John Wulff

I tested positive for COVID on Monday morning, my second time. I’d spent a few days writing off shaky joints and muscles as just being a slug, and on Saturday I woke up with what I thought was a cold. In a few hours I went from “how does this COVID stuff work now?” to a full care plan and a prescription on the way.

COVID care has come a long way since my first round in 2023. This time one home test checked for flu, COVID, and RSV at once, an online questionnaire got me Paxlovid, and Amazon Pharmacy had it on the way the same day. I also had “Dr. Claude”: Claude Code with some cool skills and a ton of my personal data in Cotrugli, the archive I built for my personal assistant. A clinician at Optum still wrote the prescription. Dr. Claude got me there with a clear picture of what was going on, which gave me confidence in every decision that day.

Getting Grilled

As soon as the test was positive (it only took about 10 seconds for that bar to fill, not the full 15 minutes), I fired up Claude Code in my vault and asked it to grill me on where I was. Grill-me is a skill from Matt Pocock’s skills collection that interviews you one question at a time until there are no open questions. Claude asked each one with multiple-choice answers I could tap through.

The questions were the ones a doctor would ask, and a couple of my answers were embarrassing. Have you had a fever? “Haven’t checked.” When did the shakiness start? “Not sure.” Other answers helped: congestion and headache were getting better while body aches and tingling were getting worse, and I got short of breath when I moved around. I’d been exposing my family all weekend, which informed how we need to test and how valuable it is for me to still isolate (yes, says the science!).

Checking My Oura Ring

“Not sure” turned out to be answerable. I wear an Oura ring, and its data flows into Cotrugli, so I told Claude to check my Oura data there and see if it could find my symptoms. It did. Friday night into Saturday my lowest heart rate was 90 when it normally sits in the low 60s to low 70s, my heart rate variability dropped to 8, my skin temperature was 0.73°C above baseline, and I was awake for two and a half hours. That looked like the fever night, the night before the sore throat showed up. Thursday and Friday showed the slug days too, with readiness slipping and temperature creeping up.

Paxlovid has to start within five days of the first symptoms, and mine had started earlier than I’d been counting, so the deadline moved up.

Courtney wears an Oura ring too, and hers was more worrying than her negative test. Sunday night her lowest heart rate was 81, higher than any night in the previous three weeks, with HRV down at 8. Her negative test didn’t settle anything yet.

Searching My Photos

Claude also asked whether I’d had COVID before. I knew I had, around my birthday, but I couldn’t remember if it was 2022 or 2023. Cotrugli runs optical character recognition (OCR) and writes a summary for every photo, so Claude searched them for old test results and found the Instagram story I posted on August 20, 2023.

I photograph my medications as I take them, and Cotrugli keeps a log from those photos, so Claude already knew about the NyQuil I took Sunday night, and I told it about the Flonase I hadn’t photographed. How I track medications with photos deserves its own post.

Getting Paxlovid

With a timeline I trusted, I started an eVisit in Optum’s MyChart, a questionnaire about symptoms, timing, and medications that a clinician reviews. Claude drafted a summary for it from everything it had just pieced together: the slug days starting around Thursday, the Friday-night fever from my ring, my risk factors, and a full medication list. The list matters with Paxlovid because it interacts with a lot of drugs. A clinician reviewed it and sent Paxlovid to Amazon Pharmacy about an hour after I first opened Claude. It was on its way that night, along with a cough medicine.

Making a Plan

With Paxlovid on the way, Claude and I worked through the rest of the decisions. I’m sleeping in our bedroom with the door closed, the bathroom fan running, and the window cracked, while Courtney sleeps upstairs. Whether I go to a hotel depends on her test tonight. Abigail has Type 1 diabetes (T1D), so Claude and I are keeping an eye on her continuous glucose monitor (CGM) data. Claude has full access to it through Glucagent and can look for signs she’s getting sick, like unexplained highs, which can be an early sign of illness. Then I asked for a one-page PDF of the whole thing, to have something on paper for the family.

The one-page report, with the fever night highlighted in orange.

If you can’t tell, I love all these tools, how fun they are to build, and how much they’re enhancing my life.

– John

Update: The Paxlovid Taste

Added October 6, 2026. I took my first Paxlovid dose at 9:38 Monday night, and about an hour later the metallic taste set in. It’s powerful, and it’s a bummer, with the rest of the five-day course still ahead of me.

I also asked Claude to figure out where I caught it: Claude, Where Did I Get COVID?