COVID-19: Out the other side

 

There is light at the end of the tunnel, at least as far as my personal Covid experience is concerned. After a difficult 15 months or so, I can look to the future with optimism, and start making plans again. And about bloody time, too! I sincerely hope that this will be the last piece I write on the subject, but I’m not betting my home it: there is still way too much uncertainty out there, too many variants popping up and spreading despite all the efforts of science and medicine to stop them. We still don’t know for sure where it came from, or how; the vaccine roll out is going superbly well in some countries and appallingly in others; vaccine shortages will continue to plague the effort and there is no consensus on how often boosters will be needed……

But all things being equal, my family were fortunate to get through it relatively unscathed: just to be certain I have a full physical check up soon with particular emphasis on my lungs (that have been impaired for a few years now after a resurgence of a childhood bout of whooping cough) and heart (my blood pressure remains stubbornly uneven and I’m back on the meds I stopped taking when I retired – and according to my doctor should not have).

But as far as Covid is concerned I seem to have come through it, and I’m out the other side.

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My journey through all this stuff has been no worse than millions of others, I suppose, and indeed better than most. We’ve all faced the same problems of isolation in various lockdowns. My older sister, for instance, close to 80 and living alone since losing her husband getting on for 8 years ago in a little bungalow on the edge of a small Norfolk village, without a car, has hardly left the house for the duration. She used to go on two or three bus outings a week to places like Kings Lynn and Hunstanton and Fakenham with a group of OAP friends. Covid has put paid to all of those trips, at least until next week. Luckily her next door neighbours have kept an eye on her, helped with shopping and made sure she’s safe – the family include in their number a paramedic and a ward sister at the biggest hospital in the area so she could hardly have been in better hands – but she’s still been effectively stuck in solitary confinement. Thank God she has a decent garden! My time in a comfortable flat, with my wife and kids, my dog and cat have been a pleasure compared to that (no matter how gutty it has been some days).

Unlike many, I’ve had no work issues as a retiree. My pension income, such as it is, has remained stable and come through on time every month. I’ve not had to get used to this new fangled WFH – Working From Home – as I’d been doing that for some years anyway between project journeys in my old job, so the tech requirements were familiar and in use already, to keep in touch with people since I finished work. I’ve not had to worry about how long my furlough might last and whether I’d have a job to go back to, as my nephew and sons have. One of them, self employed, fell through the cracks in the Government’s raft of aid schemes and was without any income at all for a good part of last year, which with a family was very tough. Fortunately, so is he (it’s in his genes) and he got through it – now things are opening up he’s working his nuts off to get his career back on track and catch up. Another lost one job and has spent his time since taking qualifications in a couple of things that are taking his career in a completely different direction. Both had their down times, and both got depressed, but again not as bad as many poor people did. Me? I had off days, climbing the wall days and short tempered days, of course, but nothing too serious, nor indeed any more than normal.

My health has remained overall good. I’ve piled on a few kilos because exercise has been difficult for much of the year. This has partly been down to the Covid restrictions, but also because of the accident I had towards the end of last summer that left me with a badly broken big toe on one foot and a torn hamstring on the other leg that, combined, took nearly three months to heal and slowed me right down. I’ve not ridden my bike since last July, for instance – before the accident I was doing 100km a week or more. All of that is manageable though, and now things are opening up I can exercise it off over the summer.

But I did manage to contract Covid – definitely once and I believe twice – so I have a good idea of just how unpleasant even a relatively mild attack can be. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone!

