69. WHAT, IF ANYTHING, HAVE I LEARNT FROM HAVING COVID 19? - Reflections on Getting the Plague

Despite my best efforts to stay safe from COVID 19 while having to work every day since September in a busy school, I failed.  I caught the virus we have all tried so hard to avoid since March and spent most of the Christmas break in bed, ill, or trying to recover from being ill, terrified (after months of reporting about how the virus affects asthmatics) that COVID 19 plus my own lifelong asthma may be the end of me.

But now it is three weeks since the day I got my positive COVID test, and I - cautiously - think I may have survived it. So I have decided to look back at the experience to see what, if any, philosophical lessons it taught me.

Because COVID 19 is a philosophical virus in a very classical sense.  A sufferer of COVID 19, for instance, gets given confirmation that Locke was right.  It was Christmas Eve, several days into my sickness, when my sense of taste and smell started to change.  Not vanish entirely…yet…but distort.  Strong smells such as vinegar became ugly and unbearable, the taste lingering longer than it should in my mouth.  I began to smell burning where no burning was taking place.  At first I believed the source to be a neighbour’s chimney, but then I realised the smell was entirely in my own mind.  Christmas dinner was the last meal I tasted most of until last week when some flavours began to restore themselves.  Some, but not all.  I realised as I cooked a curry the other night that the same was true of my sense of smell.  Up close to the stove, I could smell the spices of the simmering meal once again, and it was delicious, but walk over to the fridge on the other side of the kitchen and suddenly the cooking smelt awful again.  I had lost long-range smell!  Not only that, but things which a close sniff showed me definitely produced an aroma - scented candles, deodorant, perfume, brewing coffee - would lose their smell once I moved a certain distance away from them.  But a distance which never before would block the sensation.  That brewing coffee would usually envelop the whole house in a lovely warm evocative smell, but these mornings only the small space around the percolator gives off even a whiff.  The idea that the tastes we taste and smells we smell “really” exist and are not in some way mediated by our minds was debunked up close and personal by COVID as I found myself stuck in a tasteless, odourless world.  They are definitely a really existing power in an object to create a particular sensation - a secondary quality if you will - but it’s a two way conversation between the sense-data and the brain, and COVID had scrambled my nerve endings in such a way that the “real” smells and tastes no longer existed in the world I actually inhabited, or were grossly distorted from how they “ought” to be.

That the world we subjectively experience can be so distinct from an objective shared reality becomes even more troubling when one considers the level of