1. Are we still doing these?
☐ Yes. Go to the next question.

2. Are you completing this form for a child who is younger than kindergarten age?
☐ No. I am completing it as an empty ritual.
☐ Yes. But I acknowledge that protocols are insufficient, toddler life has resumed, and I will contract BA.9 at the Bluey party from the Silent Finance Dads around the cheese-cube platter.

3. Have you experienced any symptoms of COVID-19 in the past ten days?
☐ No. I am one of the four Americans yet to contract COVID-19.
☐ No. I am in my Inter-Infection Invincibility Window. This morning I went to the airport and licked everyone arriving from Des Moines.
☐ Yes. The distemper has visited its cold hand upon my lintel. Though I be fortified since Michaelmas with charms and amulets thrice-blessed, the miasma entered unto my chambers, smuggled there, no doubt, by an unseen Dutchman.

4. If you answered “yes” above, which of the following describes your symptoms?
☐ A fever of less than a hundred degrees Fahrenheit, cough, sore throat, loss of taste or smell, shortness of breath, piping-hot sneeze, shortness of smell, loss of throat, intergluteal elm bark, unmotivated fibula, buffalo moon hump, the Galloping Dancey Boys, increased sensitivity to rhyming insults, Count Scrofula, and fisherman’s lonely-eye.
☐ Similar to before I had COVID, with reduced paranoia about catching COVID.
☐ Adrift on my sickbed, I have descended into a spectral tunnel, where I wander through a column of humid twilight, hearing echoes of my children’s voices calling out for me, only to suddenly awake and realize that I’m making them waffles.
☐ Spectral tunnel but with diarrhea.

5. In the past thirty days, have you received a positive result from a COVID-19 diagnostic test?
☐ Yes. Also in the past sixty days and in the past thirty seconds.

6. Do you have any idea where you got it?
☐ No.
☐ I think maybe from work, but no one else tested positive. I was the only one in the office wearing a mask, but I’m not sure if it was a real KN95—the box looks pretty bootleg, and the mask straps are constantly breaking. I held a flashlight up to one of the masks, and a lot of light shone through, so maybe they’re not actually safe? The only other possibility is I got it at Sturgis.

7. If you recently experienced symptomatic COVID-19 and have since recovered, was it worth it?
☐ Yes. Now I can eat inside restaurants like all the people who never cared.
☐ No. Having the virus was hard enough, but it was worse to have to tweet “Thankful to be vaxxed and boosted!!”

8. If the line on the rapid test shows up slowly and faintly, does that mean that you’re less infectious than when it appears right away and is the color of a Flamin’ Hot Cheeto?
☐ I found an article that says you shouldn’t make decisions based on the intensity of the line. But: if it’s light, board your flight.
☐ You are most infectious when the test window shows four pirate ships.

9. Should I expect to get COVID-19 every two months until the end of time?
☐ At some point, you’ll also get monkeypox.

10. Is it weird that there are so few current TV shows that exist in a COVID universe? It’s like the characters are nominally living on our time line and in our reality, but I guess it would be just too dismal to watch them manage protocols and masking.
☐ No. Mass entertainment is a form of escape. No one wants to watch Ted Lasso come to staggering realizations about his childhood via Zoom therapy.
☐ Kind of. “This Is Us” tried to work COVID into the plot for a while but gave up to focus on ending the series with nine consecutive funerals.

11. I know this is annoying, but do you mind taking a test before we hang out? We’re supposed to visit my parents next weekend, and we’re trying to be extra safe.
☐ Yes. It is annoying.
☐ Yes. We’ve decided it’s time to stop warping our lives around what’s basically an inconvenience at this point. There are a lot of other problems in the world, and we like ignoring those, too. ♦