Exposed

You have been exposed. The CDC website offers layered guidance for different categories of people in this situation: those that are “not up to date” on their vaccines, those that are, and those that have recently had COVID. The website instructs those in the first, “not up to date,” category that they should quarantine. The word “quarantine” comes with an embedded link. The link does not work.

This may not matter, because you belong to the second category, those that are indeed up to date. You have had as many shots as the law allows. The record of your 4th shot/second-booster is jammed into a tiny space at the bottom of your vaccine card. They offered you a new card, but you thought it might not look genuine if all the entries were written in the same pen on the same day. You have a lot of experience with undergraduate reading journals.

You look at the appropriate row to see the comforting words “No quarantine.” There is no link. Whatever quarantine  is, you do not have to do it. You scroll down to see the following: “You do not need to stay at home unless you develop symptoms.” This is positive, this is straightforward, this is liberating. You are free, as the airline ad says, “to move about the country.” Your four vaccines—three, it seems, would have been enough—have bought you mobility. Although you have been exposed, you do not have to slink back across the threshold of your home. You do not have to hide from other people. This will not be like the lockdown of 2020.

So far, however, you have been reading only down one column. Your eyes, which have been traveling down the page from category to category, now travel across it to the righthand column where “precautions” are listed. Here, alas, there, are no distinctions between you, so up to date, so au courant, and those belated folk the first category. Like the non, or insufficiently, vaxxed, you must “take precautions until day 10” and “wear a well-fitting mask inside your home or in public.” Your vaccine history, carefully self-archived in case of loss, makes no difference here. Your currency is no good.

In some ways, these instructions are more daunting than those you followed so carefully during lockdown, when (or is it where?) you and your family formed a unit, a bubble, against them, against the outside world. Now, it seems, two years later, you will have to wear a mask in your living room, your kitchen, and, should you ever use it, your dining room. You will wear a mask while watching the Astros play out a pitching duel on TV; you will cook wearing a KN45 and eat outside the house on the porch with the dogs, or perhaps in your bedroom with the door closed. Your husband will sleep on the couch like the erring men in seventies sitcoms who are , frequently banished from the conjugal bed. You are a threat to your family, a threat from within. The family unit has atomized. This does not always seem like a terrible thing. You have an excuse to be alone (with the dogs) and to read Tina Brown’s The Palace Papers. There is always Trollope, whose 47 novels will get anyone through any period of time. But you feel a little bit like a balloon on a string, the kind you bought to put in the pool for the bridal shower you hosted and at which you got exposed. You float off, only perilously connected to the ballast of family life.

When you emerge from the bedroom or the porch, you must remember to mask. As with your reading glasses, you distribute multiple versions around the house. As with your reading glasses, but with higher stakes, you often forget. Of course, in many cases you must wear both, completely covering your face as you wander through the house. You are reminded of what you no longer seemed to notice wearing masks, as you routinely do, in the outside world: the much-ballyhooed fogging problem. This gets more acute when you cook.

After the first disorienting days of the pandemic, when the masks you bought pulled on your ears and snapped off your face exposing you to the suspicious gazes of strangers, you have not really minded wearing them. You have felt free to judge those who complained about face-coverings, about not being able to breathe. Masks in the house feel different though—a little like wearing daytime clothing to bed. What feels fine when you are up and about, is suddenly constricting, sweaty, almost obscene. Matter out of place. The ritual of off and on, home and outside, is suddenly reversed. Sitting masked in the chair furthest away from the rest of your family, reading on your iPad, you are suddenly hot and breathless. You wonder whether it is the mask or the appearance of symptoms you have been dreading, the symptoms for which the CDC advises you to watch in the “precautions” column.

Finally, this dreading and waiting is of course what having been exposed is all about. There is no way of expressing the condition that is not passive: “I was exposed.” There is no easy way of articulating your state that captures its relation to time, its ongoingness, its temporal confusions. I know when I was exposed, but I don’t know how long I will have to wait to find out if the exposure caused sickness. I have consulted multiple sources, all of which have different estimates of the incubation time for the virus. Some of the sources are outdated, and refer, if you look closely, to Delta and not to currently-circulating variants. Others suggest that Omicron is more efficient, quicker to infect, and that the Omicron sub-variants “may” be quicker still. Most of the stories are not, in the CDC parlance, “up to date”—how could they be in the long middle, the medias res, of the pandemic? I have read estimates of the incubation period, and thus this period of suspension, that range from 2-14 days, always with the caveat “most cases.” When I finally come across a chart comparing variants with colorful timelines, I notice that the horizontal axis, although clearly meant to represent time, is neither labelled nor divided in any way.  Wearily, you turn from popular science articles to actual studies, but even those that you understand are often in temporal limbo: either outdated or “pre-reviewed.”  You cannot read your way out of this—unless, of course, you read Trollope instead of popular science.

As you wait, as you cancel appointments, your mind grows a little clearer. You are not afraid of the infection itself. So many people you know have recently had COVID, presumably Omicron, and even those who are older or who have health conditions have gotten through the initial infection just fine. You are terrified though, of long COVID, by which you mean both the mysterious and all-too-common persistence of symptoms in the vaccinated and unvaccinated, and also the long-term effects on the vascular, neurological, and endocrine symptoms of COVID survivors that studies are beginning to reveal. At one point, just a few months ago, you thought that getting COVID might be the end of waiting, but of course it would just be the beginning. For many people (and the estimates even from reliable places vary wildly) a COVID infection is the beginning of something worse.

As with lockdown, time plays tricks on the exposed. Exposure has its one very specific experience of time, its own temporality. This was to be a strangely social week; as you erase the dinners and brunches and breakfast meetings from your calendar you marvel that they existed at all. Bereft of appointments, days swim into one another. But, unlike during the lockdown, the day of the week is also crucial: “Tuesday” becomes “Day 3 of exposure,” Friday, Day 5, etc. You test yourself every other day, although you are not sure it will be all that informative. It helps, though, to keep track. You search the city for the most efficient PCR tests (less waiting!), as your university has decided that the pandemic is over when the undergraduates left after graduation day.

You hope that when this temporality ends—in 5 days, or 11, or even in 14—that you will not have entered another one: day 5 of symptoms, say, or day 170 of long COVID.