I Stayed Home. I Wore a Mask. I Still Got COVID-19.
I would never call my husband a prepper. Jay is an investigator by nature, seeking information and knowledge for its own sake and for the sake of making decisions. Our earthquake kit is incomplete, for example.
And yet my household was better prepared than most to weather the coronavirus pandemic. Both he and I have worked from home since we moved to Los Angeles in 2012. Ours is a science-literate, affluent, rule-following household. We use turn signals to change lanes and obey stop signs rather than rolling through. We tip twenty percent across the board. We follow and discuss the news.
2020 had been shaping up to be a big travel year. It started with a trip to Whistler in January where we skied and partied with friendly gay Canadians. In an outdoor heated pool with snow all around and two dozen happy half-naked men, we foolhardily asked each other, “Is this paradise?”
We weren’t unaware of the potential for a pandemic. Footage and articles about a new disease spreading outward from Wuhan had caught our attention. We took note during the trip of how many people wore masks at LAX and at the Vancouver International Airport (I counted fewer than ten). Canadian border authorities asked about symptoms. Upon our return, the United States did not. Overall, other travelers seemed unaffected and unconcerned. It was too early to be worried.
By mid-February, we followed each new development closely. South Korea was fighting an outbreak. Iran appeared to be as well. When Italy entered crisis mode, containment had clearly failed and we knew it would arrive in the United States eventually. Cases in New York and Washington State were a sign that the net was tightening.
I saw a new side of Jay in February, which is a rare thing after you’ve been with someone for twenty years. He returned from a trip to the store with toilet paper, paper towels, disinfecting wipes, and many bottles of hand sanitizer — as well as isopropyl alcohol and aloe gel for making our own sanitizer when the store-bought supplies ran out. He also stocked us up on food. He froze eggs in muffin tins and then packed them into freezer bags. We had weeks of breakfast sausages, frozen chicken, and pork roasts.
It’s good to be prepared, but it hadn’t yet dawned on me exactly what he was preparing for or what would happen when it arrived.
Letting go of plans was difficult; they eroded piece by piece. I had registered for a writing conference in San Antonio in early March and already booked the flight. I had also agreed to share an Airbnb for the week with a writer friend. With corona testing limited and no clear picture of the spread from cruise ships and other states, I stuck to my plans even as many writers decided to stay home. The conference organizers wavered but ultimately pushed forward, leading to the resignation of the executive director and a half-empty conference. Despite a crosscurrent of fear and constant hand sanitizing, the trip was a success, for me. I solidified relationships, met a new client, recorded a podcast episode, and was inspired by fellow writers launching their first anthology of stories.
While in San Antonio, I learned of a woman who had been quarantining in the area after returning from a cruise ship. She tested negative twice and was released. After visiting a local mall food court, a positive test result came in and she went back into quarantine at 2 a.m. I started to realize what was coming.
As I waited to board my flight home, I saw author Chris Terry in line. We’d been introduced a few days before.
“How are you?” he asked.
“I can’t wait to get home and not talk to anyone for a while,” I responded. He got in touch weeks later to say he often thought of that moment in the early days of lockdown. I often thought about a hug I shared with poet and author Shonda Buchanan, which felt both dangerous, comforting, and very much a good thing despite its risk.
The next set of travel plans held up, too. My bestie since high school was turning forty and she’d planned for a group of friends to share a house in Tahoe. Her second child was months old and I knew how much it meant to her to get together. It meant a lot to me, as well. Still, Jay and I talked about it and we weren’t sure whether we should go. This was the second week of March, with the pandemic expanding. We had just had an anxiety-induced health scare. Should we really do this? We moved our flight, condensing the trip by a few days. We considered canceling. We decided to go.
This was March 12, before any shutdowns in America. Nursing homes in Washington had outbreaks. Cases appeared to be increasing but there were no comprehensive testing programs. The situation evolved by the day.
We spent the weekend in Tahoe cooking, hanging out, and watching movies and the news. The ski resorts closed while we were there and the San Francisco Bay Area counties went into lockdown. A snowstorm lasting four days dumped around ten feet. As we dug out the cars each day, we wondered what we would be going back to.
