I know I’m not the only one with pandemicinduced hypochondria

Iwoke up with a tickly throat on Thursday morning. “RED ALERT! RED ALERT!” I wanted to shout. “CANCEL EVERYTHING! LOCK DOWN THE HOUSE IMMEDIATELY!” But I didn’t actually shout this, because I had a tickly throat, and I didn’t want to spray my tickly throat germs around the house thus putting my family at real risk of also getting tickly throats.

Instead, I coughed weakly, doing my best impression of a consumptive heroine in a Victorian novel. Gosh, they knew how to be ill back then.

“Are you OK, my beloved?” is what I imagined my husband saying, when in reality he just rolled his eyes and sighed. I coughed again, a little louder for effect. This time, he almost jumped out of his skin.

He leapt straight for the pile of lateral flow tests, which are now allowed more cupboard space than he is. (“Do we really need another box of these?” he asks, every time I return from the pharmacy laden down like some sort of pandemic pack horse. To which my answer is always: “Yes! They’re free! We all need more free stuff!”)

He waved the testing paraphernalia at me (from a safe distance). I went through the motions, like the drug addict I am – a drug addict who is compelled to take rapid antigen tests every six hours because what if you picked it up in the queue for that coffee you bought this morning?

You know the drill: stick down the back of your tonsils, then up your nose, dip stick in liquid, pour liquid on cartridge, wait 30 minutes to see if you are gestating 10 days locked in your bedroom with only your self-pity for company.

‘There has been a rise in escalator falls because we are too scared to hold handrails’

I should say, we’ve got quite good at doing these tests in our house. Don’t even sneeze or gag any more!

Anyway, back to Thursday morning.

“Obviously, we are all going to have to do tests, because any one us could be asymptomatic.”

I said this, accusingly, of course, because my husband has gone back to the office and my daughter back to school, and either one of them could have been responsible for my terrible tickly throat. They groaned, and also went through the motions. Half an hour later, we knew: none of us had Covid.

But I am pretty sure that, alongside my completely bog-standard autumn throat tickle, I have come down with a bad case of pandemic-induced hypochondria.

Things would have been different two years ago. I would have taken some paracetamol, perhaps eaten an orange, made myself a coffee, and gone and smoked a fag to let my body know that everything was OK. Then I would have got on with my day, and not felt like a criminal if I happened to sneeze within a mile of another human being.

Do you remember those adverts for “max strength” cold and flu tablets? The ones where some office worker woke up with blazing red sinuses and he just took one of the capsules and went to work and showed that cold who was boss? It is unthinkable that any pharmaceutical company would run such an advert now. The brand would be cancelled and probably charged with manslaughter, and we would all be reminded that if we show symptoms of anything, really, we must STAY AT HOME AND SAVE LIVES.

I am of the belief that Covid has made us all very ill, but not in the way we think it has. Take, for example, the news this week that many people may not have Long Covid, and that there is every possibility they are simply suffering from “normal bouts of ill health”. Remember them? No, me neither.

Then there was the report published yesterday, about a rise in escalator falls on the London Underground, because people are too scared to hold handrails in case they catch Covid. This, despite researchers from Imperial College London finding almost no trace of the virus on any shared station surfaces that had been swabbed. Now, falls from fearful passengers are the Tube’s “biggest risk from a personal injury perspective”, according to the managing director of London Underground. We are all so frightened of catching Covid that we would rather fall from a great height instead.

It is September, the beginning of coughs and colds season. And it is, of course, sensible to stay alert to the very real risks of Covid, especially if you are unvaccinated. But most of us are vaccinated, and frankly, if anything is making me feel sick, it’s the hyper-vigilant state I now exist in, because of the events of the past 18 months.

We all need to get well soon – else we are in for another very bleak winter indeed.