‘Never been sick like this.’ Popular Tri-Cities TV weatherman recovering from COVID

KEPR TV weather anchor Mike McCabe expected to feel ill for just a day or two after he noticed initial symptoms and then got a positive COVID-19 test result.

After all, he reasoned that he was a healthy 51-year-old and was vaccinated with an initial series of shots, if not the booster.

But instead of being inconvenienced by a brief illness, he would spend the coming days bedridden with fever, chills and a runny nose.

It was six days until he started feeling better, he said in an interview on the Kadlec on Call podcast Feb. 3.

Both he and his wife, a third grade teacher in Kennewick who also had COVID-19, “both were just out of it,” he said.

Monday, Feb. 7, two weeks from the day of his first symptoms, was when he expected to be back to work and sharing the weather forecast with viewers from the Pasco, Wash, station, he said.

“I’ve never been sick like this,” he told podcast host Jim Hall, the chief philanthropy officer for the Kadlec Foundation.

His wife came home from school on a Friday, feeling ill and began to quarantine in a bedroom in case it was COVID-19, he said.

By Monday, Jan. 24, a third test was positive.

McCabe falls ill

McCabe went to work that day with “a little bit of a tickle in my throat,” but had tested negative for COVID-19.

He thought he might be getting a cold, his first in two and a half years after his family had been careful of exposures during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“But as the hours went on — by that 11 o’clock show on that Monday evening, (and) by the time I got home — I knew that I was not coming to work that next day, whether it was COVID or not,” he said.

A subsequent test for COVID-19 was positive.

As he and his wife spent days in isolation, their teenage daughters left food at their bedroom door and kept in touch with them by texting.

As of the podcast last week, neither were infected.

“We’ve done everything we can to make sure they don’t get this,” McCabe said.

“I’ve told them ‘this is the real deal here’. I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy,” he said.

McCabe has been missed, with viewers posting on Facebook to ask if he had left the station. McCabe’s worked at KEPR since 2005 and has been the weather anchor for the evening and late night newscasts since 2008.

‘Mild’ COVID

Most people with COVID-19 don’t get confirmation of which variant of the virus sickened them. Random samples of test results are collected for genetic sequencing in the laboratory.

But McCabe likely had the omicron variant, since it is responsible for most cases in recent weeks in Washington state.

Residents may have gotten a little bit complacent about COVID-19 because omicron often is considered “mild,” said Heather Hill, infectious disease supervisor for the Benton Franklin Health District, speaking on the podcast.

That’s compared to the delta variant that caused the previous wave of cases and could be severe, with some people ending up on ventilators in intensive care units.

“What medically we consider mild is still a very uncomfortable illness, that we’re seeing people ending up home from work for one, two three weeks,” Hill said.

“They have body aches, they are feverish, very severe fatigue, that brain fog, where they just can’t get up and go to work, she said. “Unfortunately, that is still labeled ‘mild’ disease because it certainly has not progressed to the ‘severe’ that requires hospitalization.”

Even that mild disease is extremely disruptive to family and work life and impacts the local economy as people are too sick to go to work, she said.

People who received one dose of the Johnson and Johnson vaccine or two doses of the Moderna or Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine are considered fully vaccinated.

But an additional booster shot is recommended, or two additional shots for some people who are immunocompromised, including because they are undergoing cancer treatment or taking medications that suppress their immune response.

McCabe vaccinated

McCabe and his wife had both had two Moderna shots.

But their work schedules were busy and “we got a little complacent,” McCabe said.

“Hindsight is 20-20. We didn’t get the booster,” he said.

He got as close to stopping by a pharmacy, but when he learned he needed to sign up on a schedule for a COVID vaccine booster, he figured he was healthy and could put it off a little longer.

It’s a decision he regrets, knowing that people with boosters often have symptoms that are more like a cold, he said.

As he and his wife are feeling better, they plan to get booster shots now, he said.

“I’ll never take my health for granted, that’s for sure,” he said.

“I was complacent before,” he said. “But it is real and it impacts families.”