During the journey home on March 16, we transited through the Reno, Las Vegas, and Burbank airports, which were quiet and nearly abandoned. We used lots of hand sanitizer. We wiped down tray tables, armrests, the backs of the seats in front of us, our seat belts, and all the surfaces within reach. At the time, public health guidance was focused on surface-to-orifice transfer with little mention of airborne transmission. We noticed a few more masks, but we hadn’t brought any with us. N95 and surgical masks were still being rationed for health care workers. There was no talk of alternate face coverings.
We made it home and considered ourselves lucky. We knew we’d used up our risk-taking chits. We stocked up on food and, a few days later, L.A.’s Safer-at-Home guidance went into effect. Parks, hiking trails, and beaches closed. Restaurants were allowed to provide delivery and take out only. Bars were shuttered (they still are as I’m writing this).
Throughout the spring we did our part to flatten the curve. We rarely left home. Every two weeks, one of us would go to the grocery store to resupply. Hiking trails reopened and we resumed getting outdoors on the weekends but not at our usual paths in Griffith Park by the Greek Theater. We found alternate, less-frequented routes in the Verdugo Mountains, places where we would only pass a handful of people. The neck gaiters we wore were printed with stars and galaxies, bright pink paisley, Prideful rainbows, or earthy tie-dyes like layers of sedimentary rock. We would put them up when passing others and take them down when we were alone. Other hikers we saw on the trails were sometimes masked, sometimes not.
From the start, people adopted widely varying approaches to risk and precaution. That variance would grow far larger than I ever imagined it could over the summer, fed by denialism and conspiracy theories from the White House and magical thinking in fact-blind communities across America.
Professionally, I threw myself into organizing online literary events when all the local bookstores canceled theirs. I stayed busy with writing projects. I read the news.
The month of May marked the beginning of a new phase of life for reasons totally unrelated to the pandemic. Our twentieth anniversary was pegged to the day we met: May 11, 2000. We celebrated with a hike that was comically short when we found the hiking trails in Pasadena to be overrun by the mostly maskless. Being outdoors, staying distant, and wearing masks seemed low risk until we saw so many people not taking the bare minimum of precaution. We opted for an alternative that turned out to be only a mile-long loop around the Cobb Estate ruins where we saw only a few people from a distance.
The fact that so many people weren’t taking the pandemic seriously worried me. Thinking about the ethics of every decision was exhausting. But the alternative, to live like everything was normal, would be carelessly destructive. I said to Jay that it seemed like people reached a breaking point, a switch flipped, and they just couldn’t care anymore.
The evening of our anniversary, we picked up sushi takeout, the first in months since our trip to Whistler, which seemed ages prior. It was a bittersweet celebration, but the nostalgia was strong and comforting as we looked back on so many of our photos from living abroad and traveling and growing into new people together in the nurturing soil of each other’s love.
My fortieth birthday two weeks later posed a different set of challenges. The original plan of traveling with friends to Mexico City to celebrate was off the table and had been for months. California had largely flattened the curve, but restaurants and bars were still closed. Organizing a large party inside our home would have been deeply irresponsible. However, we did know more about how the virus spread and we reasoned that it would be possible to celebrate outdoors with friends if we took precautions. Here’s the opening of a long email that Jay sent to a group of twenty close friends one week in advance:
Hi everyone,
The question of the day: how do you celebrate a big milestone birthday in times like these? Very, very carefully. And to do that, we start with a very, very long email. Thanks for your patience in reading this :)
Here’s the TL;DR:
Birthday celebration in shifts on our back patio this coming Sunday, May 24, 11 am to 5 pm.
Shifts start at the top of the hour and last approximately 45–50 minutes, allowing me 10–15 minutes to clean and sanitize before the next visitors.
Maximum of 4 visitors per shift. More details on this below.
Minimum safety rules:
Arrive masked (but not masc-ed)
Maintain 6 foot (2 meter) separation if we decide to de-mask
Outside only (pee before you arrive)
BYOB and snacks if you want
Enter through the side gate
Alternate options!
We schedule a drive-by sometime over the weekend. Either you drive by our place, or we drive by your place, and we have a mini celebration from yard/curbside to car!
We schedule an individual zoom hangout to celebrate!
Read the details below under The Schedule on how this all will work and how to sign up for a time slot if you want to visit and celebrate in person with us.
