My experience getting COVID in Spain - The Dallas Morning News

For the last 2.5 years, I managed to avoid the coronavirus. I stayed home. I skipped family Christmas twice. But after snagging my second Moderna shot last year, I warily ventured forth. I boarded at least 25 flights. I cut a distinctive airport figure, wearing an N95, my ski goggles, a hideous muumuu and a bad, bad hat, in an effort to encourage strangers not to get too close. I covered the Austin City Limits Music Festival and South by Southwest with an N95 over my sweaty face. I’ve been cautious, but not a shut-in.

My winning streak ended when I went to Barcelona, Spain, in June for the Primavera Sound music festival with a British friend and his many, many, many British friends.

Vaccine boosters in England are only for those over 70, so our crowd was unboosted.

Every day I learned of more and more people in our group laid low by the current plague. Nearly all our gang who had met up at Hemingway’s favorite absinthe bar were struck down with COVID-19. This inspired me to freestyle off both the title of Hemingway’s 1940 masterpiece For Whom the Bell Tolls and John Donne’s 1623-ish poem of the same name, “Ask not whom the COVID test tolls for, it tolls for thee.”

My first clue that the jig was up was my having a hard time staying awake as saucy independent filmmaker and author John Waters was interviewed by Spanish transvestite singer/model Samantha Hudson. Waters, director of Pink Flamingos, is a hoot. (Waters noted that if COVID-19 had happened in the musical climate of the 1950s and ‘60s, there would have already been a COVID-themed hit song and accompanying dance!) If I could fall asleep during that riot, something was definitely amiss.

The day after seeing John Waters, my “I don’t want to be the one who spreads the plague” routine home test turned positive and I went back to bed.

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Luckily I had gotten my booster a month before. Given that I have a tendency to get dramatically sick, I wanted to get Paxlovid, the Pfizer pill which can prevent the disease from becoming severe if given early in the course of the disease. It’s on the market in Spain.

I hauled myself to Barcelona’s Hospital del Mar, which has a long history in fighting infectious diseases. The website explains it’s situated on what was the 16th century Health House, “a quarantine centre for possibly contaminated persons from overseas.” Perfect.

“The epidemics of cholera and yellow fever that struck Barcelona … forced the City Council to build an isolation hospital in 1905. This is how … the Hospital of Infectious Diseases was built ... to combat the infectious diseases that continually afflicted the city.”

At the ER, I asked about getting either Paxlovid or monoclonal antibodies, both of which are best given early in the disease before potentially catastrophic symptoms of the coronavirus develop. I was told, repeatedly, that zero treatments existed for the early stages of the coronavirus. I was instructed to go home, rest and drink lots of fluids — and come back when I was really sick and needed hospital services.

It was like I had stepped into a wormhole to early 2020, where early treatment of the coronavirus focused on the healing properties of chicken soup. This in a European Union hospital that claims to be up with modern times!

The Hospital del Mar is “a modern general and university hospital, active and with research activity, which treats pathologies of medium and high complexity,” said their website. I disagree.

Maybe early coronavirus treatments aren’t big in the European Union? When I casually mentioned the possibility of early-stage COVID treatments to Latvian friends working in the arts over lunch this summer, they looked at me as if I had grown a third ear or was eating my french fries with my fingers.

Here in the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention already estimates that some 65% of current coronavirus cases are the new superduper contagious omicron variant of BA.5. No word if President Joe Biden’s current infection is from this newest variant.

My experience in Spain, coupled with the recent dropping of the requirement for a negative COVID test to enter the U.S., means there will likely be more people entering with even more new COVID-19 variants, or unpleasant viral remixes of BA.5. I know multiple people who have recently returned to the U.S. with the coronavirus as an unwelcome souvenir.

Given the lack of treatment options in Spain, I watched Spanish television, ate gazpacho and tested negative before flying back. When I tested again in Texas before spending time with my 85-year-old mother, my home tests were again positive. So was my PCR (polymerase chain reaction) test at Austin Public Health.

The nice coronavirus researcher who lives next door told me that, according to the respectable podcast This Week in Virology, my testing positive/negative/positive in quick succession has been called the Paxlovid effect. And it’s even possible if you haven’t taken Paxlovid!

According to the clinical trial data referenced on the podcast, 1% to 2% of both the people who had taken Paxlovid and the placebo group had symptom rebound. My neighborhood coronavirus researcher suspected that I had had one long infection, not two different ones. He thought it unlikely that I would have contracted a different variant so soon after an original first infection because my immune system would still have been all fired up to fight off new virus varmints.

Act II of my time with COVID-19 involved a theatrically bad cough, a telemedicine visit with my Austin doctor, 10 days of antibiotics and a follow-up chat with someone from Austin Public Health, who told me I was the second person that week she had seen who had a positive test after visiting Barcelona.

We’re at peak summer travel season. If you factor in the difficulty of getting early-stage coronavirus treatments abroad, the total disappearance of mask usage in places like Latvia and the recent decision to drop the requirement for a negative COVID-19 test for people entering the U.S., it’s time to be very, very wary.

With BA.5 in the mix, hospital admissions for COVID-19 have been trending up. The Centers for Disease Control is expecting the current wave to crest with 13,800 new confirmed COVID-19 hospital admissions likely to be reported on Aug. 12.

Given my Barcelona ER experience, I suggest doing everything you can to avoid getting COVID while traveling. Squeeze some N95 masks and free government tests in between the bathing suits and beach books!

After being on holiday with Mr. Covid, I cannot recommend the experience.

Anna Hanks is a writer in Austin. She wrote this for The Dallas Morning News.

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