This is what catching COVID-19 actually feels like

COVID-19 symptoms vary between each person. Picture: iStock

For us, Covid started while we were walking the dog. We bicker, my wife and I, because she likes to walk very quickly and I don’t and, look, don’t judge us, we’ve been together since we were students and we’ve got to talk about something. This time, though, she was lagging. “Bit breathy,” she said, and we both knew at once, although not really. The next morning she was worse, so we took her for a test.

The rules are clear-cut, but reality never is. You think you’ll know when it comes. You’ll have the textbook symptoms and you’ll pull the kids out of school, cancel everything, call everybody you’ve seen, batten down the hatches.

COVID-19 can leave some people feeling exhausted and weaker. Picture: iStock

What, though, if it’s not like that? What if you just feel a bit … rubbish? Do you cause all that disruption every time? As a diligent hypochondriac, I’ve personally been crying wolf at myself since March. As a result, like some special sort of madman, I have learned to roll my eyes at myself, however bad I feel, and assume I’m only pretending.

Her test, though, came back positive, and her fever spiked, and she took to her bed. “No more school for a bit,” we told the kids, and they cried, miserably, because they remember the grim house arrest of spring.

I slept in the spare room and watched the US election. Feeling antsy, sure, but who wasn’t? By the time Fox was calling Arizona for Biden, I was online, booking a test. For a while I genuinely wondered who would get a result first, me or America. I won, by days.

We don’t know where it came from. We were on holiday in Suffolk the week before, we ate in a couple of pubs. Maybe, we think, we saw somebody with a cold. Either way, I think we’ve been very lucky. “More a Trump than a Boris,” as a friend put it. My wife’s fever came and went but mine was distinctly half-hearted. Not much cough, either.

Instead, for both of us, the worst symptoms were exhaustion and muscle pain; racking agonies like the Cruciatus Curse you get sent to Azkaban for in Harry Potter. My worst day, physically, was probably the day they announced the Pfizer vaccine. “Well that’s just f..king lovely for you all,” I thought. I also had explosive sneezes, exactly like everybody says Covid doesn’t give you. My virus wanted out.

I’m quite healthy, normally, lifting weights and running miles, but it has been hard going getting up the stairs. Strangest of all was the way that, once the shivers and headaches were gone, it didn’t really feel like an illness at all, but more like a transition into a weaker, older state of being. For a couple of days – thankfully passed – I was genuinely wondering if I’d have to spend a few weeks walking with a stick.

More interesting, at least journalistically speaking, has been a first-hand experience with the behemoth of Test and Trace. We talk of them as one thing, bundled together, and we shouldn’t.

The “test” part, at least in our experience, has been phenomenal. Our nearest walk-in centre is half a mile away, always has space, and is slick and reassuring and only a little bit Children of Men. For a system that didn’t exist six months ago, and was making people drive across the country only a few weeks ago, it seems to me that somebody somewhere has performed a quiet logistical miracle.

The testing process in the UK is ‘phenomenal’, according to Hugo Rifkind. Picture: iStock

“Trace”, meanwhile, has just been mad balls. “May I speak to the parent or guardian of Hugo Rifkind?” somebody asked me over the phone, three days in a row. “Do you want the dead one?” I felt like answering, bitterly. Eventually we established that this was because Public Health England somehow thinks there are two of me and that one of them is six months old. And they have been very worried about his social life.

Even conceptually, the trace side of things is a weird business. Do you not know, already, where you have been? Is some faceless temp in a call centre really going to track down the nameless man with a beard who sat two metres from you on a bench outside a pub last Tuesday?

There is a real social awkwardness to being the contact with Covid; you think about who you’ve seen and steel yourself for having them know you’ve messed up their lives for a fortnight, balancing that against how much more socially awkward it would be if you actually killed them.

We called everyone. I suppose some people don’t tell a soul. Probably, that’s why the whole system exists, to make it as impersonal as possible. “They pinged me and I’ve got to self-isolate,” said Boris Johnson on Sunday, which is a notably abstract way of putting it, as if he’d won (lost) the lottery, or had his name pulled from a hat.

In fact, he was in contact with Lee Anderson, a Conservative MP who tested positive shortly afterwards. Did he really not bother phoning No 10 himself? “I’ll just let the pinging take its course,” he must have thought. It’s like a Microsoft paperclip alert, “you have been exposed in the passive voice”. I’m honestly not sure that’s the best way of thinking about it.

Anyway, that’s been my fortnight. If Covid one day is an endemic, unremarkable thing, rolling around like flu, then I suppose the idea of a whole column along the lines of “man gets a bit ill, not much else happens” might seem quite inane. Here and now, though, I find people do want to know every detail. It’s as though they think they can prepare; intellectually prompt an antibody response.

All I’ll say is, it’s been no fun. Now I’m off for a sleep. Stay well.

The Times