Covid Post, II
30 Aug 2020
It’s been nine days since I tested positive for COVID-19, and since I’ve been completely asymptomatic, that means tomorrow I’m allowed back on campus. The university isn’t retesting, and in fact will now exclude me from surveillance testing, meaning I won’t be retested unless I’m showing symptoms.
There’s two findings about COVID tests that inform my point of view on that policy. First, most test methods are very specific but not very sensitive. That means it’s much more likely to give a false negative than a false positive. However, and this is the second finding, a positive test merely states that you have genetic material from the virus in the nose and throat. The test results are a simple yes/no on if such material is present, even if it is in very small amounts. This means many people who test positive may not be contagious. Moving to the armchair for a second, I wonder if that may be a part of the perception that most cases are asymptomatic. Of course, it can’t explain all the findings about how COVID-19 affects different individuals, but it’s interesting nonetheless.
Here are links to the sources for those two findings: accuracy meaning of positive tests
Thoughts on Isolation
The first few days of being in isolation weren’t a big deal at all, really. I live alone, I had plenty of food on hand, and all of my classes were available online to me in the first week anyways. It only really started to grate about halfway through. I found myself getting restless, walking around in circles and sweeping constantly looking for excuses to be standing up. In my first two years of college, I picked up a habit of not really relaxing very often. Rather than moving between being fully ‘on’ and relaxing, I spent most of my time at some medium level of stress and anxiety. That made it harder to sustain intense focus for short periods of time. Instead, I’d constantly find myself flitting between assignments and readings and etc., spending way too much time just thinking about how much I had to do. Being isolated brought some of that back to me: I actually reached the point where I had all of my assignments and readings and etc. done, and couldn’t shake a feeling of guilt when I took time off to watch Netflix or play some video games. Normally, spending time with my friends releases me from that guilt. For whatever reason, when I’m by myself I always feel like I should be getting something done.
I’m trying to combat that by scheduling more intentionally. For example, after classes were done on Thursday I wrote a list of what I wanted to get done that night. I worked on some of it, then took a break guilt-free knowing I had plenty of time to get the rest of it done after 7. The work got done, but then I started to feel like maybe I had been underambitious in my todo list. There are certainly some kinks to work out, especially once I start getting long-term projects assigned.
Moving away from that conversation, I started to fully appreciate the reality of living in a studio apartment. Since everything’s always in your immediate vicinity, I’ve been forced to clean more often than I might have were the kitchen or bedroom not in view. I honestly like that part of it – having a smaller space makes it easier to intentionally use all parts of it. At this point, I’m shopping for some art for my one blank wall, but otherwise I’m happy with my first real place. Having a space I like and that was already set up for remote activity made isolation much easier than it would have been if I were at home with my family or if I had roommates.
Fun Quarantine Activites, Part Two
I baked more! I made a bunch of cookies and proudly showed my mom and grandma, and today I made a coffee cake again. There’s definitely something to be said for varying the type of work you do throughout the day – I look forward to whisking and measuring and the sort because it’s so menial when compared to doing my physics or probability homework, for example. A nice mix of reading, writing, thinking, and just moving around is becoming an apparent necessity for me, as I’m sure it is for many others.
I also have been much more consistent about doing some sort of exercise every day, funnily enough. The lack of walking made the idea of giving my legs something to do much more attractive than it typically is. It also gave me a good way to take a measured break - 20-30 minutes of exercise and stretching, then 10-15 to shower and change is a pretty consistent way to wind down from being in class. The moving around between sessions at the computer seems to do something comparable to walking between class and the library and home like I got used to last year.
Closing Thoughts
I know I teased talking about Algorithms and Accounting last time, but unfortunately the first week of class is never the most exciting one to write about (unless you’re particularly into syllabuses). I also joked last time about the language often used to describe what’s going on in the world right now. What I think I’ve realized is that much of what is happening, at least for me, has some amount of precedent. While going to class on zoom is pretty different from in person, the content of Intro to Algorithms hasn’t changed at all. While the modality is different, the meat of the matter is exactly the same. Learning to work within a new context always has a ramp-up time, but perhaps because I’m a college student, adapting to the new honestly just isn’t too bad. Perhaps because I don’t have the well-defined long term vision of someone outside of their early 20’s, I’m not as shaken by what the future will look like given today. I currently have a lot to be excited about in the second half of my college career and beyond. A pretty important part of the second half of college is developing some of that long term vision, both for myself and the corner of the world in which I belong. With all that in mind, it’s hard not to be excited.