If you are an infectious disease expert and you feel ill what should you do?

Most of us who aren’t infectious disease experts would call in sick, brew a cup of tea, heat up some chicken soup, and do whatever the 21st-century equivalent is of watching game shows on TV.

But if you are Kent Sepkowitz, an infectious disease expert at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, you desperately search for a COVID antigen test at home, and when you can’t find one you go on a trek to multiple drug stores to gather up multiples of them to serially test for the virus.

This American infectious disease expert got sick and tested negative for the coronavirus on a rapid test.

Instead of just staying home until well, he visited two pharmacies to look for more rapid tests.

Rather than reflect on the wisdom of visiting multiple pharmacies while… pic.twitter.com/FHbhDhROfC

— Anthony LaMesa (@ajlamesa) September 5, 2023

Make it make sense.

There is a substantial class of people–many of whom are among the most intellectually gifted in the country–who have lost their minds over COVID. It has become their idée fixe, an obsession about which they are helpless to think rationally.

Here is Kent’s description of his days of having a cold:

I woke up with a scratchy throat, a symptom often associated with early SARS-CoV-2 infection. Being a doctor, I was determined to ignore it, but as the day wore on, I began to feel ill with “viral symptoms”: chills though no fever, unusual fatigue, headache, some sniffling. It was bad enough to stay home and Zoom through my workday.

To sort it out, I decided to perform an at-home rapid antigen test. And that was when I realized just how different the entire 2023 version of Covid-19 was going to be, no matter its ultimate reach or severity. The days of shrugging off, toughing out and soldiering through a cold or even the flu ended once Covid-19 first arrived. With Covid-19 (as with home pregnancy testing and little else), we have — most of us — entered the world of facts on demand and the adjustment of social behavior according to the results. We have accepted our responsibility to interrupt the chain of contagion (and we also might grab an antiviral if the illness actually is Covid-19).

Getting facts, of course, is not quite as easy as advertised. The rapid antigen test, which we all had hoped would be relegated to the dustbin of history by now, is not as reliable as the home pregnancy test. It is a pretty good test but only when taken serially over a few days.

For most of us the beginning and end of the matter would have been encompassed by that first paragraph. We feel ill. We call in sick. We either work from home or get back into bed.

Get better in a day or three. If it gets worse, we go to the doctor, right? The alternative to “soldiering through” getting sick every once in a while is to live as a desperate hypochondriac whose life is dominated by things we cannot control, like microbes and viruses that in all likelihood will prove to be an annoyance but nothing more.

So it has always been.

Before you “remind” me that COVID is not like the flu and killed a lot of people in 2020-21, let me remind you that COVID is in fact exactly like the flu–and that the flu virus has been dramatically more deadly in some variants than COVID ever has been. The Spanish Flu epidemic killed 50 million people in 1918-19, far outstripping COVID numbers in a world with fewer than 25% of the current population. Yet we live with the flu because we have to, even knowing that occasionally and unfortunately it can become especially virulent.

It is called “living in the real world.”

Kent doesn’t live in the real world, so he goes insane:

This though was just the start. Remember? One negative test on the first day of symptoms, especially with the rapid antigen test, is not determinative. I went through the house looking for masks (found a few) and N95s (found just one) and looked for any test kits that might be hidden away, stacked somewhere in a moment of last year’s supreme epidemiologic overconfidence. I found none.

So, to prepare for the days ahead, I headed out to the closest drugstore — where I found that tests were sold out. I walked (very) slowly to another one several blocks away. The second drugstore had only a single remaining test on offer from the now picked-over shelves, which I bought with a credit card, not wanting to give over contaminated and infectious and perhaps lethal paper currency to the unwitting cashier.

The entire “what if” scenario appeared in full, the choreography of living with a pandemic with all the tangled concerns: In addition to the mechanics of diagnosis, I had to sort through notifying but not alarming people; tiptoeing around my house to keep a distance from my wife; trying to anticipate what might need to be canceled in the days ahead, should I be positive on the next morning’s test; and feeling draggy but uncertain why. In other words, though stale and unwelcomed, I was forced to return to the deliberate, sober, adult world of complicated decisions that are their own silent reward.

“Deliberate, sober, adult world of complicated decisions” is precisely the opposite of what Kent did. He was sick. Instead of staying home, he wandered the city looking for COVID tests. He went to multiple stores. He deliberately exposed others in search of a test to determine whether he had the right or wrong kind of cooties. For a disease that he, as a doctor, knows will almost certainly pass in a few days without any serious consequences.

In other words, he decided to increase the risk to others solely for the purpose of getting a test he knows isn’t particularly reliable or meaningful.

Because COVID is magic. It has the power to rot the brain, apparently, even if you don’t have it.

To be honest I would feel sorry for Kent, except for the fact that his insanity has power over others. He is well respected enough that CNN gave over its resources to his whinging and Sloan Kettering Cancer Center employs him. His utterances influence the world, and hence he should be ridiculed mercilessly.

If he were simply a neighbor I would sympathize with him. Getting a cold sucks, and being afraid of shadows sucks, and I would simply consider him idiosyncratic. We all have idiosyncrasies and phobias after all. If he were just a COVID-phobic without power it wouldn’t merit mentioning.

But no, such people rule our world. We are seeing mask mandates again. Some colleges are still requiring “vaccines.” The fear is being ratcheted up again.

The only appropriate response is ridicule. Keep your paranoia to yourself. The rest of us have lives to lead.

And when you are sick: stay home! I don’t want your crud if I can avoid it.