I'm going to defend kewlJ here (shocking, I know).

Going out after 9 days of symptoms is fine. COVID is believed to have a shorter infection window, where it really declines infectiousness at about day 6 of symptoms, even if your symptoms still feel strong. By Day 11, you are not likely to infect anyone.

This is different than colds and flu, where active symptoms which haven't yet declined indicate continued contagiousness, even if it's 2 weeks after they began.

COVID also does NOT spread on surfaces.

I once made everyone laugh during a COVID discussion at the WSOP. I said, "If you have COVID and coughed on one of your chips, and gave it to me, I could put it in my mouth and suck on it, and not catch COVID." They found that visual amusing, but it's correct, as much as it would contradict what you'd picture. Colds and flu work differently, in that you can easily catch them from surfaces.

COVID has converted to be flu-like. It now carries approximately the same danger and severity as the flu. In fact, the very tough 2024-25 flu beat COVID in ALL CATEGORIES during flu season. There were more flu infections, hospitalizations, serious cases, and deaths than from COVID, across all age groups during the fall/winter/early spring of 2024-25. This was the first time that occurred since COVID showed up.

I got that flu in late December, and it was the worst one I ever had, and far more severe than my 2 bouts with COVID (2022, 2024).

COVID does have more symptomatic variance than the flu, meaning different people will experience COVID differently, whereas with the flu, aside from extremely serious cases, most people experience it relatively similarly. This past year's flu carried with it immense fatigue, body aches, and fevers from 103-104 degrees.

Anyway, yes, Paxlovid is useless after 4 days, and you just have to wait it out at this point.

It is possible that you'll get some long-lingering symptoms (I had a long running cough after my 2024 COVID), but again, the flu can do this as well, as I also had a cough and linering fatigue which didn't go away for awhile early this year.


It is likely that COVID and the flu will both be around long term, and have relatively similar statistics. There was some thought that the flu might destroy COVID in 2025, as COVID infections were rapidly dropping when the flu was raging through the population. However, once the flu vanished in the late spring, COVID started to come back, though it's still at low levels.