Today is my ninth day of Covid symptoms. When I woke up last Saturday morning with a sore throat and headache, and could barely keep my eyes open duirng the day, I intially thought that I was reacting to my latest Covid vaccination, my 4th, and the flu jab the previous afternon, and I made a note not to have them on the same day in future.

I was quite flushed from time to time but ascribed that to my normal hormonal hotnesses. The following day, I thought I had probably caught a little cold in the pub on Friday evening from the person who waited until we’d been speaking for over an hour to tell me that they had the “lurgy” and they’d been on a plane. It might not have been them, of course, but who knows? In fairness, I was in an enclosed and fairly crowded space without a mask, but hey, it’s a pub and you don’t expect people to mix with you if they are unwell. I was shocked when my just-in-case LFT test on Tuesday came out positive.

I feel that I have escaped very lightly so far. I have a cough on my chest and feel light-headed, with intermittent headaches, and tired a lot but, ironically, Covid has made me sleep better than I usually do. 

The most annoying thing has been cancelling the things and people I was meant to see during the week though I’ve taken the dogs out most days and had some very socially distanced dogpeople conversations about the state of the world.

I am not complacent about this still-deadly and incredibly contagious illness. The prospect of Long Covid, and of sudden serious health events such as heart attacks and strokes coming out of nowhere frighten me a lot, but for now I consider myself to have been pretty lucky, mainly due to being fully Pfizered up and not really having to mix with too many people.

The attitude of some of my friends since I returned from ZeroCovid City in April has shocked me. Many are quite casual about the possibility of reinfection because they have come throught it once relatively unscathed.  One friend told me sagely that it was just a matter of time until I learned to relax without my mask in the pub, and that no-one bothers testing anymore, even though we are asked to do so before we attend choir. The same people tell me that singing isn’t dangerous as long as one uses the correct technique, but who is available to monitor singers constantly? Last time I looked, I was using the same pair of lungs to sing and to breathe. The cognitive dissonance on this is astounding.

I really don’t understand how people can be so cavalier about the health of other people when we consider that this virus affects everyone differently and its effects on each individual person cannot be predicted. I might been only slightly ill, I could even have been asymptomatic, but I could still kill someone or cause them severe or long-term injury by passing the virus on to them. I don’t understand why this is such a difficult concept for people to assimilate.

It seems to be to inconvenient for the people who roll their eyes at the hairdresser’s or take pot shots at me on social media for wearing a mask that I’m wearing it to protect others. They’re as personally affronted by my mask as if I were coughing repeatedly in their faces. I don’t care what you call me. I’ll carry on wearing a mask.