Shortly after crashing the maskless, indoor reception of the wedding D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser officiated, I soon found that it hurt to swallow. I couldn’t sleep without relentless sneezing and coughing waking me up, or type without brain fog. A grating headache forced me to close my eyes and put an ice pack to my brow line.
I learned through an at-home test that it wasn’t the coronavirus (COVID coughs are dry, so the symptoms weren’t consistent). But interestingly enough, it wasn’t strep either — it was just a common cold.
If you’ve had the worst common cold of your life this past spring or summer, you’re not imagining it: After a year of lockdowns and constant masking, we’ve collectively lost our immunity to the pathogens we used to come into contact with every day of our lives.
For adults, this is a mere nuisance. But the implications could be more serious for children.
As late as July, doctors continued to confirm that the flu is still more dangerous to young children, those still ineligible to get vaccinated against COVID, than the coronavirus. But unlike the coronavirus vaccines, which have been overwhelmingly effective at preventing hospitalizations and deaths, even against the delta variant, the flu vaccine is usually no more than 50% effective. Most people, especially the very old and very young, rely on acquiring natural immunity to the flu. The same goes for RSV, which is now ravaging children’s hospitals in perennially locked-down Australia. It’s why experts are panicking over a surge of more serious cases of influenza and RSV as children head back to school.
But such a surge is inevitable, and putting off a return to normalcy likely enhances the risk of further lost immunity. However bad your post-pandemic cold is, doctors rightly fear that the post-pandemic flu and RSV cases will be worse.
As for me, I guess I’m glad I ripped off the Band-Aid and got my first post-pandemic cold during the slow news month of August and prior to flu season. But children may pay the price for our pandemic paranoia.
