By Mark Jones

It is different. Still a little scary.

I am now in my last day of COVID isolation. Fully vaccinated and boosted, I managed to catch COVID for a second time. Yep, I am a return customer, a double breakthrough case.

There are some big differences. In May of 2021, I felt invincible. I’d gotten two doses of the new mRNA vaccine. I was fully vaccinated by CDC guidelines. The vaccine gave hope we’d return to normal. When I became a breakthrough case, my aura of invincibility disappeared. Things were pretty scary. People were dying, and they went from seemingly okay to dead pretty quickly. It was hard not to fixate on pulse oximeter readings, wondering whether seeking medical care was prudent or not.

I didn’t spend as much time pondering death this time, mostly based on my past experience. Waking with a splitting headache and sore throat prompted an immediate flashback. I’d returned from a trip to San Francisco two days earlier. There was a passenger on the bus from the terminal in Detroit to the parking lot who hacked the entire time. Hard not to think that was my exposure. It may have just been allergies, that my time mingling with thousands of other chemists in the Moscone Center inoculated me in a not-so-obvious way. Maybe it was the crowd waiting for the cable car on Powell Street. I really can’t know with certainty.

The two bars both turned color in my at-home test. I was alone when the sinking feeling came over me. That is a big difference from 2021. There were no antigen tests. Instead, back then, I got an institutional PCR test. The test was performed by a PPE encased nurse. She zealously swabbed, feeling like she was hitting my brain stem. Results took 24 hours. This time, testing was so much more civilized. More instantaneous.

I got informed two years ago. A doctor called and walked me through the precautions I should take and sought information about where I might have gotten exposed. The system notified me, the CDC, and the local health department. My test was counted. My test added to the body of knowledge. It helped track the progression of the disease. It was informing decisions. My current test, performed in my kitchen is unknown to the rest of the world. I tried to figure out how to report I was positive, still thinking it important to share the data, important that we know where the virus is lurking. Apparently, it isn’t. There is no place to report my case to the local health department. The CDC site is full of pages with disclaimers that they are no longer being updated. The breakthrough case data ends on June 22. No one provided advice on what to do. I had to dig on the CDC site to find the current isolation protocols.

No one cared about my case this time. No one seemed to be tracking the disease. In our polarized world, COVID became political. I assumed the worst. I assumed we should be following the disease and aren’t. Turns out, technology got better. Monitoring is happening, just not at the individual level. It is now common for wastewater to be tested for COVID. The CDC launched the National Wastewater Surveillance System (NWSS) in September 2020. It wouldn’t have changed my travel plans, but had I looked, I would have seen that San Francisco was reporting pretty high levels of the virus, much higher than my corner of Michigan. The data are there.

My house has a septic tank. Even with the new technology, my case isn’t being counted in Michigan. Chalk it up to COVID-induced delirium, but I did ponder where I could go to use the bathroom in order to register my case, in order to register that the virus was back in Michigan. I decided against it.

I recall a golden age of data visualizations back in 2021. The data being collected and shared back then led to all manners of slicing and dicing. COVID visualizations were everywhere. Mainstream media embraced logarithmic scales. Today, not so much. COVID trackers on major news sites are gone. The creative visualizations are gone. Two little line plots are how the CDC reports cases now. Had I looked, I would have noted the troubling upward trend in both hospitalizations and deaths

I never ran a fever, just a wicked headache, sore throat and the pesky loss of taste and smell. My isolation is only 5 days now, down from the 10 that I spent in 2021. My most contagious days are now well behind me, according to the guidance. I sure hope that is true. I can’t rely on antigen testing. According to most, I will continue to test positive even when no longer contagious. Knowing when to remove my mask is inexact science.

I’ve survived my second COVID infection. Serving as a warning to others is never good, certainly not my aspiration. I am, however, a warning that COVID is still with us. A reminder that vaccinated is not invincible.