What Covid was Like at Our House in May 2022

I say “what covid WAS like at our house” loosely. The fact is that it is still IN our house.

Today is the 3rd Sunday since we found out we were sharing our home with the Rona.

Our family gets sick regularly from various cold viruses, but we always test negative. So when I hear sniffles in my house, testing for covid was not even my first thought or response anymore. It was more like an afterthought.

My oldest son’s sniffles began the Friday before Mother’s Day.

No one paid it much attention. By Saturday morning, he was like, “Yeah, I’m SICK.”

By Sunday morning, we felt like ALL of our children had varying levels of cold virus symptoms. We had our Mother’s Day church service in our own living room, watching church on YouTube. Alan and I were both fine, and we teach small group Bible studies on Sunday morning. So after we watched the church service, Alan and I headed to our classes to teach.

Sunday afternoon we thought, “Well, we’d better spot test one or two of the children to make sure they don’t have covid before we decide whether or not to send them all to school.”

They have ALL already missed so much school this year that they were not about to miss Monday for allergies.

We tested the two sickest sounding kids and waited for the results. Daniel, the sickest one, came back negative. Joshua, the second sickest, came back positive.

Alan looked at the test strip, his eyes got big, and he held it up for me to see, “It’s positive. He ACTUALLY has covid!”

“What!??”

Then we tested all the kids and ourselves. Everyone else was negative.

So then we thought, “Well, we have never seen a positive result before. Maybe it is a false positive.” We retested Daniel and Joshua with a different test brand. (It was so hard to believe Dan was negative too because he had a very sore throat and ears.)

Again, only Joshua’s was positive.

Okay, so this is real. Everyone in the family knew and was buzzing about it, except for Joshua. He was still outside, playing basketball in the street.

It has to be a very sick day for him to not play basketball, sicker than covid, apparently.

On Monday, I called the schools and consulted with the nurses of our three different schools. We made a quarantine schedule for each kid.

Honestly, each school nurse counted it slightly differently, but the basic guideline now is this:

• When you test positive, you must isolate at home for 5 days.

• After that, you may go out, but you should wear a mask for five more days. You may still be a little contagious.

• If you are fully vaccinated, but exposed to someone in your home with covid, you do not have to quarantine.
• You are only fully vaccinated if you have had your booster.

Spoiler alert: whatever variant of the rona this was has no respect for our vaccines.

Did the vaccine help us to get the disease less severely maybe? Perhaps. There’s no way for me to know how much it helped. All four of the vaccinated people at our house still got sick.

We had varying levels of illness. No one got off scott-free, except the youngest of the family. JD, age eight, never did test positive. His brother, age eleven, was the least sick of all of us once he did finally test positive, about two weeks after Joshua’s initial positive test.

The youngest two boys were the least sick of all of us, and that is why I had not vaccinated them in the first place. I figured the covid would not phase them much after I saw how they acted like the flu was nothing a couple of years ago.

I know that hospitals have been very serious about publicizing the results they are seeing. Most people who end up in ICUs are adults, and they are unvaccinated. So the vaccine is still a good idea. It’s better than nothing, but just know that you will probably still eventually get covid.

This article is on the CDC website, and it’s all about the effectiveness of vaccines.

It is not true where it says, “Most people who get COVID-19 are unvaccinated.”

Going off the sample of the people I know personally on my street and in my family, I can tell you that at this point most of us have gotten covid whether we were vaccinated or not. I think it is getting less and less effective, but that is just my opinion from what I’m seeing.

My best tip from this variant (in May 2022) is to not trust your Covid test result until day 3 of having a scratchy throat.

Most of us saw a couple of negative results before we got our positive one, usually around the third day of having a scratchy throat.

Number One Symptom at Our House:

All five of us did get a scratchy throat. It was even a sore throat for some of us. Mine was only scratchy.

Nasal congestion was also present, but it wasn’t all that bad. If all you have is a runny nose, that is probably not covid.

My worst symptom was a low grade fever.

Now here’s the weird part, but you have to keep in mind that literally EVERYTHING gives me a fever. If I do not sleep enough, fever. When my allergies are bad, fever. Somebody hurt my feelings, fever. haha! Okay, kidding, but you get the idea.

For seven days, I had a low grade temperature of around 99.5. This is just enough that no one takes it seriously. You still have to handle all your responsibilities, yet you do feel tired and run down.

Then on Monday, two days before I finally got a positive test, the fever cranked up to 100. That’s still low enough to not count as an official fever but high enough to make you want to go lay down and go to sleep. Done. Done. Done. Done with everything. I’m going to lay down.

Only when you have a whole household to run, you don’t get to do that as much as you’d like to.

The fever finally went away, for the most part, Monday, a full eight days after it arrived.

Phew!

Other symptoms:

Two out of five of us lost our taste and smell. (Thankfully, I was not one of them.)

One person had stomach issues. It was me, so we won’t go into specifics…I have some dignity to maintain..

Everyone here had some fatigue.

Some of us had headaches.

No one needed any prescription medicines.

Our local military health clinic was unusually helpful during this. They called and checked on their patient, offered advice, and offered prescription meds.

None of us coughed much.

To me, covid 2022 was like the flu, but not as bad.

This is a truly deadly disease for at-risk people. No one in our home is elderly, diabetic, obese, or suffering from at risk health conditions, so we knew that when it came to our house we would probably be fine, and THANKFULLY we were.

This summer I will feel less paranoid about visiting my at-risk family members because now that we’ve had it, we are truly immune for a few months.