It’s been almost exactly two years since this virus landed in Washington State. Two years of mayhem and political catastrophe. Two years of death and illness. Two years of denial and conspiracy theories. Two years of propaganda, political bullying and manipulation. Worldwide, 5.3 million people have died of COVID-19, according to today’s statistics. 363 million people have been infected around the globe. These numbers can be argued in both directions, skewed by testing failures, data gaps in underreported countries, and much more, but the impact has been immense.

The COVID-19 war in the United States, and around much of the world, has become such a frenzy of misinformation, extreme language and self-righteous posturing on all sides that no one knows who to trust anymore. The CDC and the WHO and local Health Jurisdictions can’t agree on protocols and every political pundit has attempted to use the pandemic to serve their best interests.

In the U.S., to contract COVID-19 is an indicator of your status as a human being. The elite see themselves as above infection. Many of my friends on the conservative side of the spectrum who have had the virus have been sneaking around, trying to avoid detection, claiming any bug and resisting tests to avoid being counted as a statistic. On the left, any friends who contract the disease blame the dirty unvaccinated right for their exposure, not understanding why their religious observance of mask wearing and social avoidance didn’t work, forgetting perhaps that we are dealing with one of the most contagious, easily spread illnesses of our age.

I tested positive for COVID-19 on Sunday, January 23rd. In a nod to the utter nonsense and confusion of testing standards, I took two rapid tests, on Friday the 21st and Saturday the 22nd, both of which were negative. Sunday, my symptoms were worse (FYI I had two doses of the Moderna Vaccine in April of 2021), and I refused to accept that I didn’t have COVID, based on how I was feeling, so I tested again, twice. Both were positive. Maybe it’s the Omicron variant, which doesn’t show as early on some tests. Maybe the first tests were bad, somehow, even though they came from different boxes. These inconsistent test results are a universal problem, as witnessed by many of my friends and family. That we are basing so much of our social behavior on such unreliable science is telling of the world we live in right now.

It’s weird that I feel like I should be ashamed that I caught COVID-19. IT’S A FECKING PANDEMIC. More that 20% of the world population has gotten it. To avoid it is basically to swear off life and human interaction. I have no idea where I got it. Someone I know was around someone else who had it, but my contact was with someone who had it months ago and had no symptoms. I flew on multiple airplanes where I was reminded by an attendant to put my mask back in place BETWEEN SIPS OF MY DRINK because the person I was sitting next to for several hours would be safer… I ate in restaurants in Minnesota and Nevada and a variety of different airports where I was allowed to take my mask off while eating but not while walking to the bathroom… I am vaccinated. I should be protected…. oh but wait, it wears off. Ok, so I could have gotten a booster and my symptoms would have been milder. I followed the rules… and I got sick.

As soon as I got a positive test - actually before, when I started feeling crappy, I cut off contact with other people as much as possible. Traveling home with a scratchy throat and a negative test, I never took my mask down, even for a sip (even though I have been ASSURED that vaccinated people can’t spread the bug). I haven’t left my house except to have someone at Safeway stuff groceries in the back of my car. I’ve had UberEats and InstaCart and Amazon show up on my doorstep. We’ve invented some spectacular ways to avoid human contact and I am kind of a fan, I am not gonna lie.

5.63 million people have died worldwide. The Spanish Flu at the beginning of the 20th Century killed 50 million. The Black Plague is estimated to have killed 500 Million people. History tells us we’re getting better at this disease thing, slowly but surely. Even so, nearly 6 million people is a lot. It’s a lot of grandparents and parents and friends and relations. It’s not as much as the 17.9 million people that die every year of cardiovascular disease, but it’s still a lot - and the kicker is probably that some of these deaths are preventable.

According to the CDC, unvaccinated people were 13.9 times more likely to be infected with COVID-19 and 53.2 times more likely to die from the disease than vaccinated people during October and November of 2021. These statistics wavered slightly with Omicron in December, as numbers demonstrated that the vaccine was less effective against the new strain, and while Omicron infections were generally less severe, vaccination provided less protection, especially among the elderly.

The WHO and the CDC disagree fundamentally about the global distribution of vaccines, while “first world” countries are pushing third and even fourth rounds of boosters, some developing nations have yet to see their first dose of vaccine. My conservative friends are happy to share their state-mandated vaccine doses with countries where healthcare and preventative medicine is more challenging than here. They’re content to take their chances with black market Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine. Meanwhile my more liberal friends have given me an “every man for himself” speech on their way to get booster shots to protect them in their fortified hiding spaces away from germ-ridden civilization. Is there no middle ground? Is there the common sense of getting vaccinated, observing good hygiene and getting back to life? Why are we ashamed of the human frailty of illness? It is our frailty that makes us human. It’s our ability to die that makes life so precious. And yet we forego life to protect it.

I am not embarrassed that I got COVID. I’m a little bit relieved to a) finally quit wondering when it would hit and b) hope to have better immunity on top of my “fully vaccinated but unboosted” status. I would not wish the virus on any of my friends or relations, especially the ones who are truly afraid of it, but the choice to avoid it in perpetuity is up to them. I do not choose that path. I chose to keep doing life and the widespread virus caught me. Because I am human. Because my immune system can only do so much. Because this is life. I’m not saying my approach is better than hydroxychloroquine or endless boosters. I am just saying we are constantly learning, as a species, to live with and defeat these diseases. COVID-19 isn’t going away, like my sense of smell did, suddenly and mysteriously. We’ll be living with it for some time to come. We will suffer more loss, we always will, every year and every month and every day, from COVID or some other insidious monster.

I did what made sense to me. I got vaccinated. I wore a mask when asked, mostly. I have isolated while sick. I understood the risks of my behavior and made my choices. It’s all any of us can do. Why we are judging each other for different choices is beyond me. Was I selfish for traveling and exposing myself to disease somewhere along the way? Am I a brainless follower for getting vaccinated? And who says so?

I don’t pretend to have answers that even the CDC and the WHO and most doctors can’t come up with definitively. I got vaccinated. I got sick. I am getting better. I have no regrets. I have (to my knowledge) not exposed anyone else. I’ve weathered two rounds of COVID with my offspring who struggled to isolate successfully in shared houses with jobs and school they can’t afford to miss. It’s easy for those of us in more comfortable circumstances to judge the ones who might show up for work with runny noses, but I’ve lived the life of catastrophe that missing one or ten days of work can bring. This pandemic will continue to cause the financial ruin of families already struggling to survive while the middle class sits in safe, comfortable isolation, working remotely, judging the sniffling masses. There are no clean answers, and in some ways, the long term effects of this illness haven’t even started to set in.

It’s time to withhold judgement and extend compassion. It’s time to get over the elitist mentality that this worldwide disease is avoidable or that catching it has something to do with your value as a human being. Frontline, “essential” workings ringing up groceries and serving meals are at the greatest risk with no option to work from home, and yet the left calls this a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” I am vaccinated. It’s a pandemic of the living. It’s also time to stop denying that it’s deadly. Is death preventable? Yes, probably, in many cases. Always? No. But we left the station of disease containment months and months ago and it’s like we can’t accept that fact. We should have been looking at management strategies and quit pretending we could contain it a long time ago.

I’ve retreated into total avoidance of human contact over the last several months and it’s largely due to this disease. Not because I am afraid of getting it, quite the contrary. I am happy to have finally caught it. But I can’t abide the fear on one side and the denial on the other. Both extremes anger me. I have no tolerance for either anymore. So I sit here, alone, with only my dogs, quite content to finally have an excuse for total isolation. I almost wish it could last a bit longer…