Q is for Quarantine

 The text arrived on a Wednesday, from one of our neighbors.

Guys, I just got back from the doctors with [Axl’s best friend] - thought he had allergies but went for a strep test just in case - AND he has covid. Not aware of when or how he was exposed - hopefully all your kids are okay but wanted to let you know ASAP.

My reaction was something like well, finally. It had begun to seem strange, as close as we now are to the pandemic’s second birthday, that we had not received this sort of news yet.

There had been a brief flutter of concern, way back in April of 2020, when a friend, Stan, dropped off some hand-me-down toys (a skateboard, a scooter) for the kids (enduring the first month of the first round of “remote instruction”), then called later to say he would be getting tested because Roy, a mutual friend of ours who happened to be an ER nurse, had just turned up positive. Stan and Roy had talked on Roy’s porch for fifteen or so minutes just prior to the toy hand-off, which felt ominous given that this was at a point in the pandemic when I was still feeling it necessary to scrub our groceries with Lysol wipes before bringing them inside. Stan turned out negative, however, and we all moved on.

Petra went for her own coronavirus test just a few weekends ago. What had started out feeling like allergies on Friday was, by Sunday morning, starting to feel like something more than allergies. She didn’t have a fever, and—given that she is vaccinated—COVID-19 seemed like one of the statistically least likely illnesses that she might be suffering from. Still, she didn’t want to go back to work on Monday without making sure she wouldn’t be spreading a potentially deadly disease among her spottily vaccinated coworkers, so she decided to seek out a test.

Given the dire state of the pandemic in West Virginia, getting tested on a Sunday in the Waldhurst area was surprisingly difficult. Walgreen’s wasn’t offering tests due to being shorthanded, and the CVS was closed. If you didn’t mind paying for an ER visit, you could get one at the hospital, but the drive-through testing tent that had once been a fixture in that institution’s parking lot had been long since shut down.

The only option we could locate was an urgent-care clinic just outside town. There were several dozen cars  in a long line snaking through the parking lot by the time Petra arrived. She ended up waiting about two hours for her test, inching along in our car and kicking herself for not thinking to both fill the gas tank and empty her bladder before setting out. But her test was negative. Instead of COVID, she turned out to be suffering from a good-old-fashioned cold.

Otherwise, no significant COVID scares in this household in all this time. No reports of close encounters with anyone who had gone on to test positive, no other instances of worrying symptoms. It’s been almost two years of pronounced good health (physical, at least, if not mental)—an unsurprising result of most of us simply staying home most of the time.

With this news about the neighbor boy in hand, we next needed to establish what we were supposed to do about it. What were the chances that Axl was actually infected? How likely was it that Belle, Petra, and I might be? Was it in any sense required that we now test Axl—and then what about the rest of us? In other words, what exactly were parents in our situation recommended/urged/required to do with news like this?As anyone knows who has wrestled with these kinds of pandemic-related questions, finding answers is not exactly straightforward.

As far as what one is required to do, the answer is not much. In West Virginia, there are currently no statewide executive orders or laws in place requiring any pandemic-related precautions or actions in response to illness or infection (although, in what passes for good news in these strange times, there are no laws forbidding any specific precautions—yet).

In stark contrast with my obsessive blow-by-blow monitoring, last fall, of coronavirus news and changes to state and local policies, I had pretty much switched off since getting my vaccine. Somehow I had formed the vague sense that West Virginia generally and our county school system specifically were “following CDC recommendations,” so I started on that organization’s website.

At this late date in the pandemic, and given how much is at stake, you might assume that parents in this sort of situation can consult a single, flowchart-style web page on the CDC site that would lead them through a series of yes/no questions and to a clear, concrete recommendation as to the appropriate reaction to this sort of news.

You would be disappointed. To get the initial answers I was looking for, I ended up working my way through four different CDC pages. There was the general one about “protecting yourself and others,” which seemed to be the original/ur-page on pandemic precautions for the general public; there was a newer page offering “interim public health recommendations for fully vaccinated people,” which was informative, despite Axl’s unvaccinated status, in its contrasts with the more general one; there was a page that went into detail about “quarantine and isolation” (per the CDC, “you quarantine when you might have been exposed to the virus, [but] you isolate when you have been infected with the virus, even if you don’t have symptoms”);  and there was a page entitled “Know What to Expect at Your Child’s K-12 School or Early Care and Education Program."

To round all of this out, I turned to the websites of our local and state education authorities for their, respectively, School Reentry Guidance and School Reentry and Guidance.

The first question was how to define what had happened to Axl. 

