How to Shake the Guilt When You Give Someone COVID-19 – AARP

Pauline Brantley doesnt know where she got COVID-19. She does know where her three kids and her husband picked it up, though: They got it from her.

Brantley, 51, of Los Angeles is vaccinated and regularly wears an N-95 mask but still got COVID. And even though she isolated immediately after testing positive and wore the mask at home, two days before Christmas every member of her family got it too.

They went down like dominoes, Brantley says. She has been coping with the guilt of passing COVID on ever since.

As the highly contagious omicron variant races around the world, managing to evade masks, vaccines and boosters, it feels easier than ever to get COVID-19 and easier than ever to give COVID to someone else. For Brantley, a lot of her initial guilt came from ruining the holidays, and once she realized her kids were suffering, her guilt intensified.

I didnt really have a fever, but the kids all had fevers and they were really just miserable. So once ... I saw them suffering I felt worse than I did before, she says. It sucks to be sick, especially over Christmas. I just felt so bad.

Brantley is not alone in feeling guilty about passing along the virus. Its something that Elizabeth Cohen, a therapist in New York City, is seeing in her patients. A lot of people are grappling with the guilt of having passed COVID to someone else, she says. People feel like, If Im a good person, I would have protected everybody. And its like, no, you are a good person its that this virus is super sneaky.

Lucy McBride, M.D., an internist in Washington, D.C., is also seeing feelings of shame among her patients who have contracted COVID-19. A common theme is when my patients call me they say, I feel so guilty. I feel so badly that I am sick when I was so careful, she says. You have to understand that when you have a highly transmissible variant like omicron in circulation, its not a failure of our mitigation efforts. Its really just the intrinsic nature of the virus.

Thats why she gets frustrated when she hears her patients are feeling culpable. If its a hurricane and you get wet, thats not your fault, right? McBride says.

Still, like most mothers, Brantley couldnt help but feel terrible watching her kids (and husband) get sick, especially since she brought the virus into the home.

She was surprised, though, at how badly she felt about exposing her coworkers when she went into the office one day before she knew she was infected. Even more surprising was how bad they made her feel about it.

I spent a lot of time worrying that I put them at risk, Brantley says. But they spent a lot of time being mad at me for possibly putting them at risk, even though there's no way I could have known.

Its that mentality that frustrates McBride. We have to realize that getting COVID and spreading COVID is not a moral failure, she says. It's really important to take the shame away from getting sick and accidentally infecting someone else, because this virus is so contagious. It's sort of inevitable that we will all be exposed to it at some point.

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How to Shake the Guilt When You Give Someone COVID-19 - AARP