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The first bout was in October, just as I had recovered from the accident and was looking to get out and about a bit. I woke one morning feeling very poorly, with a bad headache, a bit of a sore throat, and feeling very weak and tired. My temperature shot up, so I stayed in bed for a few days. It didn’t seem to get any better or indeed worse, and the symptoms could have been the flu: I wasn’t sure. I dosed up on cold remedies and vitamin tablets, ate piles of toast and garlic bread and drank gallons of warm milk with honey, and felt better slowly. I wanted to get a test but at the time, the local health service was breaking under the strain and it proved impossible to get an appointment. After about three weeks – by now it was November – a drive-in place opened close to us, so my Beloved and I went off one Saturday morning, joined the queue and eventually had the big Q-tip up the nose variety. Not the best way of spending a Saturday morning, but what the hell. It took a few days to get our results, and they both came back negative. But I sill felt bloody awful, and applied to my local GP surgery for a blood test – another three week wait. I still felt pretty rough, but went along and had a blood test in due course. It too came back negative – ergo, I had no trace of Covid.

Come March, I was feeling more or less normal, though still got tired very quickly and had huge problems concentrating on anything for more than about 10 minutes. It took me forever to read a even the best books, and my consumption of online news media shrank to ten minutes or so a day. As for writing anything – forget it. Nothing would come, no matter how long I stared at the page. To an extent, that remains the case today……...this is my first attempt at doing anything since the middle of March. I convinced myself that I was suffering from Long Covid, where the symptoms hang around for possibly months (no-one knows for sure) an medication does not seem to help. Maybe I did – I’m still unsure.

Which is when I contracted Covid again. The symptoms were precisely the same as I’d had before Christmas, if anything not as bad (at least initially) – I didn’t have to retire to my bed, but that was about all. My Beloved had come into contact with it through her boss, who called us on a Friday evening to say she had tested positive. So we all went off to the local centre, kids and all, for the Q-tip. The results came back overnight – all positive. Except me. Once more, my test showed negative, despite my symptoms being exactly the same as the rest of the family and getting worse. But we all had to quarantine for two weeks, which meant my now booked vaccination had to be cancelled as it was due the following week.

By the weekend I felt terrible, and had started to feel some discomfort breathing – not all the time, just now and again. We called the doctor, and insisted on another test, as my blood-oxygen level was also falling. A paramedic in full contamination gear turned up with his trusty Q-tip and advised me to closely monitor that pesky blood-oxygen and if it fell below a set level, call an ambulance. That night it fell very close to the number, and I spent an hour deep breathing as a last resort – I did NOT want to be piled into an ambulance and hauled off to the quite possibly the other end of the country – there were no guarantees I would come home again. It worked, just.

On the Monday, it was finally confirmed I had Covid, a positive test. It was a huge relief – at least now I knew what it was and what I needed to do, and I did it. Basically, that amounted to bed rest, vitamins, garlic bread…..all the stuff I’d done previously. I did it happily. I got through it.

Quite why three out of my four tests came back negative I have no idea. I suspect the first two, back in October/November time, were negative due to the delays in having them. I had been poorly for maybe three weeks before the first, so with an infection tending to last 14 days I must have been over the worst of it and so the Q-tip was unable to find anything up my nose – the virus had effectively run its course and died off (or whatever happens to it). The blood test was also delayed by three weeks or so, so perhaps the antibodies too had gone away – even now there seems to be some argument about how long they remain in the bloodstream in normal circumstances. Hence the first “infection” was simply missed. As to the third one, I had a glass of water just as we were leaving (my family didn’t), so perhaps that simply washed away sufficient gunk for it not to be picked up on the swab – I really don’t know. All I know is that 48 hours later there was a positive fourth test.

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I’ve now had my vaccination. Officially, if you go down with the virus and have to cancel an inoculation, you have to remain Covid-free for three months before you can re-apply and test negative before you get another appointment. But a week or so after our quarantine ended, my Beloved saw an item on the news that seemed to contradict that, so called to check. The health people happily booked me a new appointment without all that wait, so on the following weekend, in mid-April (rather than the expected July) I trundled off to the clinic for my first Astra Zenneca jab.

When I got there, they had no AZ vaccine so offered me Johnson & Johnson instead. As you only need one jab I took it – let’s get it all done. 28 days and you’ll be as near fully protected as you can be, the doctor assured me. He explained that no matter which vaccine you get, there is no 100% efficacy, there is always a chance you will get the illness again, but any vaccine will pretty much guarantee you will not suffer the worst effects and will not end up on life support. Fair enough, I’ll take that.