The email continued with a long scroll of details intended to make our guests feel that we had their safety in mind and to ensure that our party wouldn’t be the cause of any infections. Granted, no activity could be considered zero risk. On the other hand, Los Angeles had flattened the curve to a certain extent and relaxing a little seemed reasonable.
The day went mostly to plan. Friends who I hadn’t seen in months arrived for brief visits outside. We stayed more than six feet apart in the fresh air and did not wear masks. Some visitors asked to overstay their time slots and we agreed since there was plenty of space. Most importantly, we did not stray from the physical distance guidelines.
One curious moment came when a guest asked to use the bathroom. Most guests who’d needed the facilities (all men) were happy to go pee in a corner of the yard. This request was not unexpected, but it was unwelcome.
“It’s okay,” he said. “I feel fine. I don’t have any symptoms.”
A shocked moment of silence followed. Three months into a crisis that had seen overflowing morgues in New York and public health debates raging across the country, a friend was clearly having trouble understanding the concept of asymptomatic spread. What did he think our emailed precautions were about? He used the restroom while I tried to smooth over my and others’ incredulity. It challenged me. My friends were smart. My friends were considerate. What had just happened? Over time, I came to think more and more about informational ecosystems, the ethics of apathy and ignorance, and hierarchies of values.
Throughout the summer, Jay and I mostly stayed at home even as some friends began to organize get-togethers outdoors. We evaluated each opportunity on a case by case basis. How many people would be there? Can we stay distant? How careful were the other guests being in general?
I heard people say “I’m being really careful” and in the same breath they cataloged five or six different outings over the past week. “I’m being really careful” means very different things to different people. We found it was easier to stay at home than navigate the social dynamics of pandemic life.
In my mind, I was trying to remove myself from situations where I might be a potential link in a chain of infection. So many workers had to continue to show up to their jobs in person. Black, Latino, Asian, and Native American communities suffered disproportionately. People with underlying medical conditions were at greater risk. By exercising my privilege and staying home, I told myself, I was helping to protect them. It was less about fear of catching the virus. It was more was about concern that I could unknowingly pass it on to someone and the chain would grow and reach someone who was vulnerable and who could die. For example, my grandmother had recently moved into a long-term care home. I hoped anyone who could be a possible link in the chain of transmission to her would think similarly and take precautions.
My family planned a get-together in August. Infection rates were stubbornly high compared to the spring but not spiking. My parents live in the SF Bay Area while my sister, brother-in-law, and two nephews live in San Diego. They wanted to meet up in Tahoe. Oh, no, that’s returning to where this started for us, Jay and I commented to each other. But it had been a long haul and we knew we needed to start opening up if only for our mental well-being. After six months of isolation, we needed something to look forward to.
Jay’s prepper drive kicked in again. We rented an SUV and packed it to bursting with prepared foods on dry ice, snacks, canned cocktails, beer, and wine for a week. We brought our own pillows along with a bucket of disinfecting spray, wipes, sanitizer, and masks.
We stayed two nights in Mammoth Lakes, where we’d been in the past during winter but never during summer. We hiked for miles in semi-solitude to lakes overlooking wooded valleys, stopping to enjoy sandwiches Jay had made and pickles from our garden cucumbers. I experienced an onrush of memories from hiking trips with my father and his buddies on the other side of the Sierras more than twenty-five years ago. Granite boulders. Chipmunks. Pine needles. Fresh air. It was splendid.
The lodgings weren’t exactly what we expected. There was no exterior access to our room. It felt like a risk every time we walked down the hallways and got in the elevator, especially because other guests had mixed adherence to masking recommendations. At night, we searched for meteors streaking overhead through vast star fields and the Milky Way stretching across the sky.
We’d stopped at Mono Lake on the drive north and took in vast expanses of desert, briny water, mountains, clouds, and a landscape with next to no people. Glorious.
Tahoe was the opposite experience. It was packed with people fleeing civilization, recreating the same society in the mountains that they were escaping from home. We distanced, we masked, and we gawked at people taking seemingly no precautions.
To give you a sense of how careful we were throughout the entire trip, only once did we eat food that we hadn’t prepared ourselves, and it was take-away. While visiting with my family, we stayed outside, ten feet apart. When my mom saw me for the first time and moved in for a hug with arms outstretched, I jumped back.
