French apartment renovations, Day 381: When a positive is a negative

Almost two years into the Covid-19 pandemic, we had our first positive test: Inga. She woke up not feeling well (headache and fever) so we kept her out of school and got her tested. All of the months and years of isolation and masking and foregoing indoor gatherings, and it still happened.

Granted, we have been allowing the kids to play at friends' houses for a little while...but the only friend Inga has played with over the past few weeks is negative as of today. I'm suspecting it came either from school or riding the tram on the way to soccer.

Given the explosion of the omicron variant, I'm not all that surprised it happened now. But still there's the stress and uncertainty of how this will play out: how many of us will also get sick? Will Inga be one of the majority who get Covid and recover without long-term illness? Or will she be one of the statistics of Long Covid or worse?

Good news, though: France approved vaccination for 5-11 year olds recently so Ivy is already booked for hers.

A lot of my day was spent taking care of Covid-stuff: calling all of the schools, getting all of the kids tested (everyone else is negative so far), sending their test results to all of the schools, updating our test results on the national app that does contact tracing.

Right now the protocols for elementary school is: if a student tests positive, the class is "closed" and students have to test 3x (once every other day) in order to be able to attend classes. They can keep attending right away as long as they provide negative tests everyother day. It's mostly the same in middle- and high-school; if students are fully vaccinated and considered a "close contact," they can continue attending with the same testing regimen.

For now we made a "Covid isolation room" for Inga, aka our bedroom. It overlooks the living room, so we can see and talk with each other. I took periodic trips into the room to snuggle Inga (with my N95 mask on). I know it mght be overkill since Inga was breathing all over Ivy and Dio in the little attic bedroom they shared last night. But as long as we have the rest of the family testing negative, we'll keep Inga separated. 

Inga has been a great sport about putting on her own N95 when she leaves the room to go to the bathroom. I caught her carefully spraying any surfaces she'd touched: doorknobs, light switches, toilet seats, etc.

She was bored, though. I brought her a phone so we could text each other on WhatsApp, and she talked with one of her friends a bit too. I let her borrow my computer to watch and episode of The Flash. She wasn't very hungry until the evening, but she still managed to have honey-lemon tea, red berry tea, bone broth, and then a hamburger for dinner.

And with Inga camped out in our bedroom, that means we got to move down to Le Catamaran! It's so nice down here. Maybe we'll just stay here permanently :) Well, I have a relative coming a week from now (provided we are all testing negative at that point) but it's a nice thought.

Dio wasn't feeling well today, so after lunch I let him stay home. And this evening I'm kind of feeling off....so we'll see if we get more negatives turning into positives.

Okay, so on to other news: we were hoping to tile the backsplash today. With Covid interrupting these plans, we still got a lot done. I painted the special primer on the areas that will be tiled. Then we cut most of the difficult holes for the outlets. They are perfectly sized and line up precisely where the should. So satisfying. We also got the oven wired and installed. It works! I mixed up a small batch of lime mortar for where we'll be installing the bathroom mirror upstairs.