The injection took a few seconds, I didn’t feel a thing (and I hate injections!) and best of all I have had absolutely no ill effects. No headaches, no sore throat, no high temperature – all of which are possible side effects of the stuff. Not even a small bruise on my arm. He gave me my vaccination certificate confirming what I’ve had and on what date, as a vaccination certificate to keep with my passport, so I’m done and dusted – at least until the scientists decide if and when boosters are required.

A week or so later, the government announced that people in my Beloved’s age group can book for their jabs, so of course she got straight on the phone. She was told she would have to wait three months because she had just recovered from Covid, will need a new test etc etc…...basically, what we had thought originally. She explained that I had just received J&J after being sick at the same time as her, why was that. Cue chuckles down the phone and a bland “Oh, that was a mistake, but it’s done so we can’t do anything. You have to wait three months.”

So it seems for once in my life I’ve been a bit lucky.

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Of course, the weather has stopped me doing a lot – like in all of northern Europe, the Polish spring is exceedingly late this year. But there was one bright day last week, so I hopped on the Metro and went into the city for a look round. Some of the lockdown restrictions have been eased so I was interested to see how the place had changed during these awful times.

The first thing I noticed, even before I entered my local station, was the lack of masks. They’ve been a way of life, normal attire, for so long you stopped noticing them and indeed took more notice of people not wearing them. That has all changed, since masks are no longer mandatory in the open air, so most people have happily abandoned them. It was odd to see people’s faces, mouths and noses, smiles and stubble, lipstick and powder, in all their glory after so long. Much nicer. Some folk, mostly older, were still masking up but nowhere near as many, and they stuck out like sore thumbs – just like in the old days.

On the Metro, however, masking is still mandatory, as the signs on the platforms and train doors and windows impress upon you from the outset. Spot fines can still be enforced by the police if you don’t. I played my usual game of “Spot the Numpty”, aimed at seeing how many people without masks or with masks not covering mouth and nose are in my carriage. Even as recently as January and February this year, you could reckon on probably 20% of people being Numpties, because there has always been – and remains – a significant portion of the Polish population that is guided more by Facebook conspiracy theorists, YouTube fantasists and downright idiots rather than the science and Government edicts and hence reject the very idea of wearing a mask (or for that matter being vaccinated). I was pleased to see that everyone in my carriage, both ways, was properly masked – better late than never, I guess.

I got off as usual at Politechnika, and headed off down Marszałkowska towards the real city centre. Although not yet lunchtime, there were far fewer people around than of old – I assume that homeworking is still prevalent, and as I soon saw many places of business are closed. One place I was pleased to see re-opened was a bar called the Sexy Duck that my Beloved and I used several times last summer, before my accident. It’s just by the corner of the street where she worked, off Plac Konstytucji, and has a good outside terraced area under umbrellas. It sells excellent craft beers – one called Dark Duck is my choice, the closest I’ve found yet to a decent pint of British bitter like Spitfire or Old Speckled Hen, only much stronger – and some good Italian food at reasonable prices. We had some good times sitting there watching the world go by in last year’s summer sun, and were concerned when it closed towards the end of the year: the shutters on the windows suggested it was for good. Thankfully not.

Walking on, I did pass several shops and offices that were definitely closed, with For Sale and For Rent signs pasted to them. Among them was a big branch of Santander Bank at which I opened accounts three years ago (and closed them shortly thereafter), some small food shops, a casino where an old work colleague of mine, back in 2001, ran up some significant debts – the place was run by the local mafia – so he bought himself a gun for self protection (when the project manager found out, he was put on the next flight out and his apartment re-assigned to a mate of mine. When he moved in he found the guy’s farewell present had been to shoot up the apartment: every piece of furniture, tv, stereo and the walls smashed and peppered with bullet holes. Scary stuff!) - and the hotel next door.

