We were careful. We stayed inside. We masked up.

But we still got COVID-19.

Last Tuesday I started feeling sick, with a sore throat and a headache. By Tuesday afternoon I’d canceled my meetings and went to lie down. It wasn’t severe or anything, I just felt tired. I took Wednesday off as well, thinking rest should take care of it, but just to be on the safe side made an appointment to get a COVID test the next day. By Thursday morning I actually felt pretty okay. I did a full (and long) day of work, then went for my test at St. Mike’s even though I barely felt sick anymore.

By Friday I felt mostly better. I actually considered firing up the Peloton to do a low impact ride. I was sure it couldn’t have been COVID; it never felt much worse than a medium cold, or a mild flu. But then I checked my results, and saw this:

Awesome.

By this time Lindsay had started feeling symptoms too, about three days behind my own. We made dinner, and wallowed in grump for a few hours before dosing ourselves with Neo-Citran and going to bed.

Yesterday I woke up feeling a little worse again, but got better as the day went on. I received the promised call from a doctor at Public Health, and he told us to isolate for ten full days from the onset of symptoms. He also explained that the symptoms can come in waves, and he was right: by the evening I felt like garbage again, with a slew of sinus symptoms. Today — Sunday — we both feel pretty wiped out. It won’t be hard to stay isolated; we can barely get out of bed.

Frankly, though, isolation means very little change for us. We already had 100% of our groceries and 95% of our food delivered to our front door. We both work from home 100% of the time. We hadn’t gone to anyone’s house. We hadn’t visited any patios when they were reopened a week or so ago. Frankly, it felt pretty unfair that there are yahoos out there visiting gyms and going to house parties and shopping and all manner of shit without getting sick, and with our practically-monastic lifestyle we catch COVID. So how did it happen?

Without getting into too much detail, we had one — one — short, socially-distanced hangout with our neighbours in the back laneway, four days before my symptoms kicked in. We were careful, but because we were outside and 2-3 metres apart, we didn’t wear masks. That one 20-minute window was all it took. Months and months of isolation, discipline, and missing people, and boom. But hey, we live in Ontario, and our provincial government’s response to COVID has been a collection of blunderfucks from the get-go — pulling emergency brakes after they’d already driven into the tree, and so on — so who knows? Maybe it was silly to think we wouldn’t get it.

Anyway. We’re not in particularly problematic age ranges, and we have no pre-existing health conditions which should complicate this. We’re not experiencing any of the severe symptoms. Nobody’s going to lose their job, we don’t have kids to worry about, and we have plenty of supplies and gourmet restaurants who’ll bring us food. We’re not taking this lightly, but the odds are certainly in our favour. So now we just hunker down, try to get better, and…stay indoors until our fucking vaccination appointments, I guess.

Wish us luck.

[UPDATE: we survived.]