A theory on how I got it.

I blogged about the cold I’ve been dealing with since Friday afternoon here. It’s now Wednesday morning and I’ve still got symptoms.

Yesterday, I got a call from one of the pilots who’s been working with me on cherry drying for the past bunch of years, Gary. Gary had arrived on Tuesday with his RV and, on Wednesday, after two of his pilots arrived with the helicopter, we all went out to lunch at a local restaurant called McGlinn’s Public House. McGlinn’s has indoor and outdoor seating, but since the outdoor seating was all taken and we were all vaccinated, we settled on indoor seating in the sparsely furnished bar area.

Mask use has always been a little iffy on this red side of a blue state and I can’t say I saw any masks in the restaurant. Of course, it is a restaurant where people eat and it’s impossible to eat with a mask on so I wasn’t really surprised.

Gary, his crew, and I were together briefly again on Thursday when I showed them a parking spot for Gary’s RV. And I was with Gary again briefly on Friday when we ran into town in his truck to pick up a few things at the store. I didn’t wear a mask at all during this time.

Fast forward to the call from Gary yesterday (Tuesday). He began by apologizing for “disappearing.” “I’ve been sick as a dog all weekend,” he told me.

“Me, too!” I exclaimed. We then went on to compare symptoms. He seemed to have more pain than I did and I seemed to have more coughing than he did but otherwise we had pretty much the same thing. Together, we stepped backward to the places we’d been and the timing was just right for mutual exposure at McGlinn’s.

Later, he spoke to the two pilots who had been with us. Both of them were at least 20 years younger than us — hearty young guys who might be able to fight a bug better than we could. Neither were sick. But still. It was too much to be a coincidence.

I then began wondering how I could be hit so hard by something that wasn’t COVID when I really didn’t get sick that often at all. And then I realized that it might have something to do with my isolation over the past year or so. I live a pretty solitary existence, but I would normally go out and about, maskless, at least a few times a week. Over the past year, however, I’d been out a lot less frequently and had been wearing a mask among strangers almost all the time. Could that have weakened my immune system? Could not exposing myself to miscellaneous germs in the natural course of my day have put my immune system on vacation?

Sure seems that way. Numerous news stories, including this one on PBS Newshour, report exactly that:

A curious thing happened during the COVID-19 pandemic: With masks, social distancing, and Purell galore, we kept most other germs at bay.

Flu vanished. Cases of respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, which in a normal winter puts nearly 60,000 children under age 5 in the hospital, were nonexistent. Most of us appeared to sidestep the soup of bugs that cause colds.

But as masks come off, schools reopen, and some travel resumes, we should expect a resurgence of these viruses — perhaps a big one. Some experts fear we’re in for a nasty cold-and-flu season or two, pointing to a combination of factors that could make for a rough re-entry to the mixed microbes world.

There’s more, of course. I encourage you to read the whole piece.

I seem to be living proof of this. After more than a year of protecting myself, I dropped my guard and, less than a week later, I’m sick with a bad cold I can’t seem to shake.

Would I have gotten this sick if I hadn’t been wearing a mask the whole time? I don’t know. I do know that I could have been sicker — possibly with COVID — so don’t for a minute regret my caution.

What I do regret, however, is dropping my guard as if the health risk is over. Clearly, it’s not.