I turned on to Jerozolimskie and headed towards the main railway station. Happily possibly the best English bookshop in the city is still open, so I popped in and treated myself to a couple of volumes of memoir on two of my all-time musical heroes, Eric Clapton and Elton John. Happy with that. But there were more business premises boarded up all along the road….. There is, however, new stuff, too: I read recently of a building that had just been topped out making it the new tallest building in Europe, beating London’s Shard by a couple of metres. It’s standing right next to the Central Station and frankly is not that impressive, and it certainly doesn’t look as tall as the Shard. It’s topped by a radio mast that is itself apparently the same height as the city’s National Stadium across the river – which is quite impressive, I guess – and when complete the tower will house something like 60 floors, including residential and office space, a hotel, gym and swimming pool, and half way up three floors of shopping mall. So I guess it will be good when it’s finished.

I crossed to Central Station to check some travel information in the PKP Intercity Rail office. Out of interest I wanted to find what foreign destinations I could buy tickets for – last year I had planned to go to London and thought it might be fun to go by train – I’ve made the reverse journey, via Amsterdam and Berlin, a couple of times – but was told I would have to buy a ticket to Berlin, then separately the London ticket when I arrived in Berlin…..a touch impractical, so I left it. But I was told that Poland was negotiating to join the Eurorail consortium “soon”, so hoped that had changed. Well, the main ticket hall has been re-furbished – and very nice it is too – but the PKP Intercity sales office was closed and shuttered, and looked as though it had been for some time, with no sign of any ongoing works. Later, I checked a few websites to check the ticket availability for a couple of sample journeys, including to Zurich via Vienna, and the London one, and although the services are detailed in terms of departure times, intermediate stations, duration and facilities, not one offered tickets for sale. Most odd.

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I headed for Nowy Świat, because there is a good second hand book shop there that last time I visited had a good selection of English language stuff, and offers a free coffee and cake if you spend more than 50zl. The shop is still open but the selection of English stuff was much reduced – only three shelves, half as many as last time I visited before the pandemic, and most of it was translations of Polish literature or histories. I was disappointed, but perhaps as business picks up it will improve. On the plus side, the guy working there was playing some rather fine Led Zeppelin music.

Walking up Nowy Świat to the Old Town I passed another book shop, that had specialised in academic books (the University is in various premises scattered around the area) but seems to have expanded and now offers a very good selection of English stuff. It’s all scattered around rather haphazardly and you have to look for it, but there was a surprising amount of good stuff, fiction and non-fiction. I didn’t buy, but it’s one for the future.

Again, there seemed to be a lot of closures, and one place I was disappointed to find gone was a small cafe, I don’t remember the name, that had an outside terrace of armchairs and sofas and a good menu of fresh pastries and quiche, donuts and cakes and delicious coffee. I had planned to sit there in the sunshine for lunch and read my current book (an excellent Bill Bryson travelogue) for an hour or so. Ah, well…..never mind.

The Old Town and Square was surprisingly empty, and only a few restaurants were open, so I chose one at random and had a two-course lunch-time special and coffee for 30zl. It was ok, good value but the chicken in mushroom sauce was over-cooked and a bit dry. I went home then.

Overall, the city has changed over the past 18 months or so, and I suspect it may take some time to recover. But Poles are a resilient people, there is no doubt of that, so it will in time and it will be interesting to see how it will differ from before

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At the weekend I did a more local hike, to see what changes have happened in my own suburb. On dog walks I had noticed a number of decent bars that we had used were closed, and I wanted to see what else had happened further afield. The weather was not good, the rain had returned and the temperature dropped again, but what the hell – I needed the exercise.

