Corona Files: One Text You Don't Want

There's powerful writing, as our Outer Banks Ombudsman can demonstrate, and then there's the sheer brute force of a 7-word text, one that spares all preparatory run-up or foreshadowing.  And then there's the idiotic blurt of a reply.

My baby girl got the coronavirus.

She's 19. She's otherwise healthy. She should be just fine. And, spoiler alert, she's now through the woods and already out of quarantine. But it still jolted and jarred me to get that news and consider what it might mean.

In the world in which we live, there is an endless supply of Monday Morning Armchair Quarterbacks (most of whom are of the Ryan Leaf variety) who tell us what they would have done, or what we should do, or neither of those but simply tell us that people are doing it wrong... and how dare they?  Where the pandemic is concerned, way, way too many people apparently have some or all of this mess all figured out. Totally pegged. And the more sure someone is about any element of COVID-19, the more quickly I dismiss them as a foolhardy gasbag.

But I'm here to say that the comfort level that the University of South Carolina, its administration, and its seemingly unflappable president amply provided me leading up to and during my daughter's illness reduced my 385-miles-away angst significantly.  While UNC, ECU, JMU and other schools have punted (for their own reasons) and sent kids contaminated and otherwise back to their homes and hometowns, USC said in not so many words, "We have a plan. And we feel good about where we are with it."

To wit, and to an almost alarming degree, there is a USC COVID Dashboard that began at Alert Level: New Normal and has risen no higher than Alert Level 1: Low -- even as the active cases among the student/faculty/staff population topped 1,700.  There have been fleeting moments where even I wondered if the USC Prez was Kevin Bacon in the Homecoming Parade.

And then two things happened.  One, that number quickly dropped to 640 as hundreds of people are graduating from quarantine with clean bills of health. (We presume; what the virus does to the body can have horrible, lasting effects, but unless you want this father to freak the fuck out, let's move on.)

Second, my daughter got better. She was sick for several days (exhausted like never before, achy all over, mild fever), felt slightly better, waited for a scheduled COVID test while self-quarantining, tested positive, moved into the quarantine dorm (in this case, a hotel room), kept at her classes online all the while, waited for the 10-days-from-first-symptoms paroling -- which meant only three days in formal lockdown, and moved back into her dorm room yesterday.  Where she rejoined her roommate and suitemates, who have now all had the virus.

She's back to being a college kid, still in a strange time, but with a mildly augmented sense of calm. She was a total trooper throughout, talking me off ledges here and there and going full Freaky Friday on me by being the composed teenager to the uneasy parent.

Are there potential holes in this university's plan? Almost definitely. Is its success somewhat contingent on the good sense of 34,000 people who are at the age of pre-frontal-lobe-full-development? As in the age when Dave ate a cicada on a dare, when Rob won the projectile vomit contest, and when I got an embarrassing and not quite right tattoo of a girl's name on my groin?  Yes, yes, it is reliant on those kinds of people. Yikes.  But I still like this plan better than a number of the alternatives I've seen.

That's the news for now, and I hope that's all the news of its ilk for a long, long while.  Good luck to each of you and yours out there, and may your own run-ins with this beast of a virus be like mine.  You know, like a ride on a timeworn, rickety roller coaster. It scares the crap out of you, makes you curse and swear and feel ill and you just can't wait for it to be over... but then it is, and you sigh, and you still think you might puke but you're so happy to be descending the stairs that you don't even consider the organs that may have gotten damaged along the way.

And that's just the dad of the patient. Godspeed.