If you believe the experts, I should have had COVID-19 by now. Because I haven’t bought into the COVID panic, and I don’t take any precautions.
I don’t social distance and I don’t wear a mask while driving my car, walking my dog or riding my bike. In fact, the only time I wear a mask is when I’m forced to. Which means the mask goes on one step before I enter the grocery store and comes off about ten steps before I get back outside. I use the same mask over and over until one of the strings break.
I grab shopping carts from the parking lot and don’t sanitize them. When I need to open a produce bag for my veggies, I pull down my mask and lick my finger.
Because I have a beard, my mask doesn’t fit well, so I’m constantly adjusting it with my un-gloved and un-sanitized hands. I scratch my face when it itches and rub my eyes whenever I feel like it. And I’ve never, ever purchased a bottle of hand sanitizer.
I’ve talked with my neighbors inside a 6-foot radius and have been in their homes with no mask, no hazmat suit and, once again, no hand sanitizer.
If you believe that taking precautions are necessary to prevent being exposed to COVID, then you’d have to agree that it is certain that I have been exposed by now. Probably lots of times. Aside from wearing a mask when forced to, I have taken absolutely none of the recommended precautions. So, the chances that I’ve been exposed to the virus is as close to 100% as it can get. I’m willing to admit that, without a doubt, I have been exposed to the virus many times over.
But I also don’t believe that continual testing is necessary. I didn’t get tested when I had sore joints. I didn’t get tested when I had a sniffle. I didn’t get tested when I had runny eyes, sneezed or coughed. I didn’t get tested when I had a temperature. (Full disclosure, I don’t own a thermometer so I can’t say whether I’ve recently had a fever. But even if I owned a thermometer, and did have a fever, I wouldn’t have gotten tested.)
Short story, I’ve never once had a PCR test and I don’t intend to ever have one. PCR tests are, in my opinion, useless and cause unnecessary panic.
If you believe the people who say that merely being exposed to the virus means that you’ve been infected, then it must be true that I’ve had COVID-19 by now but just didn’t know it. I must have been asymptomatic because clearly I would have contracted the virus because of my lackadaisical attitude and refusal to bend to ridiculous prevention policies.
Except I wasn’t. Even after following (almost) none of the recommended precautions I’ve never had COVID-19.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “But Mike, if you’ve never been tested, how can you be so sure you’ve never had the disease?”
Ah. I never said I hadn’t been tested. I said I didn’t have the PCR test. The reason I’m so sure that I haven’t had COVID-19 is that I regularly give blood. And the Red Cross tests that blood to see if there are any COVID-19 antibodies present. Mine comes back negative every single time. In fact, I gave blood just last week and the antibody test came back negative. Again.
You may be tempted to think I didn’t get sick because my immune system successfully fought off the virus. But, if that were the case, then my blood would contain antibodies. Because, infections cause the body to create antibodies which appear in the blood. No antibodies means no infection.
I agree that, one person is a pretty small sample size. So, let’s double it. My wife acts the exact same way I do. She only wears a mask absolutely forced to wear one and takes zero other precautions. And, since she and I are sometimes as close to each other as it’s physically possible to be, if she had COVID, then I’d have COVID. Therefore, if I don’t have COVID, then she doesn’t have COVID either.
If you believe that masks, social distancing and other precautions are useful and necessary, then it’s nearly certain that I have been exposed to the virus many times over. If you believe that the PCR tests are providing useful information, then you must assume that if I had taken the PCR test, my test would have also returned positive results. If you believe the infection rate is as bad as claimed, then after a year of taking no precautions, I should have been infected.
But I haven’t been. And neither has my wife.
We’ve all heard stories of people catching the virus even though they were doing all the right things. Even after taking all the recommended precautions, they still tested positive. I’m giving you two instances (and I’m sure there are tens of millions more in just the U.S.) where people aren’t being infected with the virus even though they’re doing none of what are considered to be “the right things”.
What can we learn from this?
From my experience (and the observed experience of others) masks, social distancing and shutdowns have little-to-no impact on whether or not you’ll be infected. Being tested because you have symptoms that can be caused by any number of other illnesses is a waste of time and money.
The only thing all those precautions do is make you buy masks, gloves and hand sanitizer. The only thing getting continuously tested does is make you further buy into the COVID-19 panic.
