Living With Covid

Government policy in England is now that we live with covid. If the success of that policy is measured by the number of people who are indeed living with it – that is to say, they have covid – then it has been a remarkable success.

One in thirteen people in England had covid during the week to 19^th March, that’s a whopping 4.9 million people, a record number for the pandemic.

When the next set of weekly figures are released, I would guess that that the number will be even higher. In all, there have been 21.2 million cases of covid in the UK since the pandemic began and the number of people we know who have it will soon be greater than those who have not. You'll be a member of a minority group if you haven’t had it. At present I know of more people who have covid, or who have recently had it, than at any time since the pandemic began in March 2020.

It came as little surprise to me that, after two years of successfully dodging covid, I succumbed a week or so ago, and I have a pretty good idea where and when I picked it up.

I first thought that I had something on Friday 25^th March, when I woke up with a sore throat. Whenever I get a cold, it starts with a sore throat, and I had a cold a few weeks ago that started with a dodgy throat. That cold was the mildest I can remember, but I had taken the precaution of doing a lateral flow test then, which had been negative.

On this particular Friday I was keen not to be positive as in the evening I was due to see Genesis at The O2. Having paid a princely sum for my ticket, and having had the show cancelled twice already, it was with some trepidation that I dropped the fluid into the LFT device, and waited. To my enormous relief, it came back negative, although I was quite probably positive already. Apart from the sore throat, which abated during the day, I felt perfectly fine.

I apologise profusely to anyone I may have I passed covid on to at The O2; clearly I must have had it, because the following morning, when I took another LFT, it came back positive.

The next step was to book a PCR test – a week later and that would have been more difficult, since free LFTs and PCRs have now been withdrawn, and all the testing centres have closed. Donald Trump was rightly ridiculed at the start of the pandemic when he said that the only reason the USA had record case numbers was because they were doing more tests than anyone, and our government seems to have taken that view on board – make it harder for people to test, and watch the case numbers tumble (or not, it seems).

Booking a PCR was simple, and half an hour after logging on to the government website, I’d booked a test, driven there, taken the test, and driven home again. Twenty four hours later I got an email – the PCR was positive, which was no surprise.

By any measure, I have been lucky. On the Saturday I was blowing hot and cold, had a sore throat, and a cough, and felt a bit weary, a bit like a cold.

Over the next few days, the sore throat abated, I felt less weary, and the only real symptom was the occasional cough. Unlike coughs I’ve had with colds, this one at least did not keep me awake. Not actually feeling tired did that. Sleeping was fitful to say the least. Overall, the symptoms have been very mild, for which, I thank the vaccines.

Unfortunately, having covid coal boxed things that I had planned. A recording of the BBC show, The Infinity Monkey Cage, and concerts by Simple Minds and 10CC all had to be missed.

Nine days after the original LFT, and I’m still coming up positive. I need two consecutive days with negative LFTs before I can officially stop isolating, but the NHS app says that I can stop on 5^th April, which is likely to be earlier (just), anyway.

I reckon that I caught covid at the Backyard Comedy Club in Bethnal Green on 22^nd March when I saw Paul Sinha’s radio show being recorded (see The Perfect Pub Quiz). Hardly anyone wore a mask at the venue, very few did on the trains and tubes going there and back.

The Backyard Comedy Club is owned by Lee Hurst, an outspoken critic of vaccinations, lockdowns and masks; the irony that I probably caught covid there is not lost on me. While Hurst is entitled to his views, I am sure that without the vaccine I would have been much more ill; had everyone at his venue worn masks, I probably would not have caught covid anyway.

Hurst is not alone in his opposition to masks. Many others are frequently on radio and TV repeatedly expressing similar views, some on the basis that masks don’t do any good; some believe that masks are a tool of government to control us. I am in favour of their continued use in some settings; public transport, shops, theatres, or indoor settings where people are in close proximity. It cannot be coincidence that case numbers have surged since mask mandates were relaxed.

Masks aren’t effective, some people say. I wonder, do those people use tissues, or handkerchiefs when they sneeze or cough? If so, why? If a mask doesn’t stop transmission, what use is a crumpled piece of Kleenex? Frankly, why not just sneeze in other people’s faces?

If masks are no use, then presumably, this age old advice can be ignored?

I confess that I have been wearing masks less since the rules were relaxed – there’s a sort of peer pressure, I suppose – and I now think that I was wrong to do so. To that extent, catching covid is possibly my own fault.

No matter how careful we are, the relaxation of restrictions, concomitant with a more transmissible strain means more and more people becoming infected. The degree to which they fall ill will depend on a number of variables, but there can be no doubt that if the percentage of infected people becoming seriously ill and possibly requiring hospital treatment remains unchanged, the actual number of people falling into those groups will continue to climb.

The herd immunity strategy proposed by the government in March 2020 was quickly discredited and dropped, but given that at that time it was held that it would be achieved once 60% of the population had become infected, increasing case numbers mean we seem to have readopted the policy, albeit by inertia.

Whatever the policy – and government seems not to have any sort of proactive covid policy at all now – we have without doubt reached the point where covid is regarded in much the same way as the common cold.

How appropriate a course of action this is for the unvaccinated or for the immunosuppressed remains to be seen: I have my doubts.