Tesla CEO Elon Musk says his coronavirus symptoms are mild, while he conjures up Greek mythological imagery to describe the disease.
This was the year the world was supposed to get back to normal.
After two years of the coronavirus pandemic, which changed how we do everything from shopping to eating, there have been glimmers of hope that the worst is behind us.
But every once in a while we get a reminder that Covid is probably never going away completely.
Covid vaccines have proved to be more effective at easing reactions to the disease than at preventing infection. “Breakthrough cases” — people who’ve contracted the disease after receiving the vaccine — do occur, although breakthrough hospitalizations are rare, Science Daily reports, citing Mayo Clinic data.
When the coronavirus pandemic first hit in late February 2020, Elon Musk, chief executive of Tesla (TSLA) – Get Tesla Inc Report and SpaceX, guessed that the virus would be gone by April 2020.
It wouldn’t be the first time a Musk prediction fell flat. Musk’s outlook was overly optimistic, and in November of that year Musk caught the virus … for the first time.
Musk’s Second Bout With Covid
On Monday, Musk announced that he “supposedly” caught Covid for a second time. Musk tweeted that he has “almost no symptoms” after testing positive for the virus. He called Covid “the virus of Theseus.”
It’s never fun to be diagnosed with a disease that has been present in millions of deaths globally. But at least this time Musk has the benefit of being vaccinated and the treatments for Covid have led to the disease being far less deadly than it was when Musk first caught it back in 2020.
Musk has repeatedly said he believes in the effectiveness of vaccines, even tweeting last April, “To be clear, I do support vaccines in general & covid vaccines specifically. The science is unequivocal.”
But he has called into question other aspects of the pandemic, and of the response, as it has sometimes hurt his business.
His use of the term “supposedly” when saying he has been infected with Covid again harks back to his reluctance to accept the accuracy of the tests used to determine his infection.
“Something extremely bogus is going on. Was tested for covid four times today. Two tests came back negative, two came back positive. Same machine, same test, same nurse. Rapid antigen test from BD,” Musk tweeted shortly after his first diagnosis.
Musk went on to say that he was “getting wildly different results from different labs, but most likely I have a moderate case of covid.”
Musk’s Other Battles With Covid
Early on in the pandemic, Tesla’s production schedule was hampered as the state of California forced the company to close its factory there to protect workers from the spread.
Musk so sharply opposed the move that in March he said that Tesla would be leaving California. He cited “absurd and medically irrational behavior in violation of constitutional civil liberties,” as the state looked to stop production in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic.
Musk followed through with his threat, officially moving Tesla’s corporate headquarters from Silicon Valley to a large factory that is currently under construction outside of Austin.
