Monday, September 20, 2021 (Kaiser News) -- The test results that hot day in early August shouldn’t have surprised me — all the symptoms were there. A few days earlier, fatigue had enveloped me like a weighted blanket. I chalked it up to my weekend of travel. Next, a headache clamped down on the back of my skull. Then my eyeballs started to ache. And soon enough, everything tasted like nothing.

As a reporter who’s covered the coronavirus since the first confirmed U.S. case landed in Seattle, where I live, I should have known what was coming, but there was some part of me that couldn’t quite believe it. I had a breakthrough case of covid-19 — despite my two shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, the second one in April.

I was just one more example of our country’s tug and pull between fantasies of a post-covid summer and the realities of our still-raging pandemic, in which even the vaccinated can get sick.

Not only was I sick, but I’d exposed my 67-year-old father and extended family during my first trip back to the East Coast since the start of the pandemic. It was just the scenario I had tried to avoid for a year and a half.

Where did I get it? Who knows. Like so many Americans, I had loosened up on wearing masks all the time and physical distancing after getting fully vaccinated. We had flown across the country, seen friends, stayed at a hotel, eaten indoors and, yes, even gone to a long-delayed wedding with other vaccinated people.