Folsom: Ready to be Back After COVID | Opinion | emissourian.com
As I write this, I’m on my final day of quarantine for COVID-19. I am definitely ready to get out of the house, but it hasn’t been an easy time.
I haven’t been super sick. I’ve worked from home the entire time. At worst, I felt like I had a really bad cold. My only slight fever came the first night after I had symptoms.
In fact, I would have probably gone back to work a couple days after I started having symptoms, if I wasn’t, you know, contagious with a deadly virus.
But that doesn’t mean I’ve felt great. I’ve had a sore throat off and on the entire time. I had a major coughing spell just yesterday and am still a bit congested.
I had a poisonous taste in the back of my throat up until the last couple days. I’m glad it’s finally gone.
I’ve left the house exactly once since I took my COVID test Wednesday, Feb. 24. We took a Sunday drive down to a lake near Potosi, not going near anyone. One thing I noticed was all the political signs that had gone up just since I was previously out of the house five days earlier. Definitely a reminder to get on my election stories.
I also was able to talk to the Franklin County Health Department about rescheduling my second vaccine shot. I am supposed to go to Mercy Clinic for that.
I posted my previous column, about my initial thoughts on getting COVID, to my Facebook page and got a very nice response. I heard from friends I rarely hear from, learning that several of them have dealt with this terrible disease as well.
l had to hide one of my friends from seeing some of my Facebook photos because she called us out last summer when I posted photos of our various activities, saying COVID cases were rising and we were putting ourselves at risk. After I posted my column, she told me she got sick with COVID in October after her husband got it working at an election site in Texas (She also lost power for several days in the recent winter storm, so she has seen the worst of Texas.)
I also got an email from a reader about my column. It … wasn’t as nice:
“What a stupid article! You got COVID from the ‘vaccine’… i. e. ALLOWING THE VIRUS TO BE INJECTED INTO YOUR BODY!!!
“Stop playing the political game regarding COVID … you are appearing very foolish by blaming everything except the vaccine for you testing positive for COVID.
“Here (attached) is how you should be writing … you know … truthfully!!!”
Attached was a story called “31 reasons I won’t take a COVID vaccine” from a site called LifeSiteNews. I’d never heard of LifeSiteNews, so I looked it up and found it has been accused of peddling “far-right conspiracy theories about the rigged election, ‘leftist agitators’ in the crowd at the Capitol, and COVID-19 being a bioweapon,” according to the Canadian Anti-Hate Network.
LifeSiteNews was even banned from YouTube because of consistently posting false COVID-19 information.
I mean, how bad do your conspiracies have to be to get banned from YouTube, which is known for its conspiratorial videos?
I felt it was important to tell my story about getting COVID, so I can hopefully help people who get it themselves or maybe even help prevent someone from getting it. I put myself out there, so I’m not surprised to get some blowback.
But people shouldn’t be getting information about deadly diseases from far-right (or far-left) conspiracy sites. If you can, talk to your doctor, pharmacist or the health department about it, or at least go to news sources based in science.
As for me, I’m looking forward to getting back out in the community, taking some photos and getting the second vaccine shot.
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