It looks as though some of the closures were indeed temporary, as I had hoped, and doors were opening again. The biggest surprise to me was the big Tesco store close to where I lived for my first 4 years in Warsaw – it was my local store and had a little mall of smaller shops in the building. I had seen that Tesco is leaving Poland so the store is slated for closure or takeover. It was depressing to walk in there and see all but four of the smaller shops closed down, including what was once a very nice cafe and coffee shop. Tesco itself had reduced its size with probably 25% of its floor space now closed and shuttered off. It all looked very dirty and depressing, and even though it was Saturday mid-afternoon – peak shopping time – the whole place was half empty: very few customers even in the supermarket. A shame, and once the closures are completed probably a couple of thousand more jobs lost (at least until new owners come in).

A little further on is the Las Kabacki forest park, so as the rain had eased I decided to take a look. It’s a place we’ve visited frequently over the years, and enjoyed the several kilometres of bike and footpaths, plus the big bonfire field for grilling sausages, steaks and so on, in past years when the sun shone. It’s always busy, but on this day I saw very few people – on my way in, two young couples walking and laughing, wet through, and a middle aged lady on a completely impractical (at least for the unmade dirt tracks) Dutch bike, red in the face and struggling. But happily, and surprisingly the bonfire field was in use, despite the poor weather. Along one side of it there are perhaps a dozen wooden shelters, open sided and with picnic tables and benches, and all were in use by what looked like family groups, cooking up a storm and enjoying a return to something like normality. The smell of grilling suasages and onions and pickles and the pop of opening beer cans made me hungry so I headed for home.

Despite the weather, it was an enjoyable walk. And 12 kilometres or so was exercise I badly needed. It also showed that things are getting back to something like normality.

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Which begs the question: what exactly is normality, in this Covid world? I will not use the more common term “post-Covid”, because I have no doubt the virus is here to stay. It’s not going anywhere.

Indeed, to the best of my knowledge, despite the advances in medical science and care not a single virus has ever been fully eradicated. Smallpox, measles, mumps, bubonic plague, typhoid, polio – they’re all still here, still flaring up from time to time (notably recent polio outbreaks in war zones like Afghanistan and Yemen) and we have simply learned to live with them, with medication and regular inoculation where needed. There are many varieties of flu (and the common cold for that matter), and annual flu jabs are part and parcel of modern life. The vaccines we now have for the flu need to be re-engineered every year to keep track of changes to the virus – like Covid, the various flu strains mutate regularly. At the moment, there seems to be no definite consensus as to how often the various anti-Covid vaccines will need to be refreshed or how frequently boosters will be needed, but the best guess seems to be it will be an annual process, as for the flu vaccines. I’m happy with that.

The question seems to be more about the other measures we’ve become accustomed to over the past year and a half. Masking for instance…….without a doubt the most contentious measure. Masks have been around and worn by the general public for years, especially in the Far East (Japan and South Korea in particular), and to we Westerners it’s always seemed a bit, well, dramatic, a bit odd……. Are these things really going to filter out all the germs and petrol fumes and stuff that plague city life in Paris and Warsaw, London and New York? And anyway, I’m not going to wear ‘em because I’ll look a complete idiot……

Which is to miss the point. The masks aren’t there to prevent the wearer from catching something, not there to filter out the fumes from our gas-guzzling buses and taxis and cars and trucks. No, as any resident of Tokyo or Seoul will tell you – the masks are there to prevent the wearer from passing anything he may be carrying on to other people: the filters work the other way. So all the Numpties on the Warsaw Metro, the Vancouver Transit, London Underground or wherever, were not making an “I’m safe, there is no virus, I’m not going to catch it” statement at all – they were simply being stupid and ignoring the facts (if they even knew them or gave a shit). No surprise, really: they are probably the same clowns who believe the entire pandemic is either a Chinese plot (as Trump insists) to destroy the Western economy, or a scare story dreamed up by the mythical Deep State and Bill Gates to enable them to implant location tracers into everybody for some unspecified purpose (ignoring that fact that the nano-technology that scenario would require is decades away). Both delusions are prevalent on the internet and have their legions of gullible believers.

