Mark Lane: COVID still grinds on, so get the shot

My son, who is healthier than me, leaner and with far better life habits, who runs in the morning, does not drink, smoke or eat meat and is fully vaccinated, announced not long ago that he had come down with COVID. Again.

It was COVID lite, but still.

The unpredictability of this disease is unsettling. Some people get it and it feels like a cold. Some people get it and die.

I now am among the minority of people who never contracted it. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated in April that close to 60% of the U.S. population came down with the virus at some time, 190 million people. That percentage has only gone up since then. I’m starting to feel special.

My wife and I are the only members of my family not to have been downed by COVID. All four of our healthier children have had it along with their partners. The nieces, too. People we’ve worked with had it. People we sat with at baseball games had it. People I’ve hung out with got it as soon as we parted.

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Which is why I sat in a folding chair in a pharmacy last week getting the new-and-improved, omicron-variant-designed, COVID booster along with my annual flu shot. Like the flu, COVID keeps mutating, so the old vaccines don’t work quite as well as they did when first released. The new shot is called the bivalent booster because it’s designed both for new variants and COVID classic.

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Time was, you'd sit in your car for hours waiting for a vaccine

Remember when cars lined up and people parked overnight at drive-in vaccination centers to get the vaccines when they first came out? This time I wandered up to the pharmacy counter and was out the door with a bandage on my arm in 10 minutes. (I got a flu shot at the same time. Public service message: Get the flu shot, too, when you start seeing Christmas displays in stores, which would be now. They can cut your chances of coming down with the flu in half.)

Everyone’s weary of COVID, and many people have just stopped thinking about countermeasures. Which is why the booster – new! improved! and it’s bivariant! – hasn’t generated a rush to the pharmacy.

And I expect I’ll be getting both shots again in a year or so. Because this disease keeps rolling on and mutating even though things thankfully feel more normal now. There were only a smattering of masked shoppers in the pharmacy during my visit. Restaurants, bars and gyms are crowded again. People are back on bleachers cheering their teams again. People are making up for lost time traveling.

It's not life after COVID. It's life with COVID as a routine part of it.

It’s not the post-COVID world. It’s the routine COVID world. But no, it’s not “over” as President Joe Biden asserted in a television interview.

The virus is still around and still will kill a few of us. About 400 people die each day, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nine a day in Florida. The average lifespan in the United States dropped to 76 years for people born in 2021, continuing a dramatic drop from the year before, the first two-year drop in a century.

And yes, you can still get alarmingly sick for longer than you’d expect. Everyone I know who suffered through it described it as feeling like they were hit by a truck or a bus or something big like that. But thanks to vaccines and better treatment options, fewer of us end up in the hospital with oxygen tubes on our faces.

Hospital admissions due to COVID are almost a quarter of what they were when COVID hospitalizations in Florida peaked last January and are still dropping.

Still, each time I hear that somebody else I know is stricken, I clear my throat and wonder how significant that last cough was. I have overactive sinuses and live in a world of pollens, sawdust and various household chemical miasmas, yet these days I second-guess every sniff, every tickle in my throat.

I think the thing that has saved me is that I exercise social distancing out of reflex. I’m not a hugger. Don’t like crowds. The socially awkward among us have a natural advantage in routine COVID world.

So far, so good. But even as I left the pharmacy with the new-and-improved, omicron-variant-ready vaccine coursing through my bloodstream, I wondered how long my luck will hold up.

Mark Lane is a News-Journal columnist. His email is mlanewrites@gmail.com.

This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: COVID may be less of an issue but it's not gone. Get the vaccine.