The damn thing finally got me. After two and a half years of dodging the coronavirus, my wife and I gambled on an overseas trip and came back with COVID. We were probably infected at one of the airports, where we were trapped for hours in closely packed throngs of mostly unmasked people, who were sneezing, coughing, and braying with no concern about spreading infection. As we wave the white flag of de facto surrender, the BA.5 variant is surging, with known new infections up 20 percent in two weeks, 40,000 hospitalized, and deaths creeping back up to 3,000 a week. When immersed in aerosolized clouds of this hyper-infectious variant for prolonged periods, even masked people are at high risk. Despite my two boosters and excellent overall health, COVID made me sicker than I'd been for decades, with a fever, massive congestion, crushing fatigue, and a body that ached like I'd been beaten with a baseball bat. I'm still hacking after two weeks. It's no cold.
We've entered a surreal stage of the pandemic: Most people have such understandable COVID fatigue they've decided it must be over. Even if people get infected, they tell themselves, it'll be "mild." Wishful thinking. COVID, for many, is no mere respiratory disease; SARS-CoV-2 can maraud through the body, damaging the heart, brain, and multiple organs. It can wreak havoc on the immune system. Multiple infections, studies show, can double or triple the risk of severe illness and long COVID. With millions of ongoing infections, the virus keeps mutating at breakneck speed to elude prior immunity from illness and vaccination. "Living with the virus" may mean getting COVID three or more times a year, amid a constant backdrop of widespread illness. British immunologist Danny Altmann compares our COVID reality to "being trapped on a roller coaster in a horror film." We might prefer to shut our eyes and cover our ears, but this movie is not over.
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
-
6 elegant Queen Anne Victorian homesFeature Featuring original diamond-glass doors in New York and a registered historic landmark in Arkansas
-
Starbucks baristas strike over dress codespeed read The new uniform 'puts the burden on baristas' to buy new clothes, said a Starbucks Workers United union delegate
-
US overdose deaths plunged 27% last yearspeed read Drug overdose still 'remains the leading cause of death for Americans aged 18-44,' said the CDC
-
RFK Jr.: A new plan for sabotaging vaccinesFeature The Health Secretary announced changes to vaccine testing and asks Americans to 'do your own research'
-
Five years on: How Covid changed everythingFeature We seem to have collectively forgotten Covid’s horrors, but they have completely reshaped politics
-
HMPV is spreading in China but there's no need to worryThe Explainer Respiratory illness is common in winter
-
Marty Makary: the medical contrarian who will lead the FDAIn the Spotlight What Johns Hopkins surgeon and commentator Marty Makary will bring to the FDA
-
Long Covid: study shows damage to brain's 'control centre'The Explainer Research could help scientists understand long-term effects of Covid-19 as well as conditions such as MS and dementia
-
FDA OKs new Covid vaccine, available soonSpeed read The CDC recommends the new booster to combat the widely-circulating KP.2 strain
-
Mpox: how dangerous is new health emergency?Today's Big Question Spread of potentially deadly sub-variant more like early days of HIV than Covid, say scientists
-
What is POTS and why is it more common now?The explainer The condition affecting young women