 Reviewing these materials, we determined that he seemed to fit the description of having been in “close contact”—that is, 15 or more minutes in any 24-hour period less than six feet away— with his infected friend, thus triggering the need for some sort of quarantine. Axl, the friend in question, and two other boys had jumped for hours on a backyard trampoline on Labor Day Monday; he and one of the other boys had been inside the sick boy’s house for a half hour or so that same day; and, on Tuesday, he and this boy had sat across from each other at lunch in the school cafeteria.

Interestingly, it seemed from the CDC website that, although fifteen minutes eating lunch with his friend would alone have been enough to qualify Axl as having had “close contact with someone who has COVID-19,” sitting next to each other in class for the entire rest of the day would not have—provided that both boys “correctly and consistently wore well-fitting masks the entire time” (an impossibility at lunch, of course).

Under the exact same circumstances, however, a teacher or any other adult in the classroom would have been considered to have had close contact with the sick boy—even if the adult, too, been “properly and consistently” wearing a mask—and would thus have been recommended to quarantine. But only by the CDC. Because our county has imposed a universal mask mandate in the schools, the applicable guidance from the state education department was that “quarantining students and staff who have been exposed to a person with COVID-19 is NOT [emphasis theirs] required if masks are worn at the point of exposure.”

The state education department’s guidance document also puts a slightly different gloss on the role of masks in preventing transmission overall. Although the CDC’s guidance assumes a greatly reduced transmission risk if “well-fitting” masks are worn “correctly and consistently,” the state document seems to assume that the same benefits are achieved simply by requiring masks at all: “Students attending a county [sic] with a universal mask requirement and are [sic] unvaccinated will need to quarantine if within six feet of a confirmed case in high-risk areas such as cafeterias, extracurricular settings where mask [sic] are not worn.”

I don’t know about you, but I have yet to see very many children wearing “well-fitting” masks, and I doubt very much that even those who have such masks manage to wear them “correctly and consistently” throughout a school day, but here we are

So what was Axl’s quarantine supposed to look like, anyway?

The local school system’s guidance document does not contain guidelines for what to do if a child is exposed to a positive case outside of school.

“Within the school, if an individual tests positive for COVID-19, students/employees who are  exposed to this positive case will NOT be required to quarantine IF they are wearing their masks. Contact tracing will not be required. (Because they will all be wearing masks).”

An unvaccinated employee in Axl’s exact circumstances is supposed to “quarantine for 7 days from LAST date of exposure and on day 7 may have a PCR or antigen test and if that test is negative they may return to work if symptom free.”

This differed slightly from CDC guidance, which—in a section headlined “You may be able to shorten your quarantine”—advises that someone in this situation may return to work or school ON day 7 if a test performed on day 5 or later returns a negative result.  

As for what the rest of the family was supposed to do? Nothing, it appeared. Nowhere could I find an official recommendation that members of the same household as someone who’d been in “close contact” with a positive case were supposed to be tested, isolate themselves, or stay home. There was only this impossible piece of advice: “If possible, stay away from people you live with.”

After sleeping on all of this, we formed the following plan early on the morning after receiving the news about Axl’s friend.

With Tuesday being the last possible day Axl had been exposed to his friend, we would keep him home for a week and consider the following Wednesday the first day he could return to school, assuming a negative result on a test we planned to have performed on the preceding Monday. Along the way, we would, of course, “monitor for symptoms.”

If there was a scientific basis for doing all of the above, we further reasoned, there was also a scientific basis for having both children skip their usual weekly sleepovers at my mother’s house and—most tragic of all—cancelling Axl’s planned birthday gathering on Saturday.

Considering that his birthday party (and his constantly evolving plans therefor) is just about the only thing the boy talks about starting around two months out, Axl received the news of its cancellation with startling aplomb.

Then again, there weren’t actually going to be that many changes. In a normal year, there would have been a gruesome group sleepover with three invitees from the neighborhood—the infected boy and the rest of the trampoline gang, as it happened—but the parents of one of those boys had already announced a policy of “trying to minimize nonessential indoor exposures,” so they wouldn’t have allowed their son to participate even before the infection scare, much less now.

So even before the quarantine was triggered, plans had already shifted to, essentially, a virtual sleepover, i.e., meeting up with each other on a Minecraft Realms server with voice communication over Discord, with no parentally imposed (virtual) curfew. The only planned activity that now couldn’t happen was meeting up beforehand to play outside, the cancellation of which didn’t seem to be a major disappointment.

In the days leading up to Axl’s birthday, the sick boy didn’t get any sicker, his only symptom remaining the scratchy throat that had made his mother suspect allergies or incipient strep. None of the other boys developed any symptoms at all. Nonetheless, they were all at home in that glorious childhood condition: when the adults all agree that you need to stay home “sick,” but you actually feel just fine.

