Covid is mutating – and changing the way we live for ever

This week, a friend got in touch to say her son was ill in bed with a persistent cough. He tested negative for Covid. She was delighted at the news. Another friend reported that she and her husband received a phone call from a family member who had been diagnosed with coronavirus. They went along for a car park swab just in case. They tested positive. She was also delighted at her news.

Which one of them was right? Beats me. I just mumbled “That’s great…” to both of them, which isn’t really my style. But, then, the new normal is defined by equivocation.

Surely I can’t be the only one bewildered not just by the lack of expert consensus but the absence of commonsense agreement? Here in the cheap seats, it’s impossible to guess the best course of action or inaction – or even whom to believe.

Let’s take the Great Covid Coventry Rave, when 800 or so students illegally partied, up close and personal, in their halls of residence. Aside from wanting a banging night out with a hangover to match, some were quite open about the fact they saw Covid as something to get over and done with.

I’m reminded of chickenpox parties, when a shout would go up that someone’s toddler had chickenpox and everyone hared round to their house to drink wine and hope their child would catch it sharpish.

Me, I was too cowardly. Or do I mean sensible? That’s in the eye of the beholder – but the idea of deliberately setting up my infant to catch a disease simply didn’t sit well with me. There were too many “what ifs?” involved.

Creating herd immunity among consenting, otherwise healthy adults who understand the relatively low risks ought to be different. It is different. But is it for the best? And what constitutes a relatively low risk? I wish I knew.

Another thing: even if 800 students do get Covid, fall ill to varying degrees, go in to self-isolating quarantine and, one hopes, recover, they will still be subject to the general sweeping lockdowns imposed on their geographical vicinity. So what’s the point?

Without regular testing for both live virus and post-viral antibodies, there is no real benefit to any individual who catches coronavirus, whatever their motivation.

Does it make me a fascist to suggest that our society will not get back up and running until there is a register of those who have immunity and those who do not? Would that effectively sow the seeds of a dystopian dual state, or just help us hang on to some semblance of normality until a vaccine is up and ready?

Frankly, unless we have the conversation – and, more saliently, the testing facilties – we cannot move forward. Oh, and if that is fascistic, then I take it all back.

Covid has changed us all. Some people have lost their jobs, their family businesses, their family members. Others, spared their expensive commute and deprived of their organic latte habit, have an extra £3,000 in the bank, according to a survey this week. Not my lot, though: the amount we have spent on food has rocketed during the pandemic.

We are living half-lives in limbo, unable to make plans, celebrate milestone birthdays or see shielding loved ones. There is something especially harrowing about before-andafter photographs of those in care homes, taken each side of their desperately lonely lockdown; it is not disease that etches their joyless faces, but the heartbreak of isolation.

Covid is mutating, too. Some scientists assert it is getting weaker – hence why we are still seeing nearrecord daily cases but far fewer deaths – others that it is just becoming differently awful.

Every day, new symptoms are added to a list as long as Gray’s Anatomy – the textbook and the 16-season US drama. Delirium and anxiety have joined the roll call alongside muscle pain and headaches. Children, we have learnt, tend to present with gastrointestinal issues rather than loss of taste and smell.

But, in truth, unless you display “classic Covid”, with its high fever, respiratory difficulties and continuous cough – in other words, the symptoms most likely to lead to hospitalisation – GPS aren’t terribly interested.

You could say that’s fair enough as there’s no cure, but it’s also woefully short-sighted as sufferers don’t get tested and so there’s no record of them having had it, which would surely help build up a more accurate picture nationally?

I’ve been ill on and off since April, as has my younger daughter. I’m convinced we had what I call “unconventional Covid” that has since evolved into “long Covid”, where symptoms – fatigue, especially – persist.

We succumbed in April to gastroenteritis, loss of taste and smell and, in my case, loss of vision for several days. I also had unbelievably searing pains in my legs. Many months later, the extraordinarily debilitating nausea strikes at random. The leg pains are less frequent, but still unpleasant.

None of this was recognised as Covid-19 at the time, and now it’s just something to deal with. I’m sanguine because I just keel over, which is manageable as I work from home, but my 11-year-old repeatedly cries into the night, pleading to be sick. On other occasions, she throws up and struggles to stand. Since restarting school last month, she has been off twice.

She was chosen at random by the NHS for a Covid test, but that was well after the first onslaught and between bouts of debilitating sickness, so she was officially deemed negative. A GP test for bacterial infection came back negative, too.

Finding out whether she and I have had Covid would, at least, help psychologically, but the only way would be a blood test, and on that front the NHS is a bit of a lost cause – not least because of the irrational but real guilt I would feel at hogging resources. So I am resigned to getting tested privately.

It’s an answer for me, but not the answer for everyone. That lies with the Government. We need more and better and regular testing. Now.

That we still don’t have it as winter looms is a disgrace.

Our society will not get back up and running until there is an immunity register