“Whoa, stop, what are you doing?”
It’s a special kind of awful to refuse a hug from someone let alone a loving mother. However, both she and my father have underlying health issues that make them more vulnerable to COVID-19. We explained how high the case rates were back in L.A. and that despite all our precautions, we may have been pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic carriers. There’s no way I could live with myself if my parents got sick because of my carelessness. No hugs. My older nephew seemed to understand, but the younger one had to be constantly reminded. (Parents and teachers guiding kids through this difficult period are saints.)
The fires in Central California touched off during our trip, bringing uncomfortably smoky nights. Our drive home began and ended with smoke from the fires blocking our views. About a week later, around the time we went to Dodger Stadium for a post-trip coronavirus test (result: negative), the Bobcat Fire ignited. We could see the smoke rising above the San Gabriel mountains like a distant nuclear mushroom cloud. What followed was a month of air too toxic to breathe. We stayed indoors again. The double lockdown of pandemic and wildfire smoke was the most difficult to date. I struggled mentally, and sinus congestion took hold.
Then came election season. The night Ruth Bader Ginsberg passed we felt a hard jolt. Earthquake. That was a marker for the start of weeks spent anxiously watching as the country slipped further from its ideals and infections spread out of control. We weathered election week in the desert with a friend who had a similarly rigorous approach to managing risks.
It was the first time Jay and I had sustained contact with anyone since March, the first hug with someone other than each other. Sharing air had never felt so surreal or necessary. We made dinner together, watched TV, talked about the election, lamented with horror the droves of people hanging out and dining in downtown Palm Springs as if 200,000 people hadn’t died from the virus. How could they be ignoring signs that things were only going to get worse over the winter? It helped to have “podded up,” but election day and the uncertainty that followed accelerated a drinking habit and I made bad food choices.
Back home, I resolved to take better care of myself. I began jogging again, practiced yoga several times per week, and saw a personal trainer one-on-one. I cut back on drinking. My weight started edging back down from a personal high-water mark.
The surge in California, the worst yet, was filling up ICUs. We took it seriously, limiting unnecessary trips. We were back onto an every-two-weeks schedule for the grocery store. I shipped books by pre-printing labels and dashing into and out of the post office in fewer than sixty seconds. Masked, of course, and mostly holding my breath.
I was due for the third and final shot in a non-coronavirus vaccine series on December 8th. I was also due for blood and urine tests for a prescription renewal. After dropping off a few books at the Highland Park post office, I visited the Kaiser Glendale facility. They took my temperature and asked about my health status. I had nothing to report, no cough, no fever, no gastric distress. I was feeling all right.
I went to the second floor and checked in using the express kiosk. Five to ten minutes later, a nurse I recognized called me in, I got my shot, and I was done with that part. I passed maybe twenty people in line for their prescriptions. I was surprised. Couldn’t they get these by mail? Why risk coming into a medical facility during a surge in cases when alternatives existed? For my part, I had thought about skipping the vaccination and restarting the series later when COVID was no longer an issue. I thought about trying to persuade my doctor for a temporary prescription extension so that I could do my labs when California, and L.A. County in particular, wasn’t in the middle of the worst surge of the pandemic thus far.
Instead, I watched my blood fill four vials. But, in a snap decision, I refused to do the urine tests. I’d been in that bathroom before and suspected the ventilation wasn’t up to the task of protecting anyone.
The next morning, I went for a run, keeping my neck-gaiter up the whole time. I didn’t feel full of energy, but I did run 5.34 km in 33:24 minutes, which was on par and not a cause for concern.
I returned home, ate a quick lunch of leftovers, and took a nap. It had been months since I’d napped. I figured my legs needed the rest. I woke feeling a little fuzzy, to be expected, I thought. The only work I managed that day was to email preparatory instructions for participants in a Made in L.A. Writers literary event scheduled the following evening. I was thankful an APLA Board committee meeting had been postponed to the following week because it freed up more time for me to rest. That evening, I let Jay make dinner. My sleep was fitful, feverish. I felt worse by the minute.
The next day I was on the couch in my office for hours, dozing, head aching, getting up only to eat. Fatigue sapped me completely. I searched for side effects for the vaccination I’d received and found confirmation that, in rare cases, it caused fever, fatigue, and headaches. I had a fever of 100.9. Acetaminophen only took it down to 100.7.
