Catching Covid
First, thank you to everyone who texted, checked in on us, and generally gave us support through this bout with covid. It is much appreciated and we survived! My sanity is questionably in tact, but other than that, our covid experience was about as good as it could be. The current rules surrounding covid are that the entire household has to isolate when there is one infected person, so when my husband arrived back from the US on Sunday and tested positive from Monday, the clock started ticking.
At the airport, Jon received a welcome pack with three RAT tests and instructions on what to do with the results. The next morning, Monday, just after I left to take the kids to school, he took his required day 0/1 test. Almost instantaneously it was positive, and he was calling me to turn around and bring the kids home as we were now household contacts of a covid case. I hunkered down with the kids while Jon figured out what his next steps were. As a traveller, he had to go in for a PCR test. However, if it he hadn’t been travelling abroad, he would have that requirement. Fortunately our GP got him in that afternoon for his PCR test. It sounds like a large percentage (about 60% from what I hear) of border cases are sequenced to keep an eye on what variants are in the country.
As household contacts, the rest of us had to test on day three (Wednesday) and day seven (Saturday). I had my suspicions about my son, who started to intermittently cough on Tuesday while still running around like the cooped up eight year old that he is. There was the faintest of positive lines on his Wednesday test. I slid the test under the door to Jon for him to look at it as I wasn’t sure if I was seeing things. Unfortunately, he saw it too. We decided to call Healthline to get more information about what constitutes a positive test. Our faintest of faint lines was considered a positive result, so now there were two covid cases in the house, but only one of them knew it.
Healthline was full of helpful information. Since Jon’s first symptoms were Friday, if he felt well eight days later - on Saturday - he could get out of his isolation. The rest of us didn’t need to reset our clock for Robert, who was now considered on day 0 of his new isolation period and would need to isolate for another seven days. Jon and Robert, once recovered, would not be required to isolate again for another 90 days.
After hanging up with Healthline, we ordered more RAT tests from the Ministry of Health. (They’re free.) I went to pick them at a local testing site, and was shocked to find that it was just me and a guy with an iPad handing out boxes of tests. He pulled up my order number and threw four boxes of tests in the car. I hope I don’t need twenty tests any time soon, but it feels rather decadent to have such a stash on hand.
On Thursday Robert definitely had a sore throat, so he readily agreed to another covid test. It should’ve been a dead give away that he was really sick, and the covid test was definitive. There was no question about it - he had covid. I let Jon out of his quarantine-bedroom since covid was now in the rest of the house, and we immediately started praising Robert for getting his two shots so he bout with covid wouldn’t be too bad. We were able to turn around his momentary freak out (“I have covid!”) to feeling proud of himself for getting the shots even when he was scared. Then I let him watch Netflix for way too long, and he was pretty relaxed about the whole thing.
Everyone was puttering along until Saturday when Meadow started to go from an occasional sniffle to a full-fledged runny nose. No complaining, but it was enough to make me nervous about our Sunday (day 7) test. After more iPad bribery, she was still for the test, and it was bright positive almost immediately. At this point, knowing that she - and by extension, me - was now in the house for another week, I decided to give up on parenting for the day and took off the Netflix time limits.
My test was negative and I was now the last (wo)man standing. I visited the My Covid Record site to record our test results. Since my test was negative, technically I was a free person on Monday, but in reality, I wasn’t going anywhere. I wouldn’t want to be around anyone with active covid cases in their home, and I wouldn’t want to put anyone else in that position.
Unfortunately, on Monday I started to feel strange. Not bad, but like my head was disconnected from my body and there was a filter on everything. It wasn’t a good feeling, so I went to bed early, only to wake up around 1:30 in the morning with chills and the most intense back stabbing feeling. I took some paracetamol and tried to go back to sleep, but the rest of the night was spent tossing and turning and in general misery until around 4:30 when the back stabbing pain became nearly unbearable. The only thing I can compare it to is contractions during labor but concentrated in my upper bag combined with a dagger being lodged between my should blades. I decided to take a covid test and - shocker - it was now positive. I finally took enough ibuprofen and paracetamol to take the edge off and get some sleep. Tuesday was a lost sick day. I was sure to stay on top of the ibuprofen/acetaminophen cocktail to keep the back stabbing at bay. On Wednesday I woke up feeling more like I had a terrible cold and less like I was being tortured. If this is covid with three vaccines, I can’t even imagine what it is like without any protection. It’s been awful.
On Wednesday morning I got an unexpected call from my GP. I suppose it shouldn’t be unexpected, but the American in me still can’t fathom that GPs would proactively reach out to people and not wait for patients to come to them. She just wanted to check on us, make sure everyone was doing ok, and to record symptoms. It’s one of the plusses of having a well-coordinated health system.
After going through this experience, I have a new appreciation for the dilemmas the New Zealand government faced throughout the pandemic. The first area is on testing. Until recently, RATs simply weren’t a thing here. All testing was a PCR test and done through a doctor’s office or testing centre People chaffed at the control it placed with the government and the long waits for test results once cases started rising, but now I get why they didn’t want to rely on RATs or give up the visibility into test results. Jon took three tests within 24 hours of his departure from the US. They were all negative, giving us a false sense of security that the sniffles and coughing he’d had for a few days were just a regular cold. We could understand one test being off, but three? We would’ve made very different decisions if we had known he had covid.
Secondly, I can only imagine how frustrating it is to craft a message that resonates with all of the different iterations of covid and especially for people who have a “light” case of covid to take it seriously. My kids’ cases are so mild that if it wasn’t for the test, I wouldn’t have thought twice about sending them to school. Their light cases led to my case which was so painful I can only compare it to childbirth, and while it may not be catastrophic for us (thanks vaccines and good luck!) it could be a big deal to others. We would’ve easily spread it with potentially disastrous results. I can’t even imagine the minutia discussed in those meetings on how to dumb down the messaging to get people to understand and respect that covid is more than about yourself.
