WASHINGTON.- Joe and Susannah Altman are real poker players, but they are both 58 years old and the pandemic kept them away from tournaments and the green cloth tables for more than a year – Susannah has lupus, and they also had to take care of a friend who had cancer. However, a little over a year ago they came out of confinement after getting vaccinated, and have been exposed to the virus and at risk of being infected multiple times. They dined with friends who tested positive the next day, Joe spent an entire day with his 25-year-old son, who just 48 hours later tested positive for Covid, and last month Susannah went out to dinner with four friends, two of whom a couple of days later had symptoms also tested positive.
“Joe and I feel like we’re the last ones standing,” says Susannah, adding that it’s probably only a matter of time before they fall. “Because that’s the way the game is: at a certain point, there’s only one left.”
The pandemic leaves no winners. That said, those who made it to mid-2022 without having tested positive for coronavirus can feel entitled to brag a bit. Let’s see? Who is “still in the game”? Not Dr. Anthony Fauci, not President Joe Biden, who tested positive this week. Neither Denzel Washington, nor Camila Cabello nor Lionel Messi. Surely not that friend of ours who took care of himself more than one, but last week he ended up getting infected. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimate that nearly 60% of Americans have contracted coronavirus at some pointAnd those figures are from the end of February, before the devastating arrival of the super-contagious variants BA.4 and BA.5.
Whoever has gotten away so far may feel special, immunologically superior, or perhaps have invented some strange theory of “why” it lasted longer. The truth is that among the “dodgers” of the Covid, crazy hypotheses about his good fortune abound.
“I must have some kind of superhuman immunity or something like that,” stammers Kathi Moss, a 63-year-old pediatric nurse from Southfield, Michigan.
But scientists haven’t found any conclusive evidence of innate genetic immunity.. “It would be extremely unlikely that there is some innate property of the immune system that can protect against all infections,” says Eleanor Murray, an epidemiologist and professor at the Boston School of Public Health. But Kathi Moss’s non-contagion – “as far as she knows”, a caveat applicable to all those people, since in theory they could have been asymptomatic– cries out for some kind of explanation. It should not be forgotten that Moss is a pediatric nurse and has been exposed to the virus, albeit with a mask, for almost two and a half years. Not to mention that woman who gave Moss a henna tattoo over the summer for several hours and the next day she tested positive.
But the mysterious good luck of Nurse Moss hasn’t made her lower her guard or careless, and the possibility of contagion worries her as much as always. She says that she wants to “stay in the game” for as long as possible, precisely because she knows that Covid is no game… What she is most afraid of is the long-term effects of the coronavirus. “I think about it all the time: I don’t want to get it, I don’t want to have this disease,” says Moss.
Not letting your guard down may be sensible, but not seeing anyone as if it’s 2020 only fosters loneliness and nothing more.
SF asks to be identified only by her initials and says that in her house they have avoided Covid, because she does not feel invulnerable, but quite the opposite, extremely vulnerable. SF is 40 years old, has two children, lives on the outskirts of Boston, and does not give her full name because her support for the continuation of measures to prevent and spread Covid could make her a target of online harassment. Her biggest concern was always her daughter, now four and a half years old, who was born premature. And now that everyone seems to have abandoned care, protecting her daughter is becoming more and more difficult. In the square and the playground, the other boys do not wear a mask, and she feels uncomfortable having to explain to her friends that she only attends outdoor gatherings and that she prefers to continue practicing social distancing. “I feel compelled to choose between my children’s socialization and their safety,” she says.
Lucas Rivas’s parents are immunocompromised, so he took great care of himself so as not to infect them. He is 27 years old and also misses having a social life, but he has had to miss so many nights out that he prefers not to remember. “While people my age were out there living their lives, I was here living in fear, because from my work I know how widespread the disease is,” says Lucas, who at that time managed to avoid contagion despite working as a medical assistant at an urgent care clinic in Littleton, Colorado. “It is impossible to forget what you saw on guard duty and go out to socialize with a lot of people in closed places.”
But the long weekend of the 4th of July he couldn’t take it anymore and when a friend invited him for a drink, he accepted. He took a drink, then another. He shared a microphone at karaoke with a girl and kissed another. Two days later he tested positive for coronavirus. “Just when I was starting to think I couldn’t catch it, I caught it,” says Lucas. He felt like a moron, unconscious, “who had wasted two years of extreme precautions.”
That kind of self-imposed guilt despairs Katrine Wallace, an epidemiologist who has recently begun counseling and containing Covid sufferers like Rivas, who are devastated when their streak ends.
“There are many people who when they get infected feel like they failed”says Wallace, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health. “People tell me, I took such good care of myself!”, and Wallace assures them that they did nothing wrong, that the only bad thing is the new variants of the virus.
In those moments, she always avoids mentioning that she never tested positive: there is also no need to confront people…
Tony Freeman is convinced that he will be out of the game in no time. Freeman is 63 years old and is an actor in the cast of The Lion King since it debuted on Broadway more than 20 years ago. He has been on standby for five years, as a replacement in case another actor gets sick, and the truth is that it came in handy, especially during the wave of Covid last year, because he could stay hidden behind the scenes with his mask on. But now he’s been asked to take on the role of Timon the meerkat during a four-month national tour. In that role, he has to sing “Hakuna Matata” eight times a week, in front of a massive audience without a mask that laughs and coughs and is busy demonstrating loudly that he knows all the lyrics of the musical, from the first to the last. last.
So Freeman no longer believes in his chances of getting through the rest of the pandemic unscathed. “I don’t think my body is anything special. If you saw it, you would agree”, jokes the actor. Cast members swab each other six times a week, and Freeman is resigned to the fact that at any moment the swab shows two lines…
Pessimism is a way to protect yourself. Everyone stays in the game until you don’t. But bragging about having dodged Covid for two and a half years is spitting up. Better not tempt fate, because you may not be able to avoid it, whatever the consequences.
By By Ellen McCarthy
(Translation by Jaime Arrambide)