Disconcerting questions

[jducoeur]

This morning I had my "physical" with my GP. As you would expect, this was conducted entirely online, and was fairly perfunctory as a result. She didn't see any reason why I needed to be examined by anybody in person, and I didn't have any particular questions, so it was just basically a 15-minute chat.

Along the way, I happened to mention the horrible cold that Kate and I had this winter, and she asked, "Do you think it was covid?" I dismissed the idea, since the timing was all wrong.

And the timing is all wrong: whatever it was, I figure I probably caught it on the flight down to Florida on Dec. 20. The symptoms started in earnest on the 23rd, IIRC. So far, I'm not aware of any cases in the US that early.

And yet...

When I think back on it, I am, as the title says, disconcerted. The primary symptoms for me were ghastly coughing and exhaustion -- I was laid pretty much flat for about two weeks, and it took another six to shake it off once and for all, with a relapse or two along the way. (I distinctly remember being grateful that I finally seemed 100% healthy by a few days before Arisia -- and then came down with it again about a week later.) It was ferociously contagious during Christmas week, ripping through my family over the course of that vacation. (I tried to keep my distance from everybody, but when you have a dozen people spending much of the day in the house, that isn't exactly proper social distancing.) The symptoms varied enormously among my family -- some exhaustion, some fever, some cough, even some pneumonia -- enough so that we just sort of figured that there were several different ailments going around the house.

It still seems implausible: I have no reason at all to believe that COVID-19 was going around Boston as early as Dec 20th, so I still figure it was just an exceptionally horrible cold. But if you told me that somebody on that flight down had it, I would totally believe that I caught it there.

(The problem with humans is that we are really good at pattern-matching. And it's sometimes really hard to tell the difference between the false positives and the correct ones. My kingdom for a reliable antibody test...)