Will you be taking a booster?

I’ll wait and see. It could be different in January and also I made some enquiries with pharmacies.

I know I almost certainly had COVID very early in the outbreak. I had all the symptoms, but put it down to flu and spent two weeks basically bed ridden. Lungs were crackling like Rice Krispy sounds when I breathed. Fever. Aches all over, every joint hurt and was going out of breath for months after and I lost about a stone in weight and just looked rundown.

That was mid-January 2020 when it wasn’t officially here. I had also been vaccinated against flu, because I have vulnerable relatives I visit frequently, so it just seemed unlikely.

It also ran though everyone who had been together at a party after Xmas - we all had similarly dramatic “flu” - my dad being diagnosed with viral pneumonia twice during it and put on steroids and tamiflu etc - he’s still coughing almost two years later - had CT scans and bronchoscopy done twice, which just shows very slight scarring and nothing else, but he’s coughing heavily ever since.

We think it likely came into the house through travel. There were multiple trips though Heathrow, Paris CDG and Schiphol and also one family member was at a big international event and there’s evidence it was in Paris as far back as that November.

I continued to just accept it was flu and didn’t get an antibody test until almost August but that showed as negative, so I guess if anything it just proves that antibodies don’t stay in your system.

At this stage, even my now retired GP accepts that it was very likely covid and not flu.

Also after that experience, absolutely no way I would skip the booster. I want it asap.

It was in circulation in France in 2019:

Article from Le Monde : https://www.lemonde.fr/planete/article/2021/02/10/le-sars-cov-2-circulait-sans-doute-en-france-des-novembre-2019_6069431_3244.html

Unless Irish people had some kind of magic bioshield, or never interacted with the continent at all - neither of which is remotely possible and my household does a lot of European and international travel, then it’s highly likely it was already here and it was already in the U.K. and probably quite a few places before it exploded.

It started to do serious damage and show up as a major problem when it worked it’s way into very vulnerable populations - mostly care homes and the elderly.

We only began looking for it in about February 2020 and even then getting a test wasn’t easy. It was triaged. So unless you needed to be hospitalised in the early days, it’s highly unlikely you’d have been detected as having it and also it’s very likely it would have been categorised as unexplained viral pneumonia, which is what my dad was diagnosed with and just given tamiflu, antibiotics and steroids by his GP as his O2 levels were low - got categorised as “walking pneumonia” Took him about 3 months to get right again and I suspect the tamiflu did nothing.

My guess is if it was in France in November it was here, certainly by December. It just was likely circulating amongst a generally younger, healthier cohort.

I really don’t get this attitude that anyone who had this weird and dire respiratory illness in early 2020 is dismissed as somehow imagining it. It’s patronising at best and almost gaslighting at worst.

A significant number of people were reporting being extremely sick and it was dismissed as nonsense by everyone from healthcare professionals to posters online despite the fact it’s very likely it was early cases of COVID and that is backed up by French and other look back research on swabs.

There has been way too much magical thinking in this pandemic. Between “schools are safe.. schools are safe..” mantras, when they clearly couldn’t be. The refusal to recognise it was airborne. Then the notion in the early days that it was far away and couldn’t possibly spread beyond Asia … no it’s only in Italy … no Spain… France … oh crap! it’s here.

It’s been a case of slow and idiotic responses and then over compensating reactions.

Our collective response has been a lot of head-in-sand exceptionalism and I just don’t get it. I mean, you can’t hide from a virus by ducking behind the sofa and we are deeply interconnected as a single community by mass, frequent air transport.

Emmm. It really, really isn’t!

Have you ever stopped to ask yourself why a bunch of centre right, hugely pro business, pro trade parties (many of whom are also utterly obsessed with pubs) would suddenly want to impose restrictions on socialising, pubs and all of those things?

Creating a conspiracy like a “new world order” would be impossible even from a practical point of view. You’re talking about a government made up of multiple parties and people who can’t even keep anything to themselves without leaking, and it’s a proportional representation democracy that most of the time has weak executive powers and, quite frankly, would struggle to organise a pi$$ up in a brewery, never mind a grand all encompassing conspiracy.

The EU is just 27 of those systems bolted loosely together.

As for China, the virus caused chaos for it domestically and has undermined the global trade it so depends upon for growth. So that conspiracy theory goes no where either.

Unfortunately, this is just one of those hot messes and we are dealing with what is almost certainly a rather nasty bat virus that is crudely adapting itself to living in our cells…

We are just somewhat taken aback because we had a bit of a golden age, at least in the developed world, where threats of airborne pathogens haven’t been an issue for us for decades and we assumed we had an instant, off the shelf, technological cure for everything.

If nothing else, the last 2 years might have injured our ego and arrogance. Nature is still far, far more powerful than we are and we exist on a knife edge.

All that can be done is to fly by the seat of our pants, adapt and use what technologies we have and solve this problem.

If you want to believe it to be some grand conspiracy, I think tbh you’re burying your head in the sand and I think it’s about being unable or unwilling to accept that we live in a very precarious world, where a microscopic organism, that doesn’t even have its own cells could, without even being self aware, do enormous damage to a complex and highly evolved civilisation. It’s happened and it’ll happen again.

In short: boosters are the best we’ve got right now.

What gets me about was the pneumonia diagnosis for my dad, the fact it flew through the extended family and that most of us had taken flu vaccines in Oct / Nov 2019 and that it left me with months of shortness of breath. I was bad enough that if I walked up a hill I was so out of breath I was panting and I kept getting very bad reactions to cold air. It eventually faded tho.

Also my dad had been in contact with a lot of colleagues who had recently been to China.

At the time we literally self-isolated anyway, long before it was a thing because the dose was just so bloody awful.

To be fair, cock ups in a scenario like this are absolutely inevitable. It’s complex. There are so many moving parts.

The really bright spot in all of this has been the technology side around the vaccines in particular.

What’s been achieved in getting several pretty effective vaccines out has been remarkable when you consider the scale of what’s been done.