The key unanswered question on this is how long will we continue to need masking, and in what circumstances? It seems to me the answer to this will not become clear until more people have been fully vaccinated, and agreement reached on how frequently boosters will be needed…….there is simply not enough data to come to any conclusions on these questions yet: too many people remain unvaccinated. This should be no surprise: there are more than 8 billion people to vaccinate, and even with the program to do so being highest priority, that will take a number of years to complete.

Already there is evidence of a kind of vaccine apartheid, where the rich, mainly white, countries like the US, Canada, the EU, Britain and Australia/New Zealand are finding it easier to obtain and disseminate vaccines quicker than poorer countries in Africa, Asia and South America. There are UN appeals for the wealthy to stop stockpiling the stuff and pass it on to the Third World nations. As usual, these appeals are largely falling on deaf ears. How many more lives this situation is likely to cost is impossible to guess – but the number is likely to be in the millions in my view. So I suspect masks will be needed, whether we like it or not, for years to come – countries will need to decide for themselves when and how to dispense with them, and even then I would not be surprised if they remained mandatory at least on public transport, where large numbers of people are confined to relatively small spaces. for a decade or more. So be it: I’m not keen on wearing them, if only because I’ve yet to find one I can wear comfortably without my glasses misting up, but if that’s what it takes to keep healthy then fine.

What about work? Offices are re-opening, but it seems that WFH is going to remain an option for some time. Many companies are now offering a kind of hybrid process, where you can choose to work in the office part of the time, and at home the rest. With the technology available, this is a practical and increasingly common and popular solution. Of course, there are many jobs where WFH is simply not possible – construction and manufacturing, for instance, transport and health care, the entertainment and hospitality sectors – and probably never will be (at least until Isaac Asimov’s Robots become a reality). Other companies are looking at ways of moving away from the model of a massive headquarters building and big branch offices where large numbers of people are based and have to commute sometimes long distances to work. The alternative that seems to be gaining some traction is to develop a network of small, regional sub-offices scattered around where workers live, all connected by internet or whatever, in cheaper local office suites, that will allow workers to feel part of a “company culture” and be able to work with co-employees as if they were in a bigger place of work. It will be interesting to see how that develops……but it will not affect me at all. Any work I do – like writing stuff like this – I can do quite happily at home or in my little allotment cottage near the airport, on a train or holiday hotel terrace.

Travel? Well, it seems to be getting back to how it used to be – Warsaw airport is now busier and offering more flights on more airlines to more destinations, but at nowhere near the previous levels. I can’t see massive growth until there is international agreement on some kind of Covid passport to be carried by everyone who is fully vaccinated and wants to travel. The EU is bringing in a scheme where an e-certificate can be downloaded to your phone as bar coded information to be read by scanners at the passport desk or whatever in airports and presumably railway stations, but it only covers the Schengen and EEA zone countries. Predictably, Britain was invited to participate but declined…..

Similar schemes are being developed covering the US and selected partners, Australia and New Zealnd, Singapore and Hong Kong, and other small city pairs or country groupings. But something global is clearly needed and nowhere near agreed or implemented, and travel will remain in the doldrums until that changes I think. I’ll know more about that soon: next week I’m off on my first journey outside Warsaw – indeed, outside the country – for 18 months: a two week visit to family in Switzerland. As well as looking forward to seeing them, I’m really looking forward to the airport and flight experiences themselves, to see how much things have changed for myself. Watch this space – there will be posts about it all.

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So there we are. Covid is still here and will be probably for ever. But with a little effort, and a lot of luck (and who knows, maybe some intervention from The Bloke Upstairs) I’ve come through it and out the other side. With more effort and no doubt luck, and maybe more help from Him Upstairs, I’ll remain a Covid survivor and can get on with the rest of my life – hopefully for a long while yet. I bloody well hope so, anyway, I have a lot of things I want to do, places I want to go, yet.

I’m still a young ‘un, only 68 for God’s sake!