It’s been two weeks since my first symptoms of COVID-19 manifested and nobody has seen my face, at least in public, since then.
All-in-all, my quarantine has gone relatively smoothly. As noted last week, I’m fortunate enough that the bulk of my work can be done from home. Granted, newsgathering by phone is limiting, but with a little bit of help it works in a pinch.
Meanwhile, thanks to the rapid advancement of online shopping in recent years, I’ve been able to keep my fridge full while keeping human contact to a minimum. Online grocery shopping has been an interesting endeavor. It’s strange how well Fareway’s shopping app has managed to replicate the experience of browsing aisles and impulsively putting things in your cart that you weren’t necessarily looking for. I’ve missed being able to pop in to the store to pick up a few things for dinner, but there’s something to be said about driving up to the parking lot and having your groceries put in your trunk without having to leave your car.
Outside of that, the closest I’ve come to human contact outside my house has been picking up my morning breakfast sandwich and coffee from Kum and Go. Again, thanks to the marvels of modern technology, I’m able to order it from my phone and pick it up without getting close to another person.
Overall, my COVID experience could definitely be worse. Again, I’m well aware how fortunate I am in that regard. There are currently 935 Iowans hospitalized with this same virus right now so nobody should be taking my experience here as anything but a singular anecdote.
I wouldn’t say I’ve been asymptomatic, but near enough. Outside of a couple coughs here and there, you’d be hard pressed to say I was even sick. Which has actually been something of a point of confusion as I try to figure out if and when it’s safe for me to return to the outside world.
The CDC currently recommends five days of isolation following a positive test if you are asymptomatic or free of symptoms. Okay, fair enough, but my worst symptom was an occasional cough. Something that also happens during my morning shower, after I work out, or after I eat. It’s very hard to tell if you’ve gotten better when the spectrum for improvement is so narrow.
Now sure, you can usually tell the difference between a “I need to clear my throat” cough and a “I have a viral infection in my lungs” cough, but it’s not like there’s no overlap between the two. Does the five day countdown reset every time I cough for no other obvious reason? That seems excessive, even for somebody abundantly erring on the side of caution.
Somebody, somewhere, was careless about their capacity to transmit the virus. They weren’t staying home when they should have been or they weren’t wearing a mask when they should have been or they were lax on any of the other mitigation measures that have been drilled into all of us over the last two years. That’s how I got the virus.
I don’t want to be that person for somebody else. At the same time though, I can’t stay inside forever either. This weekend I made my first in-person shopping excursion in more than a week. It wasn’t long and I was fully masked, but it was nice to get out a little bit.
I also couldn’t help but notice that I was just about the only person in the building that wasn’t coughing so maybe all my efforts have basically been in vain regardless.
Judging from the rate of infection, and the number of coughing people in any given enclosed space I’ve noticed over the last month or so, we’re all going to be exposed to this virus eventually. Nevertheless, I’ll be online grocery shopping for a while longer and doing my best to make sure nobody gets it from me.
(Well, nobody else. Sorry, roommate.)
Travis Fischer is a news writer for Mid-America Publishing and is mostly worried about putting on some extra pounds due to having nothing to do at home but cook.
