so strongly pushed.  I’m just not an “early adopter” of such things.  I’m fine submitting to MMR and tetanus vaccines that have been proven over decades, and I approve of modern medicine in general.  But to require a brand new vaccine of the whole population RIGHT NOW is too much.  So I’ve signed letters to aid where church members seek religious exemption from their employers requiring the vaccine.  My family is healthy enough just to not need it, right now, I think.  But I don’t look squinty-eyed at the person who gets the vaccine.  I believe the data that it’s quite effective to stave off covid or its severe effects.

 

At the same time, medicine is a “practice.”  The crass protest here is “We are not your lab rats.”  The more vaccinations, the more data they have to find out how well it works – they don’t know for sure until they get wide-scale results from live cases.  I’m a little uncomfortable being Apple’s early adopter “Beta test” with my own body, instead of just with my computer software.  That’s a reasonable concern to me.  It overrules the knee-jerk, irrational objection, “You’re a covid and science denier jerk!”  Society, an employer, or the government does not have the right to force me to get vaccinated in this circumstance.  Give it a few years of ultra-low instances of damage done by the vaccine, and the requirement makes more sense.

 

Let’s be okay with each other making different choices on all this.

We don’t have to buy into one political narrative or the other.  I find it rather silly to overly minimize the threat of covid, to prove how conservative or anti-Biden we are.  Or to inflate the threat of covid, to prove how dumb Trump and his supporters are.

 

Resist the impulse to isolate from anyone who thinks at all differently from you on this topic.  That’s what “they” want - for us to be less willing to stand together against their tyranny.  Yes, tyranny.  The most disturbing thing in all this is the progressive and aggressive demand that everyone do exactly what the government says, and think what the government thinks.  We are beginning to think and behave exactly how the Chinese Communist party wants its people to be, and that should scare us far more than the coronavirus.

 

At the same time, I’m staying away from people while I have covid, out of love for neighbor.  It made sense to lock everything down back in March 2020 (15 days to stop the spread!), but now we should only be quarantining the sick (me) , not the healthy.

 

I’m doing fine physically right now, mild cold symptoms are subsiding, and I appreciate your prayers for those with more severe cases.