Your questions, answered "I'm hearing that most everyone will get covid so a person might as well be consciously exposed now, get covid and be done with it. In general, is this a wise strategy in the short and long term?" — Ellen in Michigan With the pandemic in its third calendar year and caseloads in the stratosphere, the thought of "getting covid over with" is tempting. But please don't try to deliberately infect yourself. It's dangerous to you, those around you, and the health system overall. For the sake of argument, let's say you ditch your mask, ignore physical distancing, and otherwise throw caution to the wind. The virus will eventually find you. If you're vaccinated and generally healthy, your case will probably be mild to moderate. But you'll still be sick, and you'll have to deal with all the complications that come with it. That means testing, isolating for a week or more, testing again, missing work — all on top of fighting whatever symptoms come up. There's also a chance you could develop long covid or get stuck with lingering problems like loss of smell for weeks after your infection clears. Nobody wants that. Consider also that you're likely to be most infectious a day or two before your symptoms appear. Or maybe you'll get infected but never develop symptoms. In either case, your recklessness puts others at risk — particularly children who aren't yet eligible for the vaccines and people with compromised immune systems. "Unless you are tested with a reliable test daily, you won't know when you first become infectious, and could transmit the coronavirus to people who did not choose to get omicron," Leana S. Wen, The Post's resident public health columnist, wrote earlier this month. If you're unvaccinated, you're much more likely to become severely ill, be hospitalized or die of covid-19. Whatever your status, any infection that requires a trip to the emergency room, or even to your local clinic or doctor's office, puts additional pressure on a system that's already under extreme strain. Hospitals are bursting at the seams right now. Health-care workers are beyond exhausted. Some parts of the country have started rationing medical care, delaying important surgeries, and turning patients away. Just this week, my colleague Lenny Bernstein reported on one hard-hit hospital in New England where some patients were waiting more than a day for proper beds and nurses were drawing blood in people's cars. This will be the reality in many places even after cases start to subside. If you recover from a case of covid-19 — and odds are that you will — there's no guarantee that your infection from omicron will shield you from future variants. Your immune protection will be elevated, no doubt, but we don't know how long that protection will last or exactly how much you'll have. Another reason to stay vigilant, Wen notes, is that better covid-19 treatments are coming. Officials are working to ramp up production of two new antiviral pills and the one monoclonal antibody infusion that works against omicron. The Biden administration is also expanding access to coronavirus tests. These tools will make infections more manageable, but we don't have enough of them yet. "The longer that Americans can hold off from getting covid-19," Wen wrote, "the more likely they will be able to access timely testing and state-of-the-art treatment." | 
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