Breakthrough COVID infections are real: Urgent to keep getting vaccinated!

Breakthrough COVID? OMG

Welcome back to Limbo!

Unvaccinated are high risk for serious illness.

Echo opinion letter published in MichiganLive 
By Lawrence Specker

I waited for the text from my wife, as I sat in the car outside the urgent-care clinic. Her message couldn’t have come as more of a surprise: The word “COVID” followed by a plus sign and a sad face.

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This wasn’t the plan: Sure, she’d been hit with fever on Friday, followed by some congestion and cough on Saturday.

Yet, she was vaccinated, so we figured it was a routine case of the crud. It had to happen sooner or later.

Remember 2020, when most of us wore masks everywhere and went a year without flu or colds? Good times.

Now, on Sunday, she’d come in to get a steroid shot and a clean COVID test so she could get back to work on Monday. Just one of those working-class things. But the test didn’t cooperate.

Later in the day, our 15-year-old son and older daughter and myself tested negative. With that result in hand, I felt like I could mask up and go get the stockpile of groceries we’d need for the next week. Daughter, who has her own place, was told to stay away, and the rest of us buttoned up.

Six days later I was back at the urgent care, supremely confident I was about to get another negative. I was vaccinated too (Pfizer, same as my wife) and my symptoms were nothing like COVID. I had a low fever, not a high one. I had a dry cough, not a congested one. I had one day of fatigue and by the time I went in, I already felt like I was over it.

Unfortunately, I was not over it.

There was a while (more like a year) when I thought of the pandemic like one of those scenes from an Indiana Jones movie, where the good guys are swimming down a river while hordes of angry people shoot poison arrows at them. The lockdowns, the masks, the self-imposed isolation -- That was us, holding our breath, trying to stay underwater until we were out of range of the arrows.

But no one can hold their breath forever. Sooner or later, something had to give. By late spring we were all bursting to the surface. A lot of us were getting vaccinated, rates were dropping. It felt good to breathe again. And things were pretty good for a while, floating along down the river, until Delta reared its head. 

Now, we’re at that point where Indy and the gang realize that, ready or not, they’re about to shoot a waterfall. Some start screaming, some grit their teeth and brace for white water.

I’m not sure how a breakthrough case fits into this metaphor. Because it takes you right out of the movie.

You’re not deathly ill, or at least we haven’t been. Melissa’s symptoms fell somewhere between a nasty cold and a mild case of the flu. It was no walk in the park, but it was still trivial compared to the horror stories you hear every day. She was selected for an antibody transfusion. The morning she went to the clinic to receive it, a fellow patient was red-flagged during preliminary screening and sent to the ER.

So you’re keenly aware that your situation isn’t tragic. You’re lying in bed at home, listening to an endless series of e-books (Melissa). Or you’re just plugging away, working from home like you’ve been doing for a year (me). You order takeout. You have groceries delivered. You watch the latest Marvel thing. Need a getaway? You walk the dog. You mow the yard. There are people out there being rolled into ERs and ICUs, being intubated. People are dying from what you’ve got, but you feel well enough to push a mower. It seems unreasonable to expect much sympathy, even from yourself.

And yet: This thing you have could kill people, so you’ve got to stay under house arrest for a while. And it really starts to suck, as it passes from one person to the next and the end date when the household is finally clear keeps moving down the line.

“When one of y’all gets it, my advice is to cough in each other’s faces until you’ve all got it,” I told a (vaccinated) friend at one point. “Get it over with instead of doing it one at a time like us. I’m not saying it’s good advice, just my advice.”

One thing about getting a breakthrough case of COVID-19, it pushes you away from absolute thinking. The world is no longer divided into the safe (vaccinated) and the at-risk (unvaccinated). It’s no longer about the righteous vs. the righteously deluded. There are no guarantees. You already knew that, in a sense, because scientists and doctors have said from the beginning that no vaccine is perfect, that breakthrough cases will happen but should be mild, that every mutation of the virus is another roll of the dice. 

So, now you know it in the sense that you’ve got all this time at home on your hands, but you can’t start that project you have in mind because you can’t go down to Lowe’s and stare at parts and fittings for an hour until you figure out what you need.

Life is no longer divided into “that time when we all had to wear masks” and “the time when we didn’t have to unless we just felt like it.” 

Moreover, it’s no longer divided into the big shutdown and the return to normal.

Normal was great while it lasted. My son and I traveled to Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico for a nine-day backpacking trip. COVID was a serious concern -- among other countermeasures, everybody in the group had to show up with proof of vaccination or of a fresh negative test result. We had those in hand and felt bulletproof.

Even in the backcountry, masks were required when mingling with other groups. But you gave a lot more care to bear safety, making sure that if one wandered through your camp during the night, you and your tent wouldn’t smell like a snack.

Sure enough, there was one morning when a couple of credible crew members said they’d heard something big snuffling around the camp during the night. And another spotted what looked like fresh bear poop. Most of us slept right through it, but it made an impression on those who didn’t.

Having breakthrough COVID in the house is kind of like that: Hearing a potential killer snuffling around your space and moving on. Good luck getting back to sleep.

As I was pondering all this, NPR’s “All Things Considered” did a brisk segment surveying the state of play in Lower Alabama: Low vaccination rates, the Delta variant running rampant, stubborn vaccine hesitancy, frustrated officials wondering what it would take to get to a better place.

I heard Mobile County Commissioner Merceria Ludgood say, “If we can’t figure out a way to get more people vaccinated, then we’re going to be in the thralls of this for years and years.”

That’s not a comforting thought. That’s a world where we (probably) all don’t have to go into mass lockdown again, but every time a fresh variant comes along the at-risk will take the brunt and some of us who’ve been vaccinated will end up having to spend a couple of weeks in quarantine fighting cabin fever. That’s a lot of nights where you lie there and hear the bear snuffling through the camp.

Things will get better; they have to. The system knows a lot more now about treating COVID patients than it did in the early days, when nothing seemed to work. With a fast-spreading variant like Delta, at least there’s the hope that it’ll pass like a flash fire, doing its worst and fading in a relatively short period of time. At some point we might even get to that fabled level of herd immunity, which will be great for the survivors.

In a few days I’ll be out of quarantine, out of Limbo. Things that are mere fantasies now, like being able get in the car and go run routine household errands, will once again be possible.

I still like my Indiana Jones metaphor, messy as it has gotten. Yes, he makes it out of the river at some point, and so will we. 

In the meantime -- I’ll see you on the other side of this waterfall.