Just like that, I had COVID, some new variant, perhaps XBB, or BA.2.10.1, or BA.2.75, or BA.1.1, or BA.1 — descriptions that mean nothing to me. I have written in this column that I believe COVID is both a disease and a story, a tale, if you will, full of ambiguous metaphor and a warning that pandemics flourish in direct proportion to the mass of social rot that infects societies. Up until a few weeks ago, I viewed myself as a detached observer, a pandemic voyeur with impenetrable immunity, as if wearing a suit of anti-viral armor. COVID encourages fatuous visions of the self. We have thunderous, mostly right wing contrarians who boast that they see through the lies and avoid the true source of malice — vaccines. Most of us employ some ideological reference point while placing bets at the COVID crap table. I was vaxxed, boosted, masked, cautious and blessed.
First, I had a nasty cough and a mild fever. The home test read negative, and being obsessive and having a drawer full of free, government funded tests, I tried two more times, but COVID the trickster would not give me the needed red line. I assumed I had RSV (Respiratory Syncytial Virus), a surging, garden variety infection, now filling ER beds with very young children, and getting some news media attention. RSV did not trouble me — COVID is the shape shifting scourge that destroys minds, selves, collects bodies and, rips countries in half along the dotted line, and I did not have it. However, my wife had sniffles and, working at a medical clinic, had herself tested for RSV, COVID and the flu, the routine viral trio. She had COVID and I did a Wiley Coyote double take — the one he does while running off a cliff. He strides on air until he looks down, faces the audience and plunges. The fourth home test was my Wiley Coyote moment.
Almost instantly, I felt a lot worse. I had been coughing all along, but now fatigue, loss of sense of smell and a thick aura of indifference settled upon me. Not all COVID is created equal. My wife still puttered about, tidying up and jumping rope downstairs while I burrowed into bed with our cats and cycled through hours of fitful sleep, sweats and tubercular episodes of coughing. Before the test confirmed my COVID, I had run for miles every day and done hundreds of pushups, crunches and curls. Now I barely had the strength to brush my teeth. COVID is a master of confusion. Did I have RSV first, and then acquired COVID, or were my first home tests false negatives? Did my condition worsen after the positive test out of my own subconscious deference to COVID’s mythic status, or did the virus itself ramp up its assault? Any illness that can ruin your heart or extract some portion of your brain can also deliver a whomping placebo.
COVID, like an image in the fun house mirror has become a grotesque, misshapen phantom associated with paranoid visions of the deep state and very real worries about limitations on free speech. Public utterances about COVID include some of the most unhinged detritus of the human mind, but even carefully measured COVID controversy is apt to be censored. While I am worrying that COVID has subtly stolen a piece of me, the chunk of flesh that COVID severed from our collective selves is impossible to deny. When one portion of the public believes that COVID vaccines are a murderous plot, and another segment believes that anti-vaxxers have unleashed a death storm, where is the bridge between the two?
My wife and I had both had the booster that was supposed to specifically target Omicron. COVID research is always ambiguous, but the claims that Pfizer and Moderna made appear to have been self-serving. What did Pfizer and Moderna do wrong? For one thing, they are making tens of billions in yearly profits, and that is narrative kerosene. One has only to look across the Caribbean, where Cuba has vaccinated 100% of the population and eradicated COVID, to understand our dilemma. There has been just a single COVID death in Cuba over the past six months. One might argue that there is no anti-vax movement in Cuba because of state controlled news media. But can one thus discount the other portion of the Cuban vaccine story — that the pharmaceutical industry is nationalized within the context of the most ambitious socialized medical system ever assembled? Even a crazy person would have a difficult time attributing evil schemes to an industry that has no profit motive. If COVID vaccines were nationalized in the U.S. would COVID still be raging?
A few days ago, I finally tested negative. I feel almost whole, but this really is not about me. COVID is the third leading cause of death in America. In the past year, COVID has killed more U.S. residents than murders, car accidents, suicides and drug overdoses combined. Almost nobody wears masks anymore, only 4% of the U.S. public has gotten the latest booster, and the current U.S. COVID strategy involves a cynical act of collective surrender. The U.S. will never nationalize the drug industry and tens of thousands will die of COVID in the coming year. This all relates to COVID’s proxy story tellers — the tale you probably believe is that nothing remains to be done.
Phil Wilson is a retired mental health worker from Northampton. His opinion pieces have been published locally, and on national platforms at Current Affairs and Common Dreams.