Like a typical cold, it started with an itchy throat on Saturday night. It worsened the next day, and sure enough, by Monday, I had a cold. By Tuesday, I had a runny nose and sneezing fits.
But I never developed even a slight fever or a headache or diarrhea, and felt no weakness, fatigue or chills – all the symptoms associated with COVID-19. Fever is reported to be the most prevalent symptom of “stealth Omicron” BA.2. I had no recent history of travel on mass transport or close exposure to crowds.
Also, being fully vaccinated and boosted (the last shot being Pfizer), and believing I still have some natural immunity from a moderate COVID infection last year, I dismissed my affliction as a normal cold. I just kept my mask on and stayed even farther away from everyone as I went through my daily routine.
Until Wednesday morning, when my cold was already improving, but I realized I had lost my sense of smell.
Panic time!
It was exactly how my COVID nightmare started last year. I have an unusually keen sense of smell – I often joke that I should work for a company that develops fragrances – so anosmia is immediately noticeable to me.
Current medical literature says there should be a combination of symptoms to suspect breakthrough COVID infection, and loss of smell is no longer a common symptom with the Omicron subvariants.
But my COVID trauma is still raw, and I didn’t want to take chances and end up infecting others.
* * *
So I closeted myself in my room again as household members returned to masking and wearing disposable gloves. Remembering that my brother’s Persian cat died of COVID (as diagnosed by the vet), I stayed away from the cats and put the cardboard barrier back up to keep my dogs away from the bedroom door.
Then I drove to a hospital for a reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction test, still the gold standard for COVID testing. Being symptomatic, I didn’t want to waste time on an antigen test that would need a confirmatory RT-PCR test if a negative result came out.
Upon processing for admission, I immediately said I suspected COVID. Unlike in the past, however, I was not directed to an isolation area.
Instead my oxygen level, temperature and blood pressure were taken at the same spot where all other emergency patients able to stand on their own were processed.
Then I was directed to a waiting area where other patients, including toddlers accompanied by parents, were waiting, with no distancing enforced. I guess the hospital staff saw no risk because all my vital signs were normal. But I did tell them about my cold and loss of sense of smell, so didn’t that warrant isolating me from others, especially kids?
Oh well, I told myself, doctors know best, and it’s one of the country’s top hospitals.
The hospital staff were still wearing personal protective equipment and double masks, but not one wore a face shield. Maybe they are all double boosted.
My attending physician didn’t seem worried about getting infected when I told him I suspected I had COVID. He recommended a blood test and X-ray apart from the throat and nasal swab test.
From admission to testing to finishing the paperwork and finally getting my receipt and discharge, it took about four hours. If I had any of the highly infectious Omicron subvariants, I would have already infected everyone at the waiting areas. (Or if anyone had COVID or monkeypox, wouldn’t I also risk catching it in that enclosed space?)
My blood test and X-ray all showed normal or “unremarkable” results. But getting the RT-PCR result, I was told, could take from 24 to 48 hours. So I drove back home and returned to isolation.
The result, however, was e-mailed much earlier, within five hours of my discharge. The result: negative.
So it was just a bad cold. Medical experts say a COVID infection can be distinguished from the common cold by the severity of the discomfort at the onset. That was how it was when I got COVID last year, and this cold reminded me of it. But I can’t honestly tell if the initial discomfort was extreme or any different from my bad cold bouts pre-pandemic.
The next day my sense of smell was back. Colleagues ribbed me for being paranoid.
* * *
I’m sure many doctors like my attitude. But there are people who believe being COVID-praning is more trouble than it’s worth. Instead they just keep stocks of home antigen testing kits (the attending physician recommended the one by Abbott) – something that I now intend to do.
Infectious disease experts have said that if you’re symptomatic and you test positive on an antigen test, there’s no need for confirmatory RT-PCR.
Others can’t afford the cost of paranoia, or even to take one day off from work, as I did to avoid infecting my officemates. My throat and nasal swab cost P3,600, but I thought it was worth it, since I got the result within a few hours.
Many people can’t afford home antigen test kits either. When they suspect COVID infection but the symptoms are not bad enough to be debilitating, they take paracetamol, and hope the symptoms will go away. They stay away from household members but not from strangers. They take mass transport, go to wet markets and continue earning a living.
Infectious disease experts have warned that this situation, compounded by a significant number of people still unvaccinated or lacking boosters, is contributing to the constant mutation of SARS-CoV-2 into even more infectious and immune-evasive strains.
The World Health Organization keeps warning that the COVID pandemic is far from over and would continue to pose a threat in 2023.
President Marcos, in Bangkok where he is attending the summit of Asia-Pacific leaders, warned of “dark clouds” still on the economic horizon as he called for investments in pandemic preparedness. At least this made me feel less praning.
Governments and people, however, are suffering from COVID fatigue. The national government should make RT-PCR and antigen tests more accessible to the masses. But it is already subsidizing so many things, now including even rice and refined sugar.
With slow vaccine and booster uptake, we’re told that the bivalent vaccines being procured by the government against the Omicron subvariants will be in limited supply.
We’re not done with COVID, and it’s better to be praning than sorry. The government must enable people to see this mindset not as an unnecessary luxury, but a reasonable response to a continuing public health threat.