More Top Picks Best Instant Pots
player ready...Have you ever been so sick you couldn’t get into bed?
Yes, you read me right. I’ve had the experience of being too sick to get out of bed before. But when COVID-19 hit me, I was too sick to get into bed.
It happened a few days before Halloween. All trick, no treat. The bug came over me before bedtime, so swiftly and ruthlessly that I could barely hobble to our bedroom.
I fell onto the welcoming mattress with the upper half of my body, only to find myself floundering on the edge like a beached whale.
As I considered for a moment whether I could just pull a blanket over myself where I was and pull myself the rest of the way in the morning, my alarmed wife asked if I needed an ambulance.
“No,” I mumbled. “Just give me a boost.”
Happily, I eventually made it the rest of the way, assisted by my long-suffering wife. Home testing kits confirmed that both of us had COVID-19.
Fortunately, we were up to date on all of our shots, not counting the seemingly endless array of variants and subvariants that were beginning to make themselves known.
So we recovered after almost a week of bed rest and more days of isolation from in-person contact with other humans. As an old holiday song might be rewritten for these times, there’s no place like Zoom for the holidays.
Yet, as medical authorities caution, we may be tired of COVID-19, but the virus is not finished with us.
As Thanksgiving approached, health officials announced a new threat: an unpredictable confluence of old and new respiratory viruses — COVID-19, RSV (respiratory syncytial virus) and influenza.
As Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt University, told NPR, “We’re calling it a tripledemic.”
Doctors had worried earlier, it turns out, over a “twindemic” of coronavirus and flu that could overwhelm the health care system in a repeat of the disastrous early days of COVID-19.
But before we could hear much about a twindemic, RSV began to surge unseasonably early, causing a heartbreaking flood of ill babies and young children who had little immunity to the disease.
Ironically, the spread of RSV had been suppressed to some degree over the past two years because of COVID-19 precautions.
“If you’re not eating or drinking, it’s probably a smart idea to protect the immunocompromised, the infants, as well as the older individuals in the household,” Dr. Tina Tan, an infectious disease specialist at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, told NPR.
That’s yet another reason to pull out my N95 mask, despite my COVID-19 fatigue.
Meanwhile, news video out of China on Wednesday offered examples of how things could be worse under tougher restrictions than masks. After almost a month under tough restrictions intended to quash a COVID-19 outbreak, hundreds of workers at Apple Inc.’s main iPhone-making plant in China clashed with security personnel.
Video showed the guards at the Foxconn Technology Group plant in Zhengzhou looking like an army of Pillsbury Doughboys as they pummeled workers who were protesting wages and tough government restrictions to control a COVID-19 surge.
Although there were times early in the pandemic when China’s autocratic government seemingly showed enviable control over the pandemic’s spread, riots like this one show the downside of President Xi Jinping’s autocracy.
On the bright side, health officials say RSV already may be peaking, and the flu also could peak before another new COVID-19 surge. That would be a big relief to hospitals and the rest of us.
But we’re not there yet. We Americans appear gradually to be learning to live with COVID-19, one way or another, with sensible voluntary health measures and as little government restriction as possible. We’re not out of the woods yet, but I think we’re beginning to see the way from here.
More Top Picks What Evaluations Should Be In A Dyslexia Iep
I’m keeping my mask handy anyway.
Sign up here to receive Clarence Page’s columns by email as soon as they are published.
Twitter @cptime