Mask Up, DKOS.

So a couple weeks ago, I went to a Hozier concert.

It was lit. The man is an amazing lyricist who knows how to jam and his fans are the sweetest people on earth (helped by the fact that so is he), and I was lucky enough to be in GA and get only three people back from the rail. (I love GA shows. They encourage dancing like absolutely nothing else.)

So two days later when I had a sore throat, I went “wow, I’m surprised it took this long to kick in.” I’m a trained singer and I can in fact scream for two hours straight without hurting my throat, but this was my first concert since….okay Imma be honest my last concert was also Hozier, in 2019, because MCR had to cancel their 2020 tour due to plague. I wasn’t worrying too hard about going hoarse. 

But it actually got worse as the night went on. So I got home from work, looked at my throat in the mirror, and went “oh no.”

This was not post-concert scratchy throat.

I went in for a strep test, based on what my throat looked like. Negative. I got a Covid test. Negative. And thus began the bafflement: couldn’t be flu because no fever. Couldn’t be sinuses because no congestion, at least at first, and once it set in it very rapidly settled in my chest. Probably not a non-Covid coronavirus, because most non-Covid coronaviruses are actually super-mild, and I felt like I’d been hit by a truck. I’m fully vaxxed except for HPV (bad reaction to the first shot, couldn’t get the second) and needing my updated winter shots—which, ironically, I’d planned to get the day I fell I’ll—so in spite of the fact I’ve been coughing hard enough to make my ears hurt and I sound like a dying dog, it’s not pertussis.

Oh. Yeah. I said “sound.” I probably caught this mystery case of Something Going Arounditis at the show on 1 November. I noticed my first symptoms in the wee hours of 3 November. Today’s the 14th of November and I’m still hacking up crap. I was out of work for a week due to the fatigue and inability to, you know, breathe normally. I’m pretty clearly on the tail end of this thing, but it’s still ongoing. RSV? Maybe. (Seems likely.) But at this point, it doesn’t matter. What does matter is all of this might have been avoided if, in the excitement of getting my concert stuff into my friend Danny’s car and popping on the mandatory pre-concert Learn All The Lyrics We Don’t Know Yet playlist, I hadn’t forgotten one small thing:

The mask hanging off my turn signal stalk.

Covid cases, surprisingly, are currently falling across most of the US. But Covid isn’t the only bad actor out there, and we’re moving into what the CDC calls “respiratory season.” This is when you “catch a cold.” This is when there’s “a bug going around.” This is flu season, RSV season, cough season, sinus infection season, and yes—strep and pneumonia season.

An absolutely astonishing we-could-never-do-this-both-on-purpose-and-ethically-at-the-same-time study, of sorts, came out of Covid in 2020. When we (mostly) stayed home and masked up, only 36,000 cases of influenza were reported nationwide. That’s the number of deaths from influenza in a normal year. The normal number of cases? So high the CDC doesn’t even count. Flu has a relatively low mortality rate—although it’s still nothing to fuck with, especially with swine and avian flus rearing their nasty heads again in the last few years—so you can imagine how many cases there must usually be. (It’s estimated up to 15% of the world population gets the flu every year.) And its most likely victims are the ones we visit during these months: babies and grandparents.

So do them, and yourselves, a favor. Make sure you get your seasonal vaxes if you haven’t already, and when you’re out and about, mask up. It’s not just for Covid. You may not wind up in the path of anything so nasty that the mask would save lives, but it can still save you a really annoying couple of weeks.

And if you stayed with me to the end, here, you can understand why I have no regrets about the show. If you only know Hozier as “the Take Me To Church guy” it’s time you learn, especially if you like blues.