Day 4 Unlucky for some

Friday 13th November, I wake up feeling a bit hot and very thirsty, I’m a bit disorientated, I think it must be about three in the morning, I come down stairs to the kitchen to get a drink. I open the kitchen door and switch on the dim night light and I get the sensation that I am not in my house. For a fleeting moment I am in a caravan, a big old fashioned 6 bedder like we used to stay in at Brean when I was a child, then the illusion is gone and I am in my kitchen the clock says five to twelve, it’s not even midnight!

Our kitchen, (left) compact and bijou but nothing lkke a caravan

There are things crawling on the floor. Indistinct wriggling things. Worms? I stoop to look and realise that it’s my eyes that are the problem. I have foggy vision. Blurred. What the fuck is wrong with me? I find my work bag, check my temperature, it’s 39.2. What the Fuck! What the FUCK! Ok stay calm, be a nurse. Ok so I have a fever. Work it out nurse! Fever, cough - Covid!

No fuck no! I use my pulse oximeter to check my sats, 94%, I take deep breaths, quickly, I hyper ventilate, with effort I get my sats up to 97%. Fuck Covid Fuck!

I wake Bruminsky “We have Covid love, we are not going to work tomorrow!” she takes the news as she takes everything in life, rationally, calmly and immediately starts being practical. I get online and book a walk-through test for the morning. We go back to sleep.

Having notified our various work places, we drive to the walk through. It’s incredibly well organised and efficient and staffed by friendly, organised, efficient people, we are only five minutes and then home.

We both feel exhausted. Brumarola makes toast but we both nod off while its cooking and we are woken by the smoke alarm. The house is full of smoke! We open doors and the smoke soon leaves like the unwanted guest and it is only then that we realise neither of us could smell the smoke.

That was a low moment for both of us, we didn’t need the test, what else could it be? Retrospectively neither of us can remember the rest of the day spent mostly snoozing in front of the telly.

On Face book I post

I am not sure that PPE works that well because despite diligently wearing it in the approved and correct manner I appear to have contracted Covid 19. Waiting on the test result but fever of 39 and coughing like my old Ford Escort makes it very likely.

I had a bowl of very hot chilli for breakfast, I'm going to burn the fucker out

I receive 253 comments wishing me well! As a lot of them are from colleagues there is a fair mix of funny comments and memes.

I have a poor night’s sleep, when I lay flat, I get breathless and have to sit up. I spend a lot of the night sitting on the sofa, coughing, I check my sats frequently they are mostly 94%. It’s getting harder to pick them up with deep breathing I can get them to 96% but they don’t stay there for very long.

Covid Atheism

Some people, conspiracy theorists mostly it seems, do not believe in Covid. This belief seems to be increasing, with a protest being held outside a hospital recently in Bristol where annoyed, impatient people ignoring social distancing and not wearing masks shouted angrily at staff going to work.

Not believing in Covid is no more an option that not believing in gravity. It does not need people to believe in it, is an illness, not a religion. These people, like antivaxxers, are plague bearers and maybe as a society we should treat them as such.

Covid cares a lot less than God does about what you think of it. I am not knocking religion but if you don’t believe in God it is unlikely that he will do much about, it whereas if you don’t believe in Covid, someone, and it might just be you, is going to die.

Covid atheists are basically selfish people, they believe that there is a very low risk of any harm if you are essentially healthy and they don’t care that they may spread the disease to other more vulnerable people. They commonly quote that 99.4% of people survive the disease, this figure sounds good but this is patently untrue. They have turned the figure around, if 0.6% die from the disease that’s about 396,000 people! So far, its 60,000 in the UK, will the winter increase the toll?

They often state that only those with underlying conditions need to be concerned, there is a call to protect the vulnerable and carry on as normal. This of course is clearly not possible. As for the underlying conditions no one van be sure that they don’t have an undiscovered condition, in my case it was diabetes. Whatever your weakness you may be sure that Covid will find it and exploit it.

Of those that get the disease it has been estimated that 30% will have some lifelong illness as a result, as I am writing this 1.67 million people, that’s about 3% of the population, have tested positive to the disease which means 480,000 will very likely have some life changing illness as result.