That evening, I participated in the Made in L.A. event, hoping what I said in my fever daze about bookstores and nostalgia made any sense. Of course, the thought ran through my mind that this could be COVID-19. How strange that I might be infected and was going on with business as usual, Zooming from my office onto the audience’s screens.
But I didn’t think it was possible that I had COVID-19. I had mostly stayed home. I had worn a mask. I had limited contact with the outside world. Where and how could I have been exposed? I was mostly too exhausted to be concerned. I was too tired to be scared.
The following day, Friday, I felt a little better, though I still had sinus issues, which I’d had for months, ever since the smoke from the fires. The soft tissues in my nose felt perhaps a bit more on fire than usual. Disaggregating symptoms is always a challenge, isn’t it? My fever was gone too. Wow, I thought, I guess I had a strong reaction to that vaccine. It struck me as a strange synchronicity with the global coronavirus vaccine rollout beginning in Britain and soon coming to the United States.
Saturday everything changed. Aside from continuing sinus congestion, I felt like I was recovering. Then Jay and I made breakfast. Bacon, orange juice, and French toast flavored with cinnamon and orange zest. Weekends still need some form of celebration, even during L.A. lockdown 2.0.
With our plates assembled, digging in, I remarked how there wasn’t much orange flavor.
“I think there is,” Jay said.
“Hmm.” I wasn’t getting much cinnamon either, despite having spiked the batter liberally.
The bacon also tasted oddly flat. The textures seemed vivid but it was akin to chewing a juicy piece of fried cardboard. The coffee tasted like hot water.
“Oh fuck. I’m not smelling a lot.” I put my nose next to the French toast. Barely any cinnamon came through and no orange at all. I went to the refrigerator and pulled out a jar of mustard. I opened the top, inserted my nose, and breathed as deeply as I could. There was maybe a hint of mustard after I inhaled for a few seconds, or perhaps my brain filled in the missing information with what it expected to find.
“Smell this,” I told Jay.
“Whoa, ew, that’s almost gone bad.”
I smelled again, showing him my reaction. Nothing. “No smell.” We both knew what this could mean. My experiences of the last few days began to replay as I put my symptoms side by side with potential exposures.
“I don’t see how, but I think I have corona. Should I isolate?” I asked. I imagined restricting my movements to the master bedroom and bath while Jay had the run of the house. For ten days. But I knew what he would say.
“It’s already too late.”
Days later, I thought about viral dosing and how he might be spared a bad infection if he limited his exposure to me. Too late again. We had so carefully considered all the ways we could prevent getting sick but hadn’t thought through what to do if we did — besides taking our temperatures and monitoring oxygen levels with an oximeter he’d bought in February.
The next few days were a blur of tasteless meals, trying not to think about the fact that COVID-19 had probably arrived in our household, and spinning my wheels trying to figure out how I’d caught it. The incubation period — the length of time from exposure to symptoms appearing — varies. The average is five to six days, but it can range from two to fourteen days. On looking back, both Jay and I were relieved that we could count possible transmission opportunities on less than one hand and we’d taken precautions in those instances. Most likely we hadn’t been spreading the virus around, which had been the fear animating most of our decisions.
The next available testing appointment at Dodger Stadium was Tuesday. I didn’t share my suspicion with any family members who I was texting with about getting Christmas presents for our nephews, or with friends on a Margarita Monday Zoom call. What if I didn’t have it? I wanted confirmation first. There were other sinus problems that caused loss of smell. But what were the odds? Meanwhile, we didn’t leave the house for any reason except to wait to get tested in a two-and-a-half-hour-long line of cars.
Twenty-six hours later the results came back positive for both Jay and me. I had already been through the worst, physically. Jay took it harder than I did. I think he’d discounted that it was possible while my loss of smell had pretty much convinced me. I was actually worried the test would come back negative and I would doubt the results and wonder what the fuck I did have that had made me get sick and lose my sense of smell. At least this was a certainty.
The weight of it began to sink in. We had lived as carefully as we could for nine months and we still got it, right at the time when ICUs had run out of capacity.
