We just received the news that one of our college sons is Covid positive. This is based on a test he took at home and mailed in before going to school. They misplaced his test and had to reprocess it, so he didn't receive the results until he was sitting in the Dallas Fort Worth airport yesterday morning during his layover from San Diego to South Bend. The doctor told him to stay in Dallas until this morning because then it would be 10 days since test date. So he got a hotel room at the airport - DFW is convenient for this - and spent the night and now is on the way to South Bend.
Not a symptom has he displayed. Nor has anyone else in the household. But back on the Fourth of July, his worked his second job at the pizza place, came home and had dinner with us and a four of our friends, and then woke up the next morning to a call that his boss was positive with the virus. His boss has now been in the hospital almost two weeks. This first announcement scared us all. We notified our friends, shut the doors, and stayed at home for 14 days except for a few runs to the store. In the meantime, our son was tested twice, and both tests came back negative. I was tested and was negative, and our other son who works at a restaurant also tested negative. So four negative tests in the family - which makes me skeptical of this positive test.
Now we are in waiting mode, locked down again in quarantine. We've had to notify a few people that we've seen in the last week. I would like to count our 14 days from the day our son took his test, but the doctor said we should count our 14 days from the last contact. He also said that the less conservative measure is 10 days without symptoms. And another option is to test at 4 days after the last contact and 7 days after the last contact. If those tests are both negative, then the quarantine is lifted. That option isn't really practical since we are so many people in one household.
Blah. Is there a vaccine yet? I'll volunteer to be in the trials...
I came across this haiku from a link somewhere - it makes me miss the summer evenings of sitting on the back porch laughing and drinking wine and figuring out how to solve all the problems in the world.
a party
where everyone says goodbye
then stays
John Brandi, "a party" from Seeding the Cosmos. Copyright © 2010 by John Brandi. Reprinted by permission of John Brandi.
4 comments:
Oh my word. Prayers for you all, and for your son. What strange times these are.
We came back from our Yellowstone adventure with a cold, picked up in Idaho. I can be confident it was a cold and nothing more because only the children had it, and they passed it to my brother and his daughter, with whom we stayed one night. Both of them had to be tested for COVID within a few days, my brother because he coughed at work and my niece because she had to have a tooth pulled. Both were negative. This is the kind of comfort we take these days!
I love that haiku. Those days will come again.
That sucks. Hope he stays symptom free. Just curious-is Notre Dame requiring home tests for all students before returning to campus, and are they using the LabCorp Pixel test (self-administered nasal swab) or a spit test? As busy as we’ve been supporting COVID testing up to this point, it’s only continuing to ramp as the back to school and back to work testing that you described are coming online.
I'm glad that your son and family are well, despite the positive Covid test and exposure. I guess that scenario is what we're all hoping for, if/when we contract the virus.
(Currently waiting on my son's results!)
I love that haiku. <3
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