Entry 576: A Week Later

I'm feeling much better now than when I wrote my previous post. I'm not quite 100%, but I'm close. Plus, what even is 100%? Have you ever felt 100% a day in your life? It's like, if I feel tired and sore and a bit of congested is that the lingering effects of Covid, or is that just how I am most the time? It's impossible to say.

Whatever the case, I'm glad to be mostly out of the woods. It was awful. It didn't feel like being vaccinated even helped. Maybe it did -- I dunno. I'm still alive and never even considered going to the hospital, which are the two most important things. It's not unheard of for Covid to kill a seemingly healthy man about my age. But it's also not unheard of -- in fact, it's the majority case -- for vaccinated people to not contract the disease even if they've been exposed to it, or to not get sick if they do contract it. I'm a first-hand witness to this. S actually came up positive in a retest, but other than feeling a little crummy one night, she was completely asymptomatic. So, I seem to have gotten a raw deal, if not the rawest of deals.

Amazingly, the kids tested negative two times, and they never show any prolonged symptoms. Lil' S1 got sick and was bedridden, but just for one day, and Lil' S2 had a bit of a cough, but that was all. As weird as it sounds, I really think they caught a different bug at the same time we got Covid. It's the only theory that really makes sense to me. There were too many people exposed to one another to get sick and test negative for it to be anything else -- our friend's youngest child, both the boys, and also S's sister, who's staying with us, tested negative but got knocked out of commission for a day. That's four people and seven total negative tests (everybody but S's sister got tested twice). There is just no way there were that many false negatives.

S, however, is convinced that Lil' S1 (and possibly Lil' S2) had Covid and somehow eluded a positive test. It led to the following conversation.

Me: I can't believe the kids got through this without getting Covid. They were locked in a car with me for seven hours while I was positive.
Her: Well, I think Lil' S1 got it.
Me: But he tested negative, twice, and it wasn't the rapid testing.
Her: Dr. C said that those tests can still be wrong.
Me: Yeah, but even if they're not totally accurate, it would be pretty unlikely, probablistically, to get it wrong twice. Plus, he only got sick for a day, and a bunch of other people got sick and tested negative. You think those tests would be wrong for everybody?
Her: I dunno. I'm just telling you my opinion. That's how I feel. You can't argue with how I feel.
Me: It's not your opinion! It's medical testing! 

This gives a good glimpse into how totally normal people can be anti-vaxxers. S is not an anti-vaxxer and she is usually much more rational than the average person, but even she can get locked into a position that is probably not true. It's usually a combination of a few factors. One is that you see something bad and weird happen first-hand, maybe to somebody you love. You know what happened to your son, because he's your son and you were there, not the doctor or the government bureaucrat. It's like the dad in the documentary Bigger, Stronger, Faster* who is convinced steroids made his son commit suicide because he saw it with his own eyes. (Never mind that, say, untreated depression is a much more likely cause of suicide among teens.) Personal narrative, especially among parents, is a huge anti-science driver.

Another factor is that the science is often legitimately unknown or confusing. How many different things have we been told about Covid since the start of the pandemic? Don't wear a mask, wear a mask, wash your hands, hand-washing isn't that important, don't be around people outside, it's okay to be around people outside, vaccinated people aren't likely to spread the disease, vaccinated people can easily spread the disease, etc., etc. It's not illogical for people to be skeptical of the latest thing they are hearing. (But skepticism does not mean blanket distrust.)

Also, most people are terrible at assessing and evaluating things in terms of probabilities. It's totally possible Lil' S1 got Covid and the tests were wrong. It's just unlikely, so far as we will ever know. But most people don't think in terms of unlikely or likely. They have three modes -- is, is not, might be. Something either is true, it's not true, or it might be true or not true with roughly 50-50 chance, so both sides are equally valid.

Lastly, the "dig-in factor" is huge. People just don't like being told what to do or told they're wrong, even when they are (and maybe deep down inside they know it). If I caught S in a different mood maybe she would have just agreed with me, but for whatever reason, she pushed back, and once you push back you often find yourself really pushing back, even if it's something you don't even have strong feelings about. I see this all the time online in stupid comment wars. I have even done it before myself. I've gotten caught up and made silly arguments I didn't even believe in, because I couldn't "let the other side win." Nobody is beyond this, and it's one reason I quit Facebook and almost never go on Twitter. We all know a huge reason right-wing conservatives are less apt to get the Covid vaccine is because left-wing liberals are almost uniformly in favor of it. That's the power of the "dig-in factor." Many would rather get Covid than give in to "liberal tyranny" (i.e., a pandemic-free society).

By the way, if you want a good life-hack here's one: Evaluate ideas based on their merits, not on the politics or identity of the people pushing them. Concerning Covid, I was an early adopter of being in public as long as you are outside. Some natural experiments (e.g., the BLM protests) convinced me that this was relatively safe. That's why when a bunch of people, primarily on the left, were scolding governors, primarily on the right, for keeping their beaches open, I was not among them. I figured beaches were some of the safest places to go. Just make sure if you do go that you aren't sharing a house with a kid who has Covid.

Until next time...