Epilogue: I got Covid

After writing this blog about Covid and the counter-productive measures taken to ‘fight’ it for nearly two years I appear to have finally got the bug. Has it changed my mind on anything I have previously written? Will all my words come back to me in shades of mediocrity? Read on.

The week beginning March 21 was one of my most active in a long time. I went out with friends, visited several pubs, played football, went into the office three times, did a supermarket shop, took my car for an MOT and more. So lots of mixing with the great unwashed. By the Saturday, March 26, ambling round a village in Wiltshire, I began to feel a little ‘off’. Initially I put this down to have been bitten nine ruddy times by some pesky insect the night before - perhaps it had given me some mild fever.

By the following day the bites were certainly itchy but I also felt a bit ‘flu-y’ and with less energy than normal. My back was a bit sore too, but sadly that’s nothing new. By Monday I had an occasional dry cough, my lungs felt slightly pressured and I was tasting food ever so slightly less than normal. I decided it might be an idea to continue working from home for the next few days, as I'm lucky enough to have that option.

Last year a Boots chemist had casually handed me a box of lateral flow tests - well, why not, they were, ahem, free - and I still had most of them left. So on the Tuesday, with an odd sense of breezy excitement, I decided to shove one down my throat and up my nose, and I was given a moderate thrill on seeing it come up positive. I was now part of the club!

Over the next couple of days I continued working, albeit not at full speed: I cancelled the VC meetings I had. My energy levels were low - most days when I’m working at home I climb the hills near my house after lunch, but all I could manage was a shuffle along the flattish field nearby. On Thursday I actually spent half the morning and most of the afternoon in bed. Outside: brief snow flurries. A cough would now and then assault my lungs, which were damaged 20 years previously, probably by inhaling asbestos. Was I soon to be heading for hospital and death?

I began to realise I might have been thinking such thoughts not just because of feeling poorly, but because of the psy-ops campaign Sage and the media have indulged in for two years. When your own government has chosen to increase “the perceived level of personal threat … among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging”, this comes at a cost, even for those of a more sceptical nature, like myself. Also, the isolation induced by the rules previously in place play heavily on the brain: you see little choice but to isolate yourself physically and mentally for the foreseeable future. It crushes the spirit. Perhaps it prolongs the actual illness.

But what struck me most, and what actually made me even more cynical of governments’ unhinged, unjust response to this disease, was how unnecessary the stay-at-home orders and business closures were. Because when you feel ill in this way, you do not want to go out. You ‘lock yourself down’, and since symptomatic people are by far and away the biggest spreaders of the most virulent form of this virus, you therefore limit (but not totally eliminate) the spread. Which is, of course, the way we used to do it before the world threw out decades of pandemic management in early 2020 and decided to follow the callous and brutal ways of the Chinese Communist Party.

And I soon began to recover anyway - on Friday I had more energy and sneezed less. On Saturday I returned to my post-lunch hill walking, then slept for 11 hours that night. Tomorrow I'll be back on the exercise bike and I’ll be returning to the office on Tuesday. So it was four or five days of being under the weather; I’ve had a hundred worse colds - which is what this resembles, although there are subtle differences to a cold, which tell you that this is indeed a novel coronavirus not seen before Fauci’s mates cooked it up in a Chinese lab. For the vast majority of healthy people this is a moderate illness, which we’ve known from very early days: it was insanity to quarantine the young and healthy, to stop them going to school, to university, to work, to the gym, for months on end. We gave ourselves the biggest recession in 300 years, half a trillion pounds’ worth of debt, and the NHS’s longest ever waiting list for this? We cratered children’s education and mental health, created a hideous precedent for public health responses, and committed an unprecedented assault on civil liberties for this? At the risk of being accused of solipsism, that is what you can’t help but think.

I’m pleased that I’ve now got a good dose of naturally acquired immunity, likely ten times more effective than a third jab would be. I’m pleased that as someone who has now had the virus, I can yell even louder about the tragishambles of lockdown; it strengthens my credentials, does it not? I’m not so pleased that society was wrecked in a vain effort to stop the spread of a disease that is considerably less harmful than many we have faced in the past and will do in the future.