I stretch the ear loops of my mask around my ears, pull the all-too-familiar piece of cloth over my face, and pinch the metallic piece over my nose. Although quite a familiar process, something is different this time; I’m in my own house. I’m the one with Covid.

   The reality in 2022 is that many of us have already fallen ill with Covid once, twice, or multiple times even. But one thing about Covid is that it is an individualized experience. One person may just have a simple stuffy nose. Others, such as myself, feel so dizzy that it takes me 3 minutes to fully get out of bed. I have a nose so congested that I can only breathe through my mouth. My throat feels bruised. I have raging headaches so bad that I can’t look at any sort of bright light or color. And to top it off, I can’t taste or smell anything. Other WO Covid sufferers had a wide range of symptoms.

   “I was on my couch for probably 20 hours a day, feeling very tired and drowsy. Whenever I stood up to use the bathroom, take a shower, brush my teeth, etc, I would feel super dizzy and I would just stand still until the dizziness went away.” Jr. Mike Doan said.

   Covid can make one feel like they got run over by a bus. Simple tasks like Doan explained, can feel so incredibly draining and difficult to do.

   “It started off with my mom having a really bad cough where she couldn’t sleep because it was killing her. Then, she had a headache and a really bad sore throat when she woke up the next day,” Soph. Yuri Martinez said.

   Some people don’t get knocked down as much by Covid, “It felt like a bad cold,” Jr. Anna Anderson said. It’s very compelling to know that some people feel like they’re on the verge of death when infected with Covid, while others experience just a bad cold.

   Losing one’s taste and/or smell is also a very common symptom with Covid. “It was weird to not be able to smell something that everyone would talk about,” Anderson said.

   In my experience, I lost my sense of taste and smell for 4 months which was horribly depressing; I never realized how much I took these two senses for granted until they were gone. I remember on Easter Sunday of 2020, my mom cooked a delicious meal that consisted of roasted ham, cheesy potatoes, homemade crescent rolls, and green beans. Everyone in my family was so excited to eat the meal, but I wasn’t because I knew I would only be able to feel all the flavorless textures in my mouth.

   Although the physical effects of Covid can be debilitating, the mental effects can be just as bad. An anonymous source said, “It wasn’t the actual sickness that caused me to struggle, it was the emotional harm that it did to me. Covid-19 started around halfway through my 6th grade year, and was the start to my depression.” 

   The start of the global pandemic was the start of mental health issues for teens worldwide. A statistic from healthline.com states, “37 percent of high schoolers experienced poor mental health during the pandemic and 44 percent said they felt persistently sad or hopeless the past year.”

   Covid is an individualized experience for everyone, physically and mentally. To put it in simple words, Covid is still puzzling to us all.