A Negative Experience

I was dreadfully sick for two weeks with a respiratory ailment in February that, in retrospect, I was sure was COVID-19.  Not that recovering from it makes you immune to getting it again, perhaps even worse the next time; no one knows. I  haven't felt 100% since then in any case.

I tried to get an antibody test in June from my health-care provider Kaiser to determine whether I was a survivor but a doctor called me when I requested such a test and told me after listening to my symptoms back in the winter that what I had had was "the flu" and not coronavirus because I hadn't been to China around that time and she said Kaiser didn't do antibody tests anyway, because what was the point?  My respect for Kaiser fell a long way then and I wondered what they do for the $12,000 in premiums I and my former employer pay to them each year for health care which costs me a co-pay each time I use it anyway.

But now Kaiser does do antibody testing, as I discovered earlier this month when I called to schedule an appointment for a flu shot.  So six months after I was so sick I went in for a blood draw to test for the presence of sufficient antibodies left over in my bloodstream that would mark a response to the coronavirus by my immune system.  It came back a few days later negative.

After four years of living in the dystopian chaos of Trump's corrupted America, where everybody has their own alternative facts in this formerly great country, where an American used to be able to trust a test result but now nothing is what it seems to be and we've fallen down the rabbit hole of anti-science and the politicization of everything, here's what I am left with.  I am happy to have had the test finally given to me but half a year passed by before I could wheedle the test, and the antibodies likely have diminished to an unmeasurable degree by now but at least now I know that I will never know if I had COVID-19 when I was so sick in February.  The test result also might be a false negative, because nobody in America trusts test administrations or results (or vaccines) anymore after four years under Trump, he of the falsity of "If you want a test you get a test, they're beautiful" and the idiocy of "Just inject bleach, it'll clean the lungs in a minute."