I’m one of 40 percent or fewer of Americans who have managed to avoid getting COVID-19. I have been avoiding it like a potentially life-threatening virus — I’d say the plague, but all I really do to avoid that illness is not interact with rodents when I visit the West and Southwest. To protect against COVID-19, I wear KN95 masks when I’m indoors in public or in crowded outdoor situations. I’m up-to-date on vaccines with my second booster shot as of May, which may provide a tiny bit of protection against infection, but is mostly for keeping me from getting really sick if I were to get infected mesin destilasi mini.

And yet, I recently invited COVID-19 into my home. It came in the form of a relative who tested positive while vacationing here. She isolated herself in her hotel room until it was time to check out, but needed a place to stay until she was safe to fly home, according to this quarantine and isolation calculator from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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She was still testing positive for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, on at-home antigen tests when she came to us, so we assumed she was contagious to me and my husband. I made that assumption based on research and conversations with experts. A recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that people infected with the omicron variant BA.1 produced infectious virus for about six to eight days on average, with some people shedding infectious virus for 10 days or longer.

We didn’t know which of the omicron variants now circulating my relative had, but we did know that we didn’t want to catch it. Omicron carries a higher chance of being passed on to household members than earlier variants of concern did, a recent JAMA Network Open study found. For instance, omicron had a secondary household attack rate of 42.7 percent, referring to the percentage of household members who got COVID-19 from an infected person in the house. That beats other highly infectious variants by a mile: Alpha’s rate was 36.4 percent and delta’s 29.7 percent. And the currently circulating subvariant of omicron, BA.5, may even reinfect people who recently had COVID-19 (SN: 6/27/22).