BLOG: ‘Omicron will find just about everybody’ and it has just found me
On January 12, Dr. Anthony Fauci told us: “The highly contagious omicron variant will find just about everybody.”
On January 13, just the next day, omicron found me!
We have entered 2022, the beginning of the third year of the pandemic. Will 2022 witness the end of the pandemic? Time will tell.
In late 2021, the omicron variant first appeared in South Africa. From Day 1, it was clear that this new variant was very contagious, and it later proved to be the fastest and the most contagious of all the variants so far. But on the bright side, omicron appeared to be less virulent than earlier variants — amongst the fully vaccinated.
People around the world began to convince themselves that perhaps this would be a good sign; perhaps 2022 will witness the end of the pandemic. Since Omicron appeared in Africa, it has spread around the world. It kept the same behavior as that initial positive impression: more contagious, but less virulent. Scientists have consistently been reassuring people that perhaps this new variant may be a milestone: Fully vaccinated (and boosted) people have been proven to have milder (breakthrough) infection when contracting omicron.
But in his statement, Dr. Fauci stressed, “but vaccinated people will still fare better.”
When omicron found me, I was traveling, for an urgent 2-day trip. I arrived at my destination city on Wednesday, and was feeling great, just as normal. Next day, in the early morning, I began feeling unwell. Over a few hours, I pretty much developed all the known symptoms of a COVID-19 infection, except that I did not lose smell or taste, though I was congested, and it was difficult to evaluate smell, and I became nauseated and so it was hard to evaluate taste.
Well, I am a diagnostician, and although sometimes it is hard to diagnose oneself, by the late hours of the morning, I felt it was omicron.
I first did a rapid COVID-19 test: strongly positive. The rapid test had two vertical lines in the kit’s window. The sample is taken similar to the PCR test procedure, by nasal swab; I was not sure how I would be able to do the self-sampling. Once the specimen is dropped into the kit’s window, the first line to appear is the dark intense control result, the C-line. One should then start looking for the T-line to the right of the C-line. If it appears, the test is positive, no matter how faint it is. Obviously, the darker the T-line, the more likely that a large virus load is in the nasal cavity. The test instructions state that one should wait up to 15 minutes to see the T-line before concluding a negative result. When I did the test, inside the rental car so I would stay away from people, the T-line appeared within second and was very dark. Very positive!
Later in the day, I became more sick, dehydrated and febrile. And being alone in a different city, I had to drive myself to an urgent care as I was getting sicker. COVID-19 infection was confirmed clinically, and a PCR test was obtained that 4 days later came back positive.
I had to cancel my flight back to Detroit and was stranded in the destination city for quarantine, 5 days per recent CDC guidelines. Isn't life very funny/unpredictable?
I extended the stay from 2 days as planned to 8 days and, basically, was restricted to my hotel room, in isolation, and not allowed to leave the room except for emergency: No room cleaning, and I would request towels and coffee on the phone. My daughter in Illinois ordered my food, groceries and snacks to be delivered to the room. Finally, I am back home.
I learned that multiple staff members from my clinic came down with COVID-19 within the same time frame. And a family member also came down with mild symptoms and positive test.
Omicron was indeed finding just about each one of us, as Fauci said. But as Fauci and scientists are predicting, all of us — who were fully vaccinated and boosted — by now have recovered after having mild symptoms.
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