Purposely exposing family to COVID is playing with dynamite

“Yeah, no, we’re just gonna 1980s chicken pox this thing,” a friend told me recently.

And she is not alone. Many friends are dealing with the omicron variant of COVID-19 by purposely exposing their family all at the same time to “get it over with.”

“People are having COVID parties?” my husband Ian said in that way that makes it clear his question is entirely rhetorical (and that he has given up on humanity).

“I mean, let’s face it,” my friend went on. “We’re all going to get it. So let’s get it and move the hell on already.”

And with infections reaching an all-time high, I get it. Her point, not omicron. Plus, this thing appears to spread faster than lice in pre-K. We all know about that Christmas party in Oslo where more than 70 percent of the doublevaccinated, rapid-tested-onentry guests got COVID.

“Typical Oslo,” Ian quipped.

I’m not sure why, but every time I hear about that party I get weird party envy instead of COVID concerns. I always imagine Oslo as snowy, with handhewn wood floors and those giant glasses of red wine. And statistically Oslo does have less lice.

“Omicron is really not that bad,” another mom told me after infecting her family on purpose. One of her kids contracted the virus at school, and she didn’t make him mask up at home. “And now we’re done.”

But is she?

“In mid-December, a study conducted in the United Kingdom found the risk of reinfection with the omicron variant was more than five times higher than delta,” Reuters reported.

And is it just me, or all those cases where people get better only to get sick again reemerging?

Yet, “the idea of intentionally trying to catch omicron is ‘all the rage,’ ” Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said with an exasperated sigh on CNN.

“It’s caught on like wildfire,” agreed Dr. Robert Murphy, executive director of the Havey Institute for Global Health at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. “And it’s widespread, coming from all types of people, the vaccinated and boosted and the anti-vaxxers.”

“We did that,” another friend in Boston told me. “My husband and I figured we were fully vaccinated, we had had the booster, omicron was mild, kids don’t usually get super sick and we kinda just wanted to be done, you know?”

“The kids have already missed so much school this year, and that’s after last year … and the year before that,” she said.

But both parents got really sick, so not only were their kids missing school, they were missing general adult supervision.

“There’s no way you’re getting a sitter; we couldn’t get out of bed. And at some stage, I found a bag of defrosted chicken nuggets they had been eating cold,” she told me.

She never thought she would say this, but she ended up feeling grateful for screens. “Our kids were raised by Fortnite for four entire days,” she said. Which is encouraging, when you consider Fortnite revolves around players shooting each other while being stalked by zombies. “Look, it was either that or the real-life version, with omicron Zombies.”

But the point is, no one knows how COVID is going to play out. A Greenwich mom I know had mild COVID last winter but has suffered debilitating lung pain for over a year. Doctors seem to think it’s “long COVID” — a condition that doctors are still trying to understand, only “long” has not been long enough. Some of the most common symptoms of long COVID are shortness of breath, cognitive dysfunction and fatigue.

In other words, the same symptoms as motherhood.

In a recent interview, Dr. Anthony Fauci said long COVID can happen no matter which virus variant hits. It’s a condition that can mysteriously develop for anyone who has had COVID-19, even if their illness was mild or if they had no symptoms. And we still don’t know the extent of its long-term damage, particularly to the heart, liver and lungs.

“This information is not helpful to someone whose whole family is already infected,” my friend texted after I sent her a second article on the topic. She signed off with LOL, which did not mean “Laugh Out Loud.”

“You’d be crazy to try to get infected with this,” Offit said. “It’s like playing with dynamite.”

Experts appear to be in consensus: actively trying to get infected is not a good idea. You can spread the disease to unvaccinated people (like kids), the disease could be worse than you expect, our hospitals are already crowded, long COVID remains a question and viruses are always mutating.

Those who are vaccinated don’t need to gamble, and for those who aren’t vaccinated, it’s like playing “Russian roulette with an automatic handgun,” Dr. Laolu Fayanju, regional medical director for Oak Street Health in Ohio, told Time.

Put another way, “Don’t mess with Mother Nature,” Offit said. “She’s been trying to kill us ever since we crawled out of the ocean onto the land.”

And she’s not the only mother in this town.