Covid in Oaxaca

An old nemesis rears its head once again.

“Well, I’ve got Covid,” I said sadly to Andrea while staring down at our yellow concrete bathroom counter. Mere minutes after being assembled, the cardboard test that resembled a lollipop showed two clear, broad, red lines. “I’ve already got your own test queued up and ready for you,” I called out.

“Wow, you already got a result? It’s been less than three minutes!” Andrea replied. She walked into the bathroom and stared down at the test. “I’m so sorry!”

Fifteen minutes later, Andrea called out to me. “It’s faint, but I’ve got a positive test also. Let’s set up a second round, just to be sure.” Another fifteen minutes later, our results were replicated. We had Covid, all but guaranteeing that Leo did as well.

All things considered, it hasn’t been so bad. We’ve responsibly received our yearly booster shots, significantly reducing the odds of a severe reaction, and we’re in generally quite good health. The greater concern is the specter of long Covid, a condition the U.S. government has seemingly all but abandoned researching and would strongly prefer people pretend doesn’t exist. We were far more worried about Leo than about ourselves, wondering how his young body might react to the virus. But now, several days in, we all seem to be recuperating well.

Being sick in a foreign country brings on its own kind of hopeless terror. Not only are you at the mercy of systems and bureaucracies that you likely have no direct experience with, the odds are good you’re going to have to explain your likely embarrassing symptoms to someone who doesn’t speak your language. U.S. media also likes to portray foreign medical systems as being profoundly flawed, to the point of being not just ineffective but actually dangerous to use. The U.K.’s system, the NHS, which legitimately has major problems, is held up as a politically charged example of how care deteriorates when medicine is socialized (pay no attention, please, to the many, many other countries with socialized medicine that offer excellent and incredibly affordable care). The boogeyman of bad care and counterfeit medication becomes even more puffed up when talking about Latin countries.

Mexico is no longer a foreign country to us, though. We’ve been here long enough that even though we’re still learning to speak Spanish and need to look up the verbs and vocabulary that can help us accurately describe what’s happening within the mortal cage that houses each of our consciousnesses, we can still effectively describe to a doctor exactly what seems to be going wrong. We don’t have a lifetime of experience in Mexican waiting rooms or standing in front of white-clad Oaxacan pharmacists asking what type of medicine we want, but those are surmountable interactions.

I’ve had a few people reach out to me to let me know that my portrayal of the Mexican medical system is perhaps a bit too glowing, and it’s certainly true that, other than the birth of our son, we haven’t had to have any sort of serious or expensive treatment here. We’ve heard time and again that cancer care in Mexico is incredibly costly and that the quality of care can be uneven. We also know people who went through IVF and who were, by their own description, taken advantage of. We also access private care here in Mexico, something we can do only because we’re wealthier than the average Mexican.

I think that Mexicans, though, don’t realize how the quality of medical care is dropping in the United States, and how grotesquely expensive it is, even from lackluster facilities and not particularly skilled providers. Having Covid remains a little scary—we lived through the worst days of the virus in New York, and I suspect I’ll never quite shake the trauma of that time—but being in Mexico doesn’t heighten that fear. If anything, the fact that Mexico takes vaccination extremely seriously sets it apart from the vile Libertarian denialism of the United States, where people would rather see their neighbors die than have their supposed freedoms infringed upon.

When we told our friends and family we had Covid, some of them expressed surprise. “We forgot that was still a thing!” was, more or less, how a few people responded, but it’s an understandable sentiment. Covid is something I think all of us would prefer to forget, and ignoring a problem rather than facing it head-on is certainly the modern American approach to life. But at least we’ve been in Mexico long enough that having this type of illness here doesn’t feel particularly frightening, and we’re in a place where people take vaccinations seriously. It’s more than can be said for many other places right now, and particularly the United States.

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