Update: I wrote this post while I had an active Covid diagnosis and delayed posting it in order to mitigate potential privacy concerns. I have since fully recovered and even gotten my first vaccination shot. Thankfully no one else in our house has tested positive (though poor Tal has had to be tested four times).
So here I am. As I write this, I’ve got Covid, or at least I’m recovering and still in CDC recommended Isolation. I’m scheduling this post to go out at a later date due to privacy concerns. I’ve been pretty lucky in that my symptoms have been very mild, and I’ve had extra support from Liv who has been doing double duty in baby caretaking. It’s still had a pretty big effect on me and my main purpose of posting this is to share the following message: Be careful out there, this thing is still going strong, and even if you follow all the precautions it can still get you.
I do not know how I got infected with this virus. In the week prior to my first symptoms I had gone into the office for my day job four times, wearing an N95 mask at all times while in the building and eating lunch in my van. I was not near many people, and have not heard of any more cases there. I went to a gallery opening in downtown Lowell for a show I have a couple paintings in. I stayed for about 20 minutes, was masked with the N95 the entire time I was there, and kept my distance from the half dozen other people in the gallery at the same time as me. I went to my studio in downtown Lowell a couple times, masked in the N95 any time I was in a common area and only seeing one person from about 10 feet away for a minute or two. I’d also dropped Tally off at daycare a couple times, masked in the N95 and following their strict social distancing code.
It’s Saturday, as I write this. Last Saturday I noticed I had a bit of a sore throat when I woke up, but it went away after I got up. Tally’s daycare screens for Covid symptoms with a pretty long list of questions every morning when you check your child in. These screening questions don’t seem to be very effective at screening out rhinovirus, though, and Tal has been bringing new colds home with him every few weeks, so we’ve all been dealing with minor cold symptoms off and on pretty regularly. One of the screening questions that will get you rejected is if anyone in the household has had a sore throat in the past 72 hours, but it was Saturday and Tally wasn’t going to daycare until Tuesday so we were fine so long as the sore throat didn’t come back.
On Sunday I woke up with a bit of a sore throat again. Damn, I though. I knew I’d be asked about it on Tuesday so I tried to schedule a Covid test. I wasted the morning waiting for call backs from my doctor’s office. (They are understandably very busy, but I never did get a promised call to actually schedule a test.) In the afternoon I gave up and scheduled a test at CVS, but by this time there wasn’t anything available until the next morning.
On Monday I was planing on going into work. I did not have a sore throat that morning but I still needed that negative test result to get Tally through the daycare screening process the next day. The best thing to do would be to get the negative result and send it off to the daycare’s Covid response team as soon as possible to get us cleared. I was scheduled for a rapid test and thought I’d be able to get the results while I drove in to work, but the clinician told me the results could take up to two hours so I went back home. Then I got the call.
“Your test has come back positive.” The clinical was very helpful and gave me a lot of useful information. I was shocked. I was scared. I was confused. I basically spent the rest of the day contacting daycare and my works HR team and anyone I could think of I’d been in contact with.
The HR team at work asked me not to share my diagnosis with my coworkers. So this post might put me in a bit of a grey area, but it’s been a week so I feel like the dust has settled. The reasoning is twofold, the first reason is that they don’t want to get people talking about who was around who or getting freaked out because they saw me in a hallway. The second is an issue of privacy protection. This issue is tricky. I think the main concern at work is that if a group of people are sent into quarantine all at the same time it indicates that those people are spending time with each other and that can indicate all kinds of things that might be personal or secret.
This got me thinking, what are the ethical issues surrounding sharing the fact that I’ve been diagnosed with this disease in a more general sense, like in terms of writing this blog or posting something on Twitter? On the one hand, it does feel like there is a bit of a stigma attached to getting Covid. Like, only people who don’t follow the rules—people who don’t wear masks or go to parties do a lot of traveling—get Covid. People who get Covid might therefore feel ashamed about it and feeling ashamed sucks so wouldn’t it be best to be open about it?
I’ve been trying to see how my actions might affect others in unintended ways. I’ve also been trying to see how my actions are impacted by my position of privilege; that is reductively to say e.g. in this case, “is feeling like I can share the fact that I have Covid 19 without any major social or economic percussions an example of my white privilege?” (I think white privilege is a gross term and it is ham fisted but it is a term that comes up a lot and if it applies to anyone it probably applies to me.)
How could me sharing my private information in a public space affect others in a negative way? The case I’ve come up with is that my sharing would further serve to normalize the act of sharing and if sharing becomes the standard and expected practice then it becomes harder and dishonest-seeming to not share what is fundamentally private medical information. In the case of the coronavirus pandemic, I do absolutely wholeheartedly believe that infection information should immediately be shared with anyone who might be at risk of infection, but beyond that it’s something that isn’t really anyone else's business. Plus, I can imaging cases where e.g. a landlord might see a positive Covid result as evidence of immoral behavior and grounds for eviction, likewise an employer might fire a worker for those same reasons, especially if the context of employment is not above-board where there are legal protections against such activity. It might make it harder to get dates on a dating app. An AirBnB host might not accept your offer. Basically your standard run of the mill discrimination situation.
There is another negative aspect I’ve been thinking about: if you believe that someone who follows all the rules—wearing masks and social distancing, washing hands and using loads of sanitizer, staying home keeping clean—can’t get infected, then getting infected implies not following the rules. In the age of Q-anon and rampant conspiracies all kinds of imagined salacious alternative realities might be proposed. Imagined affairs, drug addictions, or indebtedness to criminal organizations could easily explain sneaking around and getting exposed. For that matter, real affairs might get exposed that might put the people involved in tricky situations with their community if it is e.g. a non gender normative situation and a strict traditional values community.
The paradox is that a lot of these negative effects are neutralized if having had Covid is normalized. Thus, my conclusion, and the reason for this post, is that because I am in a position where most of these negativities will not really affect me, my sharing will have a net positive effect on the community. I own my own home, I have decent job security, I’m in a long term committed relationship, and the closest thing to a crime boss I owe money to is my credit union. If you feel like sharing your diagnosis would put you at risk then I don’t think you should feel like you have to share, but if you’re in a pretty comfortable position then I think it’s better for all of us if you.
I sure am glad that pretty soon I’ll be able to get that damn vaccine and I hope that this global nightmare comes to some kind of an end sooner rather than later. Right now, I’m especially looking forward to not having to wear a mask around Tal and being able to give him a little kiss on the head.
What do you think? Have you had any experiences with discrimination because of Covid?