Exposure

Late last evening I got my first Coronavirus exposure notification on my iPhone. This is the opt-in system built into the OS and enabled on a per-state basis; it uses anonymous Bluetooth codes which are traded between nearby enabled phones, and now the owner of a phone which was near mine has reported a positive test. The good news is the system tells me that the date of the possible exposure was 11 days ago, which puts it on the Sunday we flew home from Chicago; this indicates to me that it most likely occurred on the flight, or perhaps at the airport before or after. We were all vaccinated, boosted, and fully masked during this trip, and I have had several negative rapid tests since then, so I don’t think I was infected by this particular incident. The bad news is that the support web site which tells you what to do when you receive these notifications just tells you to get tested, and at the moment finding a test is very difficult. We were lucky to have several rapid tests stockpiled from before the trip, but due to the Omicron surge it is almost impossible to obtain more rapid tests, and clinics which do PCR tests are currently overwhelmed. It is also impossible to know if the unknown person reporting the positive test was contagious at the time of the exposure, and given that the incident took place almost two weeks ago it is near the end of the conventional 14 day limit for symptoms to manifest. Even if I was actually exposed it was probably not the Omicron variant, given its very fast growth rate.