Thick Red Line

My last brush with covid - as far as I can tell - was two years ago, and I consider I've done rather well to avoid it until now. I went to bed thinking that something was amiss, what with a headache and a tickly throat, and on rising to a headache this morning decided to check: the result was unmistakable, though now the symptoms seem to have morphed into those of a standard cold I'm very used to. Plus an upset stomach - though that's so common an experience it may not be to do with the pesky coronavirus at all. Possibly the arena of infection was the Goth night at Chislehurst Caves I spent a couple of hours at on Saturday night, but I fear, with only a day from that until the emergence of first symptoms, I was probably more infector than infectee; maybe my visit to a café in Banstead on Thursday was to blame, or Toddler Group on Friday morning. It's been so long since my last infection that I had to check what the NHS advises one does and I see it's now acceptable to get back to normal life 5 days after a positive result and see vulnerable people - such as my mum, who I hope to visit along with Lady Arlen and her daughter at the end of the month - after 10. I absolutely must meet tomorrow with a couple who need a wedding licence (we will do so outdoors and masked), and have a funeral of a beloved church member on Friday, which should be OK as the person I will interact most closely with is already dead.

It leads me to recollect that hallucinatory period that began when Mr Johnson appeared on our TV screens to say 'You must all stay at home', of which the children now at Church Club at the Infants School (which I will miss on Wednesday) will remember nothing. We treat covid remarkably casually now. My mum had it and made it through; so did Ms Kittywitch, who has several organs that aren't the ones she was born with and next to no immune system at all. It's fatally easy to forget how dreadful it seemed early in 2020, to forget that its fatality rate was 1% or so in the first wave, meaning that in this country not far short of 3/4 of a million people would have had to die before that resonant state, 'herd immunity', was achieved; to forget how we expected that sub-Saharan Africa was going to be devastated by the disease, when in fact it turned out to be relatively lenient with that part of the world. It sounds outrageous given the scale of death and suffering, but we got off reasonably lightly compared to how it might have been.

Back at (nearly) the beginning, I asked asked whether it was all worth it, the restrictions we placed on ourselves and the consequent economic and social damage, and I concluded that we would never reach a clear answer. The current covid enquiry isn't looking at all into the question of whether the Swedish solution or the Chinese or whatever would have been better than what we did in the UK, or rather the variants of what we did, as our constituent regional governments bickered and manoeuvred for advantage. I wondered whether the current advice on 'avoiding meeting people' for 5 days rather than complete isolation for 10 as it was in 2022 more reflects medical reality in terms of better epidemiology and dissemination of vaccines, or a different assessment of the balance between medical safety and socioeconomic harm. Now and again a news report appears in the lower reaches of the BBC homepage discussing some new finding about 'long-covid' or the like, but their obscurity reflects how we have moved on and don't want to think about it anymore. It's foolish, but I suppose, at the time, it's what I wanted as much as anyone.