You and your wife well know where they lost their undefeated record: in that club where they danced until dawn. That’s why, after a few days, they knew it was covid-19 when she woke up with a voice that wasn’t hers, but one taken from beyond the grave, and when you woke up with sneezes that weren’t from this planet.
Despite being 50 years old and being cannabis smokeryou took it easy: you have been vaccinated three times.
“I trusted science and a little marijuana,” you say with a mischievous tone.
Nothing to do with the second wave, when there was no medicine-potion-drug that guaranteed life. Remember your dad, stuck in a capsule on Christmas Eve, while ambulance paramedics radioed a bed in the city’s public hospitals. Remember your brothers: one, diabetic and atheist, jesusing and freeing her without major symptoms; the other is still battling persistent covid-19.
“In April, when Dr. Gatell declared the pandemic endemic, we came to think that we were immune”, you joke and immediately tell that they are the last of their circle of relatives-friends to get infected.
Others who were infected for the first time are Laura and her family. For work, they traveled to Europa at the end of May. “The two weeks we were there, everything was fine. The problem was the return, I’m sure we caught it on the plane, ”says Laura, who was knocked out by the virus.
“My daughter was asymptomatic, but my husband and I were hit hard by the bug: I was hospitalized for bronchitis; his body aches did not go down”.
Laura, who is a civil servant, learned that for a couple of weeks infections have grown in her office. “This fifth wave came for those of us who thought we had ‘something,'” she tells you over the phone. “I was reading that in Mexico we have been on the rise for ten weeks. Ten. And it looks like it’s missing.”
Although the health authorities have spoken of an increase in infections —20,959 new cases were registered in the last 24 hours—, the fifth wave, as such, has not been recognized.
Fernando, a young podcast producer, was not infected yesterday but three weeks ago.
“I never get sick, never, and this time I had a fever, a sore throat and woke up bathed in sweat,” he tells you on the way back from your house, where he lives. “I don’t know how I would have done without my three shots. They do strike.”
Although Fernando considers himself privileged to have been infected at a time when there are already vaccines, he tells you that “he was touched.” That is to say: he is afraid of getting infected again and now extreme measures, like when the pandemic started.
“I wash my hands every so often, I disinfect my office and the things in the supermarket. The other day I even sprayed sanitizer on some friends who came to visit me. I was touched, not to say paranoid”.
In fact, he confesses to you that, since he got sick, he has gone back to review the statistics of the pandemic. “Today I can tell you that, at the national level, there is an occupancy of general and ventilated beds of 6 and 2 percent, but the contagion grew 66 percent in the last week.”
When you return to your apartment you find the neighbor from 302. You have known him for several years but you still don’t know what he does for a living. He has that feint of someone who makes a lot of money without working.
“Are you still undefeated?” He asks you and, since he’s wearing a mask unlike you, you don’t know if he’s saying it with a challenging or compassionate tone.
“No, my wife and I lost undefeated a month ago,” you tell him as if it were a sporting matter.
So your neighbor is sorry that marijuana didn’t save you from Covid.
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