Delay, Not Denial

I am not in denial.

I am taking precautions, yes. But not because I think my family and I will never get COVID if I’m careful. I’m pretty sure we’re all going to get COVID eventually. Many of us more than once. Even if our countries and communities were taking excellent precautions, most of would get COVID at some point. We do not have excellent COVID policies in place as a rule. Most countries have depressing, inadequate, regressive COVID policies. So most of us are going to get COVID.

I do think that if we take precautions, my family and I can avoid getting COVID for as long as possible. That delay is important. The longer we go without infection, the better our medical care will be when infection finally occurs, and the more we’ll know about COVID.

Already, we have antivirals now we didn’t have a year ago. We know that corticosteroids help. In mid-January, the WHO recommended two new drugs - baricitinib, which reduces overstimulation of the immune system, and sotrovimab, a new kind of monoclonal antibody. The US NIH is finally starting to support research on long COVID after a series of frankly shameful delays.

Every single day you avoid infection helps. It’s less dangerous to get COVID in March 2022 than it was to get COVID in December 2021. The science continues to move fast, which means that we’ll keep on seeing new treatments. Every new treatment improves your odds of surviving COVID, and surviving with less long-term damage. Vox has as nice piece about this.

This is not a just-get-it-over-with situation. Getting COVID once doesn’t mean anything. You can just get it again with the next variant, or the one after that. And it’s looking like different variants cause different long COVID symptoms.

COVID will truly be just like a cold - eventually. I really believe that. It’s not where we are now. Maybe my family and I can dodge infection until we reach that point. Probably we can’t. But every day we stay uninfected, we reduce our risks when we finally do get sick.