Today is Monday, August 1, 2022. President Biden’s image is now being burnished with the surprise announcement of his administration having successfully assassinated an important al Qaeda leader by the name of Ayman al-Zawahiri in Afghanistan. Remember that this president has accomplished this while still in isolation after testing positive again for COVID-19. The second in command to Osama bin Laden was killed in an air drone attack without incurring any civilian casualties. At one point, al-Zawahiri acted as bin Laden’s personal physician. The hated leader was sheltering in a safe house in Kabul, according to a senior administration official, and was killed in “a precise tailored airstrike” using two Hellfire missiles. No American personnel were on the ground in Kabul at the time of the strike. The slain terrorist comes from a distinguished Egyptian family, according to The New York Times. He eventually helped to mastermind the deadliest terror attack on American soil in 2001, when hijackers turned U.S. airlines into missiles. The world will not mourn the passing of this murderer of innocent men and women.

The killing of this top leader of al Qaeda ironically comes after the 10th anniversary of Osama bin Laden’s assassination inside his high-walled compound in the Pakistani military college city of Abbottabad by U.S. special-operations forces under the direction of President Barack Obama.

Since we are still living in the age of COVID-19, I turned to an online article about having the virus and how you know you are no longer contagious. So I will have to now report that I found myself under the throes of the virus after Elliot and I returned from our European junket. As you might recall, I had stated that practically no one wore a mask in either London or Edinburgh, the two cities we visited on our 12-day trip. What might have sealed my fate, as it were, were the two-day minivan excursions to Loch Ness and to St. Andrews and the Highlands, where both tour guide and passengers failed to wear masks during the entire day of sightseeing. These were taken on Tuesday and Thursday of last week, so when we returned to the States, we both took COVID-19 antigen home kits and I tested positive, while Elliot did not. What was so ironic about this was that I primarily wore a face covering in both cities in interior venues, while Elliot was more casual about wearing a mask.

I was very fortunate that the strain I got was very mild. I had almost no outward symptoms, actually, except for a low-grade fever and a general sense of malaise. However, I did not feel so exhausted like so many other people have reported in their experience with the virus. On the other hand, I might have had some symptoms that mirrored the common cold while in Edinburgh: I did have somewhat of a runny nose, but no sore throat or loss of taste or smell. So when we came back, that’s when I began testing myself and I discovered that I was positive – until today. It was negative.

The article by Lena H. Sun and Joel Achenbach for the online version of The Washington Post is entitled “When you have covid, here’s how you know you are no longer contagious.” The writers state that the guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) “are nuanced but a little confusing.” They do write, “There is no hard-and-fast rule for how sick a person will get or how long a person remains infectious.”

Here the coronavirus is known for being transmissible even before the infected person has symptoms, in which the peak period of virus shedding starts about a day or two before symptoms appear and continues two or three days afterward. After a person tests positive for coronavirus, the CDC recommends that a patient isolate him- or herself for at least five days. “On Day 6, you can end isolation as long as your symptoms have improved and you have been fever-free for at least 24 hours without taking fever-reducing medicine.”

What is confusing about all of this is that the CDC does not explicitly recommend that you have a negative test to end isolation. Even though many experts think rapid at-home tests should be used to exit isolation. Which is what I definitely recommend a person to do when contemplating ending isolation. This only makes common sense. If you don’t test, how do you definitively know that you’re not symptomatic once more – just like President Biden who tested negative twice before leaving isolation. He has since experienced a “rebound” infection, testing positive on Saturday, thus going back into isolation.

So the skinny for healthy people is if you test negative on a rapid antigen test on or after Day 5, “you are unlikely to be contagious to other people,” according to Amy Barczak, an infectious-diseases expert at Massachusetts General Hospital. For those who have extra concerns about passing the virus along to other people, an extra test is not a bad idea. Another recommendation on testing is provided by Michael Mina, a former Harvard University infectious-disease epidemiologist who is an expert on rapid tests, who said two tests 24 hours apart could provide extra security – “like a double lock on your door.”

So there you have my confession: I had to fly over 3,000 miles to come down with coronavirus. I was able to avoid contracting the virus here in the United States for more than two years – until now. Would you say this is pretty ironic then? But given my age and my recent history of asthma, I can say I was damn lucky over the type of strain I succumbed to. Let’s hope I do not get a reoccurrence of this anytime soon. No matter how serious a case one can get, no one would want to suffer from this virus by any means. That’s why precautions should still be taken by everyone here, I strongly recommend. We are not over this pandemic, by any measure of the word. More mutations will undoubtedly appear out of the virus shed to cause havoc among Americans of all shapes and stripes. Maybe we should all be prepared to get it since I’ve read that about 60 percent of the nation’s population has already contracted it at least once. Whether or not that creates herd immunity is probably unclear. I would think it’s too late for this to happen. Americans failed to heed the call to vaccinate once it was practical to do so. And we all know who to blame for that stance, don’t we?

On another matter, tomorrow will be primary day in several states, where some Trump-backed candidates (jerks all) could get their names on the ballot in November. So this could be seen as a referendum on the insurrectionist ex-president. Let’s hope the electorate will see the glaring faults of these monumentally flawed candidates and vote for the better candidate.

I will now report on my ongoing coronavirus journey as it unfolds in real time.

Stay safe and be well.