I haven’t given a pandemic update in a while, and that’s felt like an oversight. It’s helpful to capture how we’re feeling at the time. Unfortunately, it’s been a bit of a time lately.
Since late February when Russia invaded Ukraine, it’s all felt like a little much. I noticed my reading dropped incredibly after the invasion, and it’s only gotten worse.
Here we are, supposedly at the end of the pandemic, with health and safety requirements dropping like flies, and that’s when I get COVID-19. I got sick two weeks ago, after a weekend of family coming to town for a visit. Because hey, we’re all vaccinated and things are better so it’s about time, right? I guess not. I don’t actually know how we got exposed, but something like 8 of the 11 family members got sick. Fun.
Here I am two weeks later, still enduring a lingering COVID cough, watching all the people cheer the lifting of the mask mandate on transportation. It’s all a little nuts. And kind of fills me with a barely contained rage.
But I digress. I don’t want to get into the rant, because we’ve heard it before. And no one listened. So let’s move on to capturing how we’re feeling.
COVID-19 Experience
Thankfully, my case of COVID was pretty mild (yay vaccines!). It started with a sore throat, and the first day or two I had a fever. But after those first couple days, it wasn’t that bad. I was sick enough that I couldn’t sit at my desk all day and work, but I also wasn’t down and out in bed.
The first week I took off work completely (except for a couple things I couldn’t put off). By the second week I was still coughing and not feeling a lot better, but I had to get back to it. I gave one full day and realized that was too much, so spend the rest of the week on half time.
Now I’m in the third week and the cough is still here, though maybe marginally better. I’m working a little more, but still avoiding full days.
My wife also tested positive and now that she’s better has a lingering sore throat, like painfully bad. She went for a strep test (negative), and the nurse told her a bad sore throat or cough that can last for up to a month is fairly common with COVID. So that’s fun.
The only good news is that we’re not contagious anymore. Still, I’m trying to minimize time in public spaces and absolutely wearing a mask.
A Word on Testing
The most frustrating part of COVID has been testing. It’s great to have the at-home tests, but they’re not very reliable. All three of us in our house who eventually tested positive first tested negative while we had symptoms. So that negative test result is kind of useless. I’m the only one who tested positive with the at-home test. The other two had to go get a PCR test.
The other weird thing: at-home testing means I’ll never show up in the COVID case count. I don’t know how anybody is supposed to know I tested positive, and there’s clearly no reporting mechanism. So those case count numbers they report are pretty useless now.
COVID Movies
As frustrating as it’s been to get COVID at what’s supposed to be the tail end of the pandemic, and as not thrilled I am to be on week three of a cough, I am incredibly grateful it’s not worse.
So I spent most of my COVID downtime watching movies. We don’t tend to watch a lot of movies, preferring to binge TV shows instead. It’s also hard to find a movie everyone likes, and a lot of the movies I’m interested in nobody else wants to watch. So since I had the TV to myself for days on end, I decided to watch all kinds of movies I hadn’t seen before. The list is a little ridiculous:
- Kate (OK)
- Blade Runner 2049 (meh)
- Army of Thieves (good heist movie)
- Enola Holmes (fun)
- Hulk (2003) (wow that was bad)
- Inception (too much hype)
- Dunkirk (meh)
- Sherlock Holmes (2009) (kinda dumb)
- Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (better)
- Moneyball (pretty good)
- American Ultra (fun)
- Argo (good)
- King’s Man (dumb)
- Chappie (flawed by enjoyable)
- The Harder They Fall (meh)
- Dr. Who and the Daleks (Rifftrax) (bad funny)
- Gone Girl (book was better)
- The Highwaymen (good)
- Red Notice (OK)
- Onward (better than I thought it would be)
- Triple Frontier (wow Netflix cranks out the meh movies)
- Public Enemies (anti-climactic)
- (got HBO Max to find more movies
- Batman v Superman (bloated)
- Man of Steel (it’s hard to do a good Superman movie)
- Suicide Squad (dumb plot, but fun movie)
- Justice League (Marvel did this so much better)
- Aquaman (better than I expected)
- Birds of Prey (had its flaws, but Harley Quinn is fun)
- The Suicide Squad (also dumb plot, but had fun moments)
- Green Lantern (wow, green super hero movies are doomed)
- Dune (gorgeous, but not a lot happens)
- Joker (depressing)
- Shazam (fun concept, but more of a kids movie; more Adam Brody!)
- The Batman (I liked this more than I expected)
- Knives Out (great)
- Hanna (meh; the Amazon TV series that remade most of the movie was way better)