Coronavirus Diaries 7

You have absolutely no reason to believe me but I had a conversation with my wife a week or so ago and at the onset of the self-isolation craziness and the enormity of the Coronavirus was becoming all too real, wherein I wondered whether I, and a few people I know around me, had contracted the Coronavirus earlier in the year and didn’t know it.

Bear with me here because I know what I’m about to say may sound crazy but…

Early in the year, in early January, I recall my father got very sick (he’s since recovered) and he was sick for an awful long time, perhaps two or so weeks, and had a hard time getting rid of whatever he had. A friend of ours, another elderly man, also got sick around that time and for him, too, the illness lasted an unusually long time. He coughed a lot and had pain in his lungs but, over time, he finally got over it. Yet another person who works for us also got sick and it also took a long while to get over. One of my sisters also got sick. She’s a pharmacist and noted this cycle of getting sick was going out of hand. We started cleaning up around us and disinfecting all because it seemed like we couldn’t quite kick the illness.

At around that time, perhaps later January, I too got sick but the illness didn’t last terribly long for me and it wasn’t particularly hard hitting. What I do recall was that I felt it was strange to catch what I thought was the flu (the symptoms seemed to line up with that) since I had my flu shots for the year done in October or so. My wife, as far as I can remember, didn’t get sick.

I also recall experiencing -and I verified it with some of my January and early February posts- being awfully tired at the end of work weeks, to the point where I would literally collapse in bed from exhaustion and greatly welcome the weekends.

See, when I’m not working on my latest novel, my family works in the tourism industry and we have contact with people from all over the world.

Including China.

Could what the people immediately around me and I have been experiencing at that time, in January and into very early February, been the Coronavirus and we simply didn’t know?

Before you think I’m certifiably nuts, check out this article by Lindsay Holmes and presented on Huffingtonpost.com:

Is It Possible That You Had The Coronavirus Earlier This Year?

Seems like I’m not the only one who thinks maybe he was exposed to the virus early on.

Thing is, and as the article notes: There is no way to test someone to see if they had the Coronavirus before, just if they have it now.

Which means that even if I was exposed to it or had it, I, and everyone in my circle of family and all my friends, even those who were sick earlier in the year, need to continue being incredibly cautious and self-isolating.

Still, it is a scary thought that maybe, just maybe I might have been already exposed to this virus before the news of the pandemic truly broke.

Terrifying, really.