I got diagnosed with Covid this week, days before the Memorial Day holiday weekend. It’s my first Covid bout. I’m not really surprised it finally caught up with me after 4-plus years. Early on in the pandemic, I heard one Covid authority say that, eventually, we’ll all get it, one time or another. What’s unpleasant is to get it just before the Memorial Day holiday weekend. I obviously had to pull out of several very nice family plans. But I suppose there’s never really a good time to get Covid.

I find interesting that almost everyone asked me “how I got it.” I have absolutely no idea. Very few people in NYC these days are wearing masks. So it could have been just about anybody with whom I came into contact last week in a store, on a subway. Who knows? I did sit in the back seat of a warm, airless Uber last week (until I opened a window) behind a sullen masked-up driver. (Was he sullen because he had a fever? Or just because he was a sullen Uber driver?) Did I get into the back seat of a car filled with those purple Covid variant spike proteins floating around like so many dandelion puffs? By the way, this new variant, has been identified as FLiRT. Its name has nothing to do with any playful socializing it does but rather with technical names for its mutations. https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/3-things-to-know-about-flirt-new-coronavirus-strains

For whatever it’s worth, I had the latest Covid booster 6 weeks ago, so my immune system was as primed as I could make it. So far, my symptoms appear to be at the milder end of the spectrum, thanks to trusty Paxlovid. https://www.paxlovid.com I think that Paxlovid deserves its own blog post when I’m done taking it next week. But, at this time, let me say about its metallic aftertaste that walking around feeling as if you are sucking on iron filings is very unpleasant. For the record, however, it is still a better sensory experience than having full-blown Covid symptoms.

So, enjoy your Memorial Day holiday weekend 2024 and eat a S’mores for me. By the way, if only they made Paxlovid taste like a S’mores, then we’d really have a treatment for this.