COVID dances around my boss

My boss didn't come in again today, so he basically missed out on this entire week. At first, there was some sort of scare involving a child who went to the same school as his sons; that turned out to be a false alarm, but then some woman got COVID and listed my boss's wife as a contact, so now his wife is under a shroud of suspicion (gotta love the witch-hunt mentality, right?), and by extension, my boss himself is under suspicion. As a precaution, the boss opted not to come in to work today for fear he might be, at the very least, a carrier.  (The affected woman tested positive for omicron.) According to my boss, his wife seems fine as of right now, and he's fine, too, so all of this is probably much ado about nothing. Still, the boss told me not to come in this weekend because he plans to come in both Saturday and Sunday to do work. I have to wonder how he's going to handle Monday. Might have to have the shepherd's-pie luncheon without him. A shame, but the show must go on.

So my Korean coworker got COVID from his daughter; my American coworker had his own daughter-related COVID scare (which turned out to be nothing), and now my boss is dealing with the possibility (however unlikely) of infection. That leaves me—the only one unaffected by all this so far (or infected a while back and asymptomatic ever since). I've been tested twice over the past eighteen-ish months and was negative both times. But how long can I go before I, too, finally have my own COVID-related problems?

I go back and forth on this. On one hand, it's been two damn years, which is plenty of time for me to have unknowingly gotten infected, been asymptomatic, then shaken the virus. On the other hand, maybe I've just been really lucky this whole time and have never gotten COVID. I honestly don't know. The original virus had a specific suite of symptoms: dry cough, fever, and for many people, loss of taste. I haven't experienced those symptoms all at once, ever. I had a fever back when I had an infected toe (June 2020), but that's been it. No bouts of dry coughing, no loss of taste. Omicron apparently presents with a whole different constellation of symptoms, all of which are like those of a mild cold. I have had some of those symptoms, but does that mean I've had omicron? If omicron is so transmissible, why didn't my coworkers get it from me, then?

It all adds up to a big I don't know. For all I know, I could get infected tomorrow. Or next month. Or never. As an introvert with a fairly fixed and limited routine, I'm like the introvert in that joke who, a year into the pandemic, says, "What? There's a pandemic going on?" All I can do is to keep chugging along, living my life as freely as I can. As I mentioned in other recent posts, my stance against the vaccine has hardened over the past two months, the more I've learned about it and its (lack of) effects. Sure, on some level, I'd like to see my friends and engage in some normal human interactions, but I'm not wired to be lonely and pining for human companionship. Being alone doesn't equate to being lonely for me. The voices in my head keep me company. The wide world begs to be discovered. I do my distance hikes without masking up (unless it's too cold out these days, in which case I break out the winter mask); I go to work; I cook at home; I worry about my weight and BP; I read stuff, watch videos and movies, and work on personal projects—and that's my life. My wish is to survive to the officially declared end of the pandemic with my sanity and long-range plans intact, not having ever gotten COVID. I realize, though, that that may be too much to ask. We'll see.