The mystery lingers. I have no idea how I became infected with COVID-19. If we had been more careful, spacing out our errands and getting tested more frequently, we might have been able to identify the source of infection. As it is, I’ll never know.
Looking back, I’m glad it happened this way. If I got sick from a trick as had happened to friends-of-friends in Palm Springs, or from dining out, or from visiting family or friends — or if the reverse happened — it would be really hard to live with. I wish I could say I did my best — except, to be honest, I know I could have done better. That stings.
If I could give myself advice on what to do differently, I would list a few to-dos. Be more careful with items brought into the home. I had become very lax with mail, deliveries, and groceries. Early in the pandemic, I would wipe them down and wash my hands multiple times. Lately, I probably washed my hands as often as I did pre-pandemic. Don’t go indoors anywhere that isn’t home. Better yet, I would tell myself to never leave home during a surge for any reason. When cases spike, that’s the time to take the most precaution. Resist pandemic fatigue, resist the siren call of life-as-normal. Get tested frequently. Some walk-up testing sites don’t have lines, I heard from a friend. I should have made the time and exerted the effort to become a testing connoisseur.
Enjoy life. The people and experiences we love are precious and transitory. That’s one I’ll remember long after 2020 is over.
My sense of smell came back about a day after our positive results came through. Food tasted good again. Wine tasted good again. Another day and my energy returned. I’m typing these words as fast as my fingers can go in between cleaning sprees throughout the house. I’m healthy again, and while Jay has lost his smell and is sneezing and dripping from his nose with some minor aches, he appears to be on the mend, having avoided fever and fatigue.
We are both extremely lucky to have had relatively mild experiences. Friends told us about their illnesses: weeks of fever, pain, and fatigue, feeling short of breath for months following infection. I would add that a significant part of the journey is the very rational fear that the disease could take a turn.
If you’re reading about my experience and thinking maybe it would be a good idea to become infected to get it over with, you’re drawing exactly the wrong conclusion.
What makes the coronavirus pandemic so difficult to manage both from a public health perspective and a personal risk-budgeting perspective is that — aside from age and co-morbidities like obesity — we don’t know why some people die, why some people get very sick, why some people have mild infections, and why some people are asymptomatic. That range — from death to smooth sailing — confuses us. We describe a pandemic using statistics. We estimate the likelihood of events and outcomes by risk factors.
However, every instance of transmission is a matter of physics and biology, of a moment in time when a specific number of viral particles make the journey from one host to the next and the difficult-to-predict mechanics of infection and disease. Masks are not one hundred percent effective. Neither is physical distancing or washing hands. Applied together, according to the Swiss Cheese Model, these do help reduce risks but not completely.
In the absence of perfect information, what are you willing to do to protect the people you love? Is that any different from what you are willing to do to protect a stranger or to protect yourself?
We delayed telling anyone about our experiences because we wanted to get to the other side of it first, to avoid causing them to worry whether we were going to be okay. We wanted to be able to say, “We got it and we recovered. We’re fine. Don’t worry, please.” That took a leap of faith.
Our quarantine lasted through Christmas Day. People debated the wisdom of getting together for the holidays. To me, this was lunacy. It’s maybe a lack of education or a lack of caution or carelessness for the health of others. Jay pointed out that overconfidence by educated people may also be a factor.
I understand the impulse to get together, but impulses can and should be managed, contained, or ignored when people’s health is at stake. Especially when an infection might be deadlier now because healthcare is harder to come by.
I stayed at home (to a reasonable extent). I wore a mask. I still got COVID-19.
I wish I had reacted to the winter/holiday surge more strongly. We didn’t gather with family or friends, but we also didn’t go into the strictest lockdown of the year — until we were infected and had to quarantine. Although we followed public health guidelines throughout 2020 and in many cases we were stricter than the recommendations, the truth is I became overconfident. My love for science and faith in my intelligence convinced me that I could play the odds and stay safe.
Yet the virus doesn’t play odds; it follows every available path of transmission. In the end, I was lucky and I enjoyed all kinds of privileges. As a society, we should do better to protect the vulnerable and the disadvantaged among us.
I am begging anyone who reads this: Please be more careful now than you have been at any time in the last year. Collectively, we’ve used up our risk budget. It’s time to tighten up and save lives. Your health and the health of your community are at stake.
