How We Got Covid

That was probably a bad headline. I don’t know how we got Covid. If I’d known, I probably wouldn’t have gotten it. What happened was this:

We were in Iowa last week. I was driving the support vehicle for my brother and my dad as they rode RAGBRAI (the Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa—you can read about it here, it is a blast, we’ll probably allude to it in this but no full recap right now because 1- ours was cut short and 2- we’re here to talk about the thing that cut it short). We got there on Monday, they started riding on Tuesday, on Wednesday they rode 105 miles.

Now.

Something that many have not experienced in their own bouts with Covid, I’d imagine, is that Covid can feel about the same as you’d expect the aftermath of riding 105 miles to feel. Body temperature out of whack, aches & pains, general fog…you can see how some might be confused. With that, I don’t really know when my dad and brother started having symptoms. For me it was right around their 90^th mile on Wednesday, but I’d gone for a little two-mile run and I thought it was that, so I wasn’t going to be the guy complaining about feeling terrible. They finished the ride, we had a nice evening in Mason City, I was feverish through the night with shivering and heat and those circular stressful fever dreams but Covid, for some reason (possibly the mental fog) didn’t cross my mind.

On Thursday, they rode another 50 miles. After they started, I went to Walgreens and bought myself tissues and Tylenol. After they finished, I went to Hy-Vee and bought myself a refill of my allergy medicine.

That afternoon, my brother started complaining of feeling alternatively hot and cold. I mentioned to him that I’d been feeling feverish myself, wondering if we had the same bug (spoiler alert…). Then, I left to drive to Lansing—a little town in the northeast corner of the state where RAGBRAI ended this year—to pick up our other brother, who was going to join them for the last two days but was leaving his car at the finish line. A little while into the drive, the brother who’d been riding called and suggested taking a Covid test (to hear him tell it later, he and my dad were trudging around town silently, also wrongly assuming they didn’t have Covid). So, I stopped in Decorah, the first big-enough town to have a Hy-Vee, tried to buy four Covid tests, bought eight through some slight confusion with the cashier, took one in the parking lot, left it on the passenger seat while I went back inside to have a wee, and came back to see a thicker, more emphatic black line under the “T” than it shows in any of the examples in the instructions.

Well, I thought. It hasn’t been fifteen minutes yet. This thing says not to read it until 15 minutes are up.

The line did not go away.

By the time the timer had gotten down to three minutes, I’d started to accept what was happening. I called both brothers. The one who’d been riding went and found Covid tests with my dad, which were, as you know, also positive. The one who’d been looking forward to riding turned around and drove home from Lansing. We all shivered our way back into the hotel—masked, now—and went to bed, then shivered our way out a back door in the morning and drove like zombies back to Illinois, where my dad went in to isolate at his own home (until my mom also tested positive this morning) and my brother and I went to my brother’s apartment in Chicago, where we’re now isolating while my brother’s wife and son wait us out at her parents’ place.

A few questions I have:

• Why the hell did I not think that I had Covid?
• Did the cashier at the Decorah Hy-Vee know I was buying the tests for myself, in the immediate sense? If so, why was she so cheerful and helpful? Why did she not say, “What the hell, man? Get out of here with that Covid?” I hope I didn’t give her Covid.
• Had I not been sick enough to get a fever, would my dad and brother have kept riding, and kept assuming they were just exhausted from all the riding? My dad seemed to feel his sickest on Friday morning.
• Did I bring it? Did my brother bring it? Did my dad bring it? Did we get it from someone else?
• How unlikely is outdoor transmission, exactly? Because we were around a ton of people but almost all of them were outside.
• This isn’t really a question, and it’s kind of tied to the last bullet, but I keep having this frustration that there’s no clear answer when I look for information on when I won’t be contagious anymore. And since so much of the public response to Covid has been centered around balancing giving people the information, so they can make their own decisions with their own consciences, and giving people a prescribed plan, I guess this is kind of the issue? In theory, I want everyone to just get the information and then look out for each other. In practice, I’d really like someone to tell me exactly what to do.

I’m feeling much better—started feeling a lot better by Friday night, and have slowly been improving since. My brain feels a little thick—writing this and anything else is a bit of a slog—and I’m still a little tingly. Just a hint of the aches from Wednesday and Thursday. The fever’s been gone for at least 24 hours, and maybe 72. The congestion and the congested cough are there a little, but they aren’t severe, and my throat doesn’t feel 100% but it’s on the mend.

I always found it kind of preachy or performative (often in an innocent, covering-the-bases sense that I do on a lot of things too) when people would say they had Covid and before taking their next breath say how thankful they were for the vaccines, but I do kind of get that now. If you think about it long enough, a virus which we’ve only known to exist for three years that’s killed millions of people worldwide is scary stuff, and while there’s no way to know for sure how much the vaccine helped my personal immune system on this bout, my experience and those of my brother and dad haven’t been too bad. I don’t know if that’s luck, I don’t know if that’s the severity of whatever variant we’re on, I don’t know if that’s the vaccine, I don’t know if it’s the severity of the variant but because the vaccine slowed down the more severe strains and thus I was able to go two and a half years before getting it, etc.

Regardless, I’m glad I found out it wasn’t the two-mile run that made me ache all over and shiver then sweat through the night. That would’ve been demoralizing.