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We would really like to believe that the country at large – more specifically any part of the country we might come to live – is past living in fear of the Coronavirus. I could go on about how the fear has caused damage rivaling that of the virus itself (and probably will in a future post), but today I’m here to give perspective by telling our story about how it affected us.
The lockdown thankfully didn’t affect my family financially, as both my work and the father-in-law’s were deemed essential. While the other Coronavirus mandates did universally apply, the general public in our part of CA did not seem to be living in fear of the virus. They wore the masks and social distanced where they were required to, but not where they weren’t, and otherwise carried on as usual. These days, with no real mandates in effect, most people breathe free.
My workplace never internally enforced the Coronavirus mask mandate until December 2020, when they were made to by the county health department. Ironically, the virus spread through here one month after that change was made. Someone got sick so we all had to get tested, and the only ones who came back negative were me and the guy in the cubicle next to mine. Which is funny because he was (and still is) the hardest masker in the company and I was the one who never wore it willingly. I still had to quarantine at home, though, because my wife and father-in-law both tested positive the same day. And neither of them had been anywhere that people weren’t “following the science.” So I worked from home for two weeks, and even though none of my family isolated from each other (and I never stopped kissing my wife) I never got even a little sick. My father-in-law was laid out pretty bad and we had to watch him closely because he was at-risk from age and COPD but he never had to go to the hospital and made a full recovery in those 2 weeks. The mother-in-law, who was also not in great shape to begin with, also got sick but not severely. Mrs. Alias did lose her sense of taste and it took a couple months to come back, but that was the worst of it.
When the shots finally became available, we got ours not as much because we felt we needed it but because we didn’t trust CA to not go full “Papers, Please” about it. Ditto for our 5-year-old. We already get flu shots every year and kind of saw this as the same thing. But I don’t know if we’re going to continue keeping up with them. As time goes on, they seem to be less and less effective even if you stay boosted, and the way they’re being pushed on young kids smacks more of government/corporate collusion than good health policy. Heck, I got sicker from the shot than I ever got from the virus.
And I did eventually COVID… two years later, just a month before writing this. I was still technically boosted, but I got a cold, and it didn’t feel any different from any other time I’ve had a cold, nor did it lay me out or make me cough much, so I went to work (save for one day when I was more symptomatic and didn’t want to give anyone else my cold). Then my wife got sick and lost her sense of taste, so two tests later that’s how we found out I had the Rona after all. We both recovered quickly, and the in-laws didn’t even get sick at all. Nor did anyone else at work pop positive after I’d been there a couple days unmasked with the bug.
So that’s our family’s COVID story. While Mrs. Alias and I never had much reason to fear the virus for ourselves, we did have our older family members to think about, but the bug took its best shot at all of us and came up empty. It may never go away entirely, but we’re done being afraid of it on any level. And that’s something we’ll be looking for in a new home state: a place where they don’t make you wear the chains because they know that living in fear of the thing just makes it worse.
