All the COVID Things

Yesterday I told you that we have COVID in the house. 

Actual footage of coronavirus barging in on our family

If you're like me, you wanna know all the things. Who has it? Where'd they get it? What symptoms do they have? What's your blood type? 

So here's a little rundown on what's going on. 

On Saturday, January 9, Eva took a nap in the middle of the day and woke up feeling a bit warm. We gave her some Tylenol. I started looking up testing sites that were open on Saturday, just in case, but her fever cleared up and she was running around doing somersaults by dinner time. Just to be cautious, we stayed home from church on Sunday, but nothing else came of it. Eva was fine. 

My kids get little fevers like that from time to time, and they just feel warm for a bit and take a big nap, so we didn't worry about it further, and life went on. Come Monday, it didn't even cross our minds again.

On Wednesday, I had my kids tested for COVID for a research study. They were handing out gift cards, and we're the type of people who will happily spit in tubes for gift cards, so it just made sense. Prior to that, we'd never had any reason to be tested. 

On Saturday, the school nurse called and told me Eva had tested positive. I was completely shocked and literally speechless - in fact, the nurse kept checking to make sure I was still on the phone. It was trippy to listen to her rehearse all the details of isolation and quarantine while the child we were talking about was simultaneously spinning in circles in front of me with a cardboard box on her head. 

Shortly after that phone call, I got the phone call from the contact tracer with the Health Department. They considered Eva's "start date" the 9th, which was nice because we were already a week into her isolation time by the time we knew she had COVID. Unfortunately, she'd been around a few people, so I had to let some people know they'd been exposed, but most of her interactions for the week were masked, and school was out all week, so that helped. We have no idea where Eva might have gotten it. 

Since you can't really isolate a five-year-old, the COVID gurus told us that Eva would be okay to return to school on January 20, but the rest of us would need to quarantine for ten days after that (you are supposed to quarantine for ten days after your last exposure, which means our ten days continue beyond Eva's ten days because she's in our space all the time). That puts us at January 30th, which is a Saturday, so my older kids can't go back to school until February 1st. 

So today Eva could have returned to school, but I'm keeping her home for the rest of the week. Since she's in kindergarten, she needs to be dropped off and picked up at the door, and I can't walk her to and from the door because I'm "quarantined." I'm going to try to make arrangements for next week, though. 

Over the past few days, Eva has mentioned a couple of times that she can't taste her food. There was also a day when someone ripped a stinky fart in the room, and Eva (who usually has a very sensitive and accurate sniffer) said, "I can't smell it!" But other than that and the little fever, she hasn't had any symptoms.  

Everyone else is symptom-free so far. Scotty and I were tested this morning, and our results were negative. The kids were all tested again this afternoon, but we won't hear back on those for a few days. 

So until January 30, we're just hanging out at home.