My Personal Encounters With COVID

So far, knock on wood, I've managed to escape COVID for twenty-eight months, despite having had more exposure to the larger world as the primary grocery shopper in the family and the person who has worked most outside our home, and despite having fairly close exposure to both my daughter and my wife when they were infected with highly infectious variants. I've been careful to social distance and mask, for as long as that was being widely done and then in addition in higher risk situations when it wasn't required or widely normative. I've had four jabs, each almost as soon as it was possible, with one of the boosters mixed from the type that I had for the original vaccination. Still, to some extent I've simply had good luck.

I'm in my 50s, I have been obese for most of the pandemic (there was a couple of month period when I wasn't but I've slowly gained back a lot of weight that I lost), and have underlying conditions so I'm at fairly high risk for a severe case if I received one, although being vaccinated and boosted definitely reduces the risk and other people are older and have more severe underlying conditions that place them at greater risk.

Not everyone is so lucky. 

My son had Delta and Omicron, despite two jabs and in the case of the Omicron infection, a Delta infection several months earlier. My daughter had Omicron or one of its BA variants, despite being fully vaccinated and boosted once. My wife had a BA variant of Omicron (and unlike my son and daughter, no really plausible way to explain where she could have gotten it), despite four jabs, three of one kind and one of another. 

Fortunately, in the case of my kids, in part because they were in their early 20s and vaccinated, and in the case of my wife, because she is overall in good health and is vaccinated and boosted, none of them have had long COVID or symptoms so severe that hospitalization was a possibility that needed to be seriously considered. I think it is also likely that my daughter and wife had exposure to fairly low viral loads probably each in single incidents, while my son my have had higher viral load exposures. I also think it is possible that some of the later variants often don't cause quite as severe cases. All of their cases were mild to moderate in severity.

We have extended family members who've had much more severe cases, although none were hospitalized and it was much less severe in the children than in the adults, in one case causing an underlying condition to become much more severe. The most severe case involved an extended family member who stubbornly refused to get vaccinated and refused to allow his children to be vaccinated to the great dismay of the rest of the family. The vaccinated family members and the unvaccinated children had comparative mild cases, although they were seriously sick compared to most pre-COVID infectious diseases.

A close family friend has had long COVID for many months only to be reinfected and suffer from long COVID again. Several people who worked in my office (including about half of the people working in my office when the pandemic began) have had severe cases, with one hospitalized and also suffering from long COVID. A healthy significant other of one of my employees who was in her 20s had a fairly bad case of COVID, as did my employee, and they thought that she had recovered fully, but she was then hospitalized for weeks with kidney failure about a month after her COVID recovery. 

A close family friend in her 50s, a former co-worker in his late 30s, and a client in his 40s all had very severe cases of COVID, although not quite to the level of hospitalization.

The COVID death most personally hitting close to home was a high school student whom my children knew of with multiple, very severe conditions who was one of the first children to die in the pandemic, fairly early on in the pandemic. So far, no one closer to us than that has died of COVID.