Jim Shella: As emergency expires, I’m still COVID-aware

The Biden administration has ended the public health emergency for COVID-19. It ended Thursday.

President Trump declared the emergency in March 2020.

The 38 months in between have been life-changing for all of us. We all have a COVID story. This is mine.

It begins in January 2020. That’s when I listened to The Daily podcast from The New York Times and heard science reporter Donald G. McNeil Jr. warn that a pandemic was on the way. As I recall, he made predictions that were horrifyingly accurate. He said we would all know someone who gets sick, if we don’t get sick ourselves. And, I recall him saying that it was likely we would all know someone who dies. I believed him.

I was already homebound recovering from eye surgery but was happy to avoid public gatherings, nevertheless. The virus still found me.

First of all, I know several people who died from COVID, and I attended the funeral for at least one of them, a man who was relatively young and healthy but unvaccinated.

I also got sick. In the fall of 2021, I got a cold that turned into an upper respiratory infection, one that was very different from any I had experienced. I coughed up large amounts of mucus, to the degree that my wife (then my fiancé) insisted that I go to the emergency room. Doctors tested me for the flu, strep throat, pneumonia and COVID. All the tests came back negative. One of the doctors told me the most likely reality was that the COVID test was a false negative. So, COVID.

I was hoarse for weeks, even after the other symptoms went away.

Then, in February 2022, I was slated to undergo back surgery. I was required to take a COVID test first. It came up positive. COVID case number two. This time, I could recall a case of the sniffles the week before I took the test but nothing more. Keep in mind that I am vaccinated and boosted.

Like many of you, my house was filled with face masks and hand sanitizers. I avoided public gatherings and practiced social distancing.

Now, all of that is in the past. My daughter recently underwent surgery, and I found there is no longer a mask mandate even in the hospital. Restaurants have gone back to printed menus instead of QR codes, and the disposable utensils are gone. You see a mask here and there, but otherwise, the virus is in the rearview mirror.

Yet I remain COVID-aware. I got a cold a few weeks ago and felt the need to test. It came up negative, but I still have a drawer full of instant COVID tests and no plans to dispose of them.

I also plan to get another booster shot, even though I now have an occasional ringing in my ears. I read an article that says the ringing might be a side effect of the vaccine. I don’t care. If the shots kept me alive, I can live with it.

More than 1 million people in America have died from COVID. In Indiana, 26,000 died. So far.

That’s in spite of record development of vaccines and government distribution of them.

Almost 7 million perished worldwide. That’s a fraction of the 50 million who died from the Spanish flu a century ago but still an alarming number.

And so, I feel lucky.•

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Shella hosted WFYI’s “Indiana Week in Review” for 25 years and covered Indiana politics for WISH-TV for more than three decades. Send comments to ibjedit@ibj.com.

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