roseola

I think you can evaluate how well you’re doing in your quarantine / anti-Covid efforts by how often you and your family members are getting sick.  If you get Covid and you’ve had no other sicknesses since February, you’re probably just unlucky.  If you don’t get Covid but you’ve had three or four infectious colds or other illnesses, then you’re just lucky.  I thought our family was doing pretty good as none of us had been sick since February, but our streak finally came to an end.  S had a textbook cases of roseola.  We did get her tested for Covid – negative.  I’ve been trying to figure out where she got it from.  Roseola is interesting in that most people get it while young and get some immunity.  If you contract it after that, you’re likely to have limited symptoms.  So, one of us likely got it and didn’t show symptoms and gave it to S.  I’m guessing it must have been one of the girls at school.  It has a 7 to 14 day incubation period, which makes it much harder to figure out.  I came down with mastitis (not contagious) for the third or fourth time more or less simultaneously.  It reminded me how much being sick sucks, especially when you, the parent, are sick while caring for a sick baby.  I ran a pretty high fever and was lying in bed under multiple down duvets shaking like a leaf with cold while S woke up every hour.  Fun times!  Thankfully, though, we all recovered before Christmas.

I have been a little disheartened lately about the future and whether the vaccine will do the trick.  Reinfection so far has been rare, but will that continue?  What if an annual vaccination is required?  I suppose that’s not the end of the world; surely we (humanity) can figure out how to make that happen.  I fear, however, that coronavirus is going to be part of our lives from now until we die.  A major distinction between Covid and, say, measles or smallpox, is that measles and smallpox have no animal reservoir, and therefore, it is possible to eradicate them.  It is not possible to eradicate a disease like coronavirus that has an animal reservoir.  Even if you eliminated it from the human population it would likely pass over again and spread, just as Ebola does periodically.  (And Ebola, obviously, is far less contagious than Covid.)