It Finally Got Me (SARS2, You suck)

Since the first wave of SARS2 hit the US, I've been advocating for people to take serious precautions and do everything they could to avoid it. At first, we were all in this together. Some of us sewed fabric masks to conserve our supply of PPE for healthcare workers, others rapidly learned online teaching programs and began implementing them, and still others began researching a vaccine to help reduce the damage this virus could do on our bodies. 

For five years we've had wave after wave of illness, usually at least two major waves per year, as people have rapidly dropped any precautions they took between 2020 and 2021. When I was pregnant summer of 2021, the government began implementing the "vax and relax" campaign. Biden claimed the pandemic was over right around the time I was giving birth to a premature infant. The complications I faced during pregnancy (blood pressure and brain disorders) both put me at higher risk for complications from COVID. Pregnancy itself is a risk factor for long term complications. Imagine knowing all that and watching so many people you love completely drop masking. So much for being in this together.

Until this fall, I didn't know personally what it felt like to have COVID. I never tested positive, despite testing multiple times during any illness (I've had so much less illness since I began regularly wearing respiratory protection). Until September 2024, the fifth summer wave, when it hit me like a ton of bricks. As someone who has a history of lung disease, I knew it would be dangerous to get a SARS virus. Most respiratory viruses cause further issues with me, as I had a whole collection of lung diseases throughout my 20s. 

It's been almost six weeks, now. I get winded easily, my oxygen drops and heart rate spikes doing basic tasks, I feel faint if I stand for long periods, my lungs crackle and wheeze every morning, and I have to take a new allergy medicine and inhaler regularly. Six weeks of symptoms that mess with my sleep and my heart function. Six weeks and two urgent care visits, because I live in a country that ties access to healthcare to a full time job. Every infection I get will increase my chances of these symptoms never going away. There are thousands of people who got COVID one time (vaccinated or not) and are now completely disabled.

Hundreds of thousands of studies have been done to see how this virus spreads (inside and outside of the body), the complications it causes, the severity of the burden on healthcare systems, and the effectiveness of various infection control methods. I have yet to find a single one that says an infection with this specific virus is harmless or even neutral. Every new study that comes out shows how dangerous it is for anyone who gets it, how much damage it causes. The virus can break you down from within, attack every organ system, and destroy your ability to function. It can cause heart attacks, strokes, dementia, diabetes, erectile dysfunction, POTS, GI issues. It can cause or worsen brain disorders like anxiety and depression.

Yet here we are with our children going into schools with no upgrades on air filtration or ventilation, no respiratory protection, and no guraranteed paid sick leave for their parents to care for them. Our elders are packed in homes where no one takes any steps to reduce the spread of this disease which is airborne and known to cause the most death in the elderly population. Folks aren't even safe in hospitals, because healthcare workers no longer mask despite regularly getting sick. It's insidious how much the government has convinced us that being sick multiple times a year with a relatively new pathogen is normal. 

I remember before this pandemic when I was struggling with back to back respiratory illnesses my last full year of teaching preschool special Ed and it was odd for someone to be so sick. Yet now I hear of people getting covid 6+ times, plus a whole list of other illnesses (strep, flu, norovirus, mystery viruses, pertussis, scarlet fever). We're seeing resurgences of illnesses we thought were gone (polio, measles) because of the demonization of vaccines and because people have lost their sense of community and willingly spread disease.

I wish I could find the article that said up to 75% of people go to work or school or shopping while sick because they don't want to miss out. Rather than staying home to rest and keep the illness from spreading, we live in a society that teaches everyone to grind and hustle and push through any illness, regardless of how negative that will effect the person suffering or the people they may infect along the way. I've seen the comparison that too many people would hide a zombie bite in order to go to a party and it absolutely tracks. So many temporarily sick people will refuse to "miss out" while putting others at risk. Sometimes a one time illness leads to a lifetime of disability. Every time you roll the dice with SARS2, your chances of having lifelong issues increases.

The reality is that we should still be taking this virus seriously because it's still a serious threat to our health. I don't know if I will ever get fully better. I don't have access to regular healthcare, I don't have the money to buy lots of supplements, I don't have the time or support to take days off to rest. My body will do it's best to heal and I will do my best to support it, but I live in a system that doesn't want to care for you unless you provide enough labor. I do know that I can wear a respirator in public and seriously reduce my risk of being infected. I know that if we were to have guaranteed sick leave, universal healthcare, mask mandates in certain spaces (like where lots of people gather together), and upgraded air filtration/ventilation indoors we would be better off. 

It breaks my heart seeing people get sick over and over again. It's infuriating knowing our resources could have been used differently to provide us with protection and time to recover. It breaks my heart that we had a glimpse in early 2020, when the world shut down hard, what would happen to the natural ecosystems if we weren't so focused on Economic Growth. The rich have gotten richer while the poor get poorer (and sicker and dead). Corporate greed was one of the main reasons we don't have an appropriate amount of time to rest and recover during an infection. If you genuinely think that you're no longer infectious 24 hours after you test positive, I have some bad news for you. The infectious period for COVID can be weeks long. Remember when quarantine was 14 days? 

I'm exhausted. I wish better for us. This was never an individual project, it always required us to work together, and yet our society is so individualistic we decided to "you do you" our way out of a pandemic. How naive. The next time you go out in public without a respirator, count how many coughs you hear. And then count how many people cover their coughs. And then remember that it's not just coughing that spreads covid but breathing, talking, laughing, singing. If you haven't tested regularly with a high quality test, if you're breathing that air unfiltered, you're being exposed to what they have and possibly spreading it to others. And maybe you'll be fine this time, but maybe you won't. Every time you choose to wear a respirator, ESPECIALLY in high risk areas, you're breaking a chain of transmission and reducing your own risk of long term illness.

If you've read this far, thank you. It shows you care enough to give a few minutes of your time to someone who is extra vulnerable to the worst effects of respiratory viruses. Now, I want you to try to change your mindset around shared air. We deserve to have safer indoor spaces. Just as we have mandates and procedures to clean our water, there are methods to clean the air as well. One thing you can do today to help stop the spread of disease, to protect yourself and the people around you, is to wear a high quality respirator as often as possible. Another thing is to pay attention to the air quality where you are, open windows, increase air flow. We have methods to protect each other. We have ways to be safer. It does not have to be this way.

Please reach out if you need help finding tests, treatments, or respiratory protection. The government isn't going to protect us. We must protect each other.