“Can you take us to the hospital?” I got the call from a very dear friend first thing one morning. A few days before had told her to call me if she needed anything. She and her husband had both been sick, and neither thought they had COVID. Even with COVID cases way down in our county, I wasn’t so sure.
Instinct kicked in, “Absolutely.” I didn’t hesitate to answer. When someone you love calls you for a ride to the hospital, would you tell them to call an ambulance instead? The thought didn’t cross my mind until well after I had dropped them at the ER curb.
It was only a 10-minute ride to Marin General Hospital from their house. Since I had been fully vaccinated, I was feeling okay about the ride. I still wore an N95 and a surgical mask over that, plus I had my passengers do the same. The husband was quite weak when I arrived at their house. He couldn’t manage to put the N95 on himself, so his wife helped. She got him in the backseat, then joined him. When I got in, I immediately rolled down the front windows and kept them down until we got to the hospital. On the freeway I rolled the windows halfway up, because it was pretty cold, then rolled them all the way down again when we got on Sir Francis Drake Blvd.
During the ride, the wife’s masks slipped down below her nose. I didn’t mention it. I felt reasonably safe with the wind blowing into the car and I craned my neck to position my masked face closer to the rushing air. I really didn’t want to take any chances, but I was rolling the dice none the less.
After dropping the couple off, I headed home. I still wasn’t thinking about all the potential implications of having been exposed to the deadly pathogen. As a fully vaccinated man in his mid-50’s I was still a candidate for a breakthrough infection. My wife and daughter at home had both also been fully vaccinated, but I would have felt like a monumental fatherhood failure if I brought the virus home. My daughter was going to be graduating from high school soon, and if I became infected, she wouldn’t be able to attend. COVID would be robbing her of yet another milestone during her senior year.
When I got home, I didn’t change my outfit. I didn’t take a shower or clean out my car. I had driven home with the windows open and figured that was good enough. I naively felt like the vaccine was my force field. My friends had not been vaccinated. They were not anti-vaxers, but they were vaccine hesitant and had been on the fence for a while. They were waiting to see what was happening, as the vaccine was so new and revolutionary. They saw what happened all right.
Later that that morning I gave the wife a ride back to her house. They both had been diagnosed with COVID and the husband was being admitted to the Intensive Care Unit. I figured I was okay to bring her home because I had already been somewhat exposed to her and would take the same precautions. This time I kept the windows all the way down on the freeway though. The wife’s viral load was likely much less than her husband. He would spend the next 8 days on oxygen, vitamins, and a course of steroids in the ICU. Fortunately, he never needed a ventilator, but it took about a month to wean off the oxygen.
In retrospect, there were a lot of things we should have done differently. My friends got the vaccine as soon as they were able, and regretted not getting it when it had been available. I drove them to the ER 10 days before my daughter’s graduation, which was the full incubation period. Each day I sweated the possibility of being a silent carrier.
At the time, the CDC was not recommending isolation for vaccinated people who came in close contact with infected people. They weren’t even recommending testing, only monitoring symptoms. That helped my anxiety a bit, but I still felt like I had to take a test which Kaiser advised me to take one week after exposure. It wouldn’t have been right to attend the graduation if I was a silent COVID carrier so I needed to know. Fortunately, I tested negative.
Do I regret the ride? No, I was lucky everything turned out okay for me and my family. Would I take the same chance again, if I knew they had COVID? That was the big thing at the time, I really didn’t know if they had the infection when I agreed to drive and I was hoping for the best. The positivity rate in Marin County was somewhere near 1% so I had felt like the possibility was remote. Had I known though, I would have offered to call an ambulance for them.