For students, the downside of the modern sick day—especially during school year two of a pandemic during which everyone has gotten plenty of practice with the mechanics of remote “instruction”—is that modern technology enables teachers to transmit assignments to them and permits them to reasonably expect that they’ll match the pace of the students who are still in class.

The upside of the modern sick day—again, from the point of view of the students who are staying home—also has to do with technology. Axl has found that, free of all of the roll-taking and class-changing and other friction of typical days spent actually inside the middle-school building, he only needs to spend about two hours on the work his teachers post to Google Classrooms. 

 That leaves plenty of time for playing Minecraft, in other words. And playing Minecraft would be fun enough even if he were doing it alone, but this week he didn’t have to. Each day, whenever he had completed the work his teachers had posted and while he was marking time waiting for any additional assignments to roll in, he was able to find his friends on the Minecraft Realms server, establish comms via Discord, and basically have about as much fun as he can currently imagine having.

I mourn certain aspects of this, recognizing as I now do the value of enduring what were, for me, those long stretches of boredom on the afternoons of days spent home “sick” from school. I had no way to play video games and there was nothing on TV but soap operas, so I had to read or draw or nap or wander around the house or stare out the window, and I now understand the great gift that this kind of solitude is for a child—all the more valuable now for being rarer than unicorns in most of what we allege to be “developed” countries.

But so it goes. Perhaps we should just let the children enjoy themselves until the electricity finally stops being generated. Lord knows they and their children will live through harder times than we ever knew.

Axl was turning twelve, by the way, an accomplishment of particular significance relative to the pandemic and current vaccine protocols. On Monday morning, the day after his birthday, we took him for a coronavirus test. The result was negative, but the doctor wouldn’t give him his first shot yet.

We made an appointment for that Friday and crossed our fingers in hopes that there wouldn't be another infection scare in the meantime.

Almanac: Waldhurst in September

 THAT TERRIBLE GRINDING NOISE you are hearing is the sound of mental gears being stripped across the country. A few months back, all of this pandemic stuff was supposed to be over and it even seemed possible the nation might be falling in love with a Democratic president. We took off our masks and started making plans for the summer and for the future of our society.

Then, the delta variant reared its head and Kabul fell and everything went to shit.

The two things will forever be connected in my mind. About a year ago, an old friend of mine, displaced by the pandemic from his assistant-dean-of-something-or-other position at a stateside university, took a job at the American University of Afghanistan. (Unsurprisingly, just about no stateside universities were expanding their work forces during the pandemic. The few that were probably had hundreds if not thousands of qualified candidates to choose from. This does not seem to have been the case in Kabul.)

Taking this new job seemed like a dangerous move even a year ago. For a quick gut check about how far south things have gone in that poor country, first try to recall what you would have thought of a friend’s decision to move to Kabul in the fall of 2020. Next, consider how desperately anyone in Afghanistan not currently wearing a beard would probably give to return to those comparably halcyon days now.

I dropped my friend a line via Facebook Messenger in June, back when the pandemic felt over and I couldn’t have told you where my mask was.

“How you making it?” I asked. Vaguely aware that the Taliban was notching victories and expanding control, even as the U.S. departure date drew nearer, I was thinking more about explosions and gunfire than microbes.

“7 days in hospital w[ith] Delta variant and pneumonia,” came his reply. “Had better days.”

Ten out of the university’s 13 international staff members were sick with COVID-19, he told me. He was one of four who had ended up in the hospital with it.

My initial reaction was skepticism. Surely this simply meant he and the others hadn’t been vaccinated yet? It wouldn’t have astounded me to learn that the vaccine rollout in Kabul had been limited.

“There are 27 COVID patients [in this hospital],” he typed. “All vaccinated and all w[ith] pneumonia.”

This was the moment when I first began to understand that the delta variant might pose a real problem.

My friend spent 14 days in the hospital—he sent me pictures of an unfriendly cat on its daily rounds, squat toilets, armed soldiers, and windowless safe rooms—before finally testing negative and flying out of the country for some rest and relaxation.

Then he went back to Kabul.

“Tell me you are out of there,” I messaged him on August 16, the day after the city fell.

“I got out my friend,” he wrote back. “…completely [b]roken seeing all we left behind. Completely broken.”

IT USED TO BE THAT, after summer break ended, you could simply say your kids were back in school. Now you have to specify. Are they actually walking/riding the bus to the actual brick-and-mortar building? Or are they just putting on a non-pajama shirt and logging onto Google Classroom in the living room?

So to be clear: Here in Waldhurst, the county schools opened for “in-person instruction” about two weeks ago, and the delta variant be damned. After a year of home/virtual schooling, Axl was starting middle school, Belle was entering fourth grade, and Petra and I couldn’t wait to see them go, vaccinations or no.

The state education department does still offer the virtual school that Axl and Belle “attended” last spring, after our county school board abruptly terminated its local remote-schooling option in January. A friend recently asked if they would be continuing in the state program this fall.

I explained the risk/benefit analysis we’d performed.

On one hand, the risk from attending in-person instruction seems to be of approximately the same order of magnitude as riding in cars, which of course we make our kids do all the time without any real concern. (Am I calculating that wrong? The CDC says that, in 2018, about 600 kids died in car accidents; meanwhile, NPR reports that, from the beginning of the pandemic through July, only 358 “children” have died from COVID, although apparently our 50 states are not all using the same definition of “child.”) 

On the other hand, another year of virtual schooling would likely have led to the murder/suicide destruction of our entire family, or at least my final descent into alcoholism. (There's the punchline, if that's what you were looking for.)

Out of our deep and abiding love for our children, then, we sent them off to school.

AT LEAST OUR COUNTY SCHOOL BOARD had imposed a 100-percent masking requirement for students and staff. There are no statewide mask mandates here, our governor having dusted off that occasional Republican talking-point-of-convenience about the superiority of local control and decision making. We’d just be tearing each other apart if I imposed a mask order statewide, he said. (Instead, we are now the state where the infection rate is growing fastest.)

So, every morning, a long line of masked children waits to get on the bus on the next street over. By some critics’ reckoning, this should be ravaging both their physical and mental health, but they seem to me like the same old bunch of happy-go-lucky hooligans as ever.

As vitriolic as the issue of mask-wearing is in so many places around the country, there didn’t seem to be much kerfuffle about the school board’s decision to mandate masks. If armed activists mobbed the board meeting or made death threats to the members, I haven’t heard about it.

There was at least one protest against the policy, led by a teacher from the more rural of the county’s two high schools. This teacher has, let us say, something of a history. He has run for governor several times on the ticket of the Constitution Party and also for sheriff—“constitutional sheriff,” naturally. A few years back, he was giving reporters defensive, even admiring comments about a “sovereign citizen” friend of his arrested in 2015 over an ahead-of-its-time plan to overthrow the state government. From time to time, he drives his loudspeaker-equipped car through the streets, monologizing about the Bible (he’s for it) and the state of religious freedom in this great nation (he is concerned but also apparently unable to detect irony).

MANY OF US VACCINATED PEOPLE feel uncertain how much good we are doing or need to be doing with our masks. The one I wear most often, because it’s comfortable, is clearly not doing much for me or anyone else. Because it’s comfortable. I can’t summon up much worry, however. Despite my friend’s experience in Kabul, my read of the current evidence is that, statistically speaking, I have only the most vanishingly small chance of getting noticeably sick or causing anyone else to become so. When I wear my comfortable mask, it is mainly to support local health authorities in trying to convince the unvaccinated to do so, not to mention my desire to avoid starring in some local crank’s meme about local government employees who don’t follow official advice.

My mask wearing serves more to send a message than anything else, in other words, but that message is only an implicit one. By contrast, there are some people who see wearing a mandatory square of fabric on their faces as yet another opportunity—in addition to their bumper stickers, flags, ball caps, and t-shirts—to broadcast the opinions they worry the rest of us are disadvantaged by not hearing.

In the early days of the pandemic, the message masks I spotted on the streets or Instagram were what you might call pro-precaution, e.g., Back that ass up—6 feet, that is, etc. As lockdowns and mandates began to chafe more and more, however, entrepreneurs saw an opportunity to separate anti-but-still-mandated-maskers from their money, too.

On the first day of school, Axl spotted one of these on a fellow student. This mask is as useless as Joe Biden, read the message emblazoned on the kid’s mask. On the second day, he’d switched to Worn by force, not by fear. (As citizens of the most fear-struck nation ever to be mistaken for a superpower, many Americans seem obsessed with denying how afraid they constantly feel, but—if I had to guess—my money would be on the position that this kid's parents' probably break into a cold sweat even thinking about driving into Pittsburgh for a day trip to the Carnegie Science Museum.)

The next week, though, Axl said the boy seemed to have switched to disposable masks. I hope this doesn’t mean the school has told him that his mask messages are “disruptive” and ordered him to stop. I wouldn’t want this student and his parents to have the pleasure of seeing their fever fantasy of being unconstitutionally oppressed proved true.

BELLE'S ELEMENTARY SCHOOL made it through four days of in-person instruction, then switched to remote for the next four days after too many staff members ended up on quarantine. This went surprisingly smoothly, but only because my mother reopened the one-room schoolhouse she operated most of last year to help me and Petra manage. It also went smoothly because (1) all the kids have county-issued Chromebooks this year and (2) both teachers and students gained experience with Google Classroom last year.

Axl’s school is still open, for now. We’ll see how long that lasts.