Following all the winter break New Year’s Eve gatherings, B-CC’s senior class made up over a third of all January absences. As B-CC hit its highest absence rate since September, questions spread. Was it senioritis? Was it COVID-19?

We may have the answer: mono.

B-CC senior Marley Boss says, “Two weeks ago I got a facetime call from a group chat that hasn’t been active in weeks. Mono had hit our friend group, and all I could think about were the stories that I had heard. She specified: “kids missing weeks of school, kids being hospitalized, everyone seems to know who has had it.” 

As more B-CC seniors discovered their spleens were swollen—not to mention what a spleen even is—the spread of mono became undeniable. At Capital Medical Group, if a teenager comes in showing Mono symptoms, the pediatrician can usually guess what school they’re from because of how Mono travels in clusters.

Dr. Snow, a pediatrician at Capital Medical Group and a key witness to this phenomenon, explained, “It’s highly transmissible among teenagers…Most people are not having blood-to-blood contact. The most common way is through saliva.”

However, before anyone claims they got it from a shared can of soda, she added, “But you can get it from sex, I’m not going to lie.”

For those who have never had Mono, your body develops no immunity to it, regardless of age. The time between infection and symptoms can be long, but once Mono hits you, you can be knocked out for a couple of weeks with extreme fatigue and a nasty sore throat.

Dr. Snow shared that the severity of symptoms varies by person; some get sick enough to go to the doctor, while others may pass it off as a cold.

“And,” she added, “there’s always going to be that subset of people who had it when they were little and didn’t know it and so they’ve already got antibodies.”

Mono symptoms can linger for months. Mr. Alivia, B-CC’s attendance secretary, commented, “Sometimes we would see a student return for a day or a portion of the day only to go home early due to illness, which indicates perhaps they had not fully recovered.”

Your best bet for dodging Mono is to keep water bottles to yourself and your bathroom sessions to a minimum. Take care of yourself too, which means fully recovering before returning to school. Stay safe and healthy out there, Barons.