For the first time during the pandemic, I tested positive for COVID-19. So, Dr.

After 26 months of playing what I came to regard as viral dodgeball, this Sunday I tested positive for Covid-19.
That is noteworthy only to my family and employer. But it’s part of a larger pattern of the pandemic in America now.

People like me are getting infected even though they are at some level vaccinated and boosted. In my case, I have received two vaccines and two boosters — all of them Pfizer. My most recent booster was administered May 9.

I tested positive 13 days later.

My positive test, of course, plunged me into isolation. An entire week of work assignments — and there were more than a few — disappeared. My podcast, “The Takeout,” has not failed to produce an original show each week in its history (dating back to January 2017). We scrubbed the in-person show we had planned and booked Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical adviser.

“You’re the personification of this,” Dr. Fauci told me Thursday, referring to rising infection rates — more than 100,000 cases per week nationally for the first time since February. “This is a highly transmissible virus. And it is very likely that if you were not vaccinated and double-boosted, then you would have had a much more severe outcome than you have right now. And you and I, I think — very unlikely, Major, we’d be speaking to each other right now.”

Fauci could see me via Zoom. I looked and sounded well enough for an interview. My symptoms were fatigue, headache, low-level fever and night sweats. Fatigue was my first, most noticeable symptom. I felt it Saturday afternoon as I tried to play golf. I was winded in an utterly unfamiliar way. It’s a common symptom, Fauci told me.

My symptoms have been manageable. I’ve had worse. I’ve had pneumonia and double pneumonia, and both were much worse.

And yet, even with four doses of vaccine in my system, Covid still felt like real sickness. To Fauci’s point, I thought about how much worse things might have been had I not been vaxxed and boosted.

Fauci asked me if I had sought any antiviral therapy. My primary-care physician prescribed Paxlovid. I began a five-day regimen Tuesday evening and felt noticeably better Wednesday morning.

That was the right course of action, Fauci told me, and he said that taking Paxlovid as soon as possible after testing positive is also something the government is trying to get the general public to do and physicians treating SARS-Co-V-2 patients to do.

Fauci praised Paxlovid as “an anti-viral drug that has a very good capability to the tune of almost 90% of preventing people from requiring hospitalizations and going on to severe disease.”

As it happened, that very day the federal government was ramping up availability of Paxlovid.

“We are doubling the number of sites that have packs of it available from 20,000 to 40,000. Just today we’ve announced the first of the federally supported test and treat sites are opening up in Rhode Island, soon to be followed by Minnesota, New York and other locations.”

Three Paxlovid tablets, twice a day, gave me no side effects, outside of a faint metallic taste.

“It blocks the replication of the virus,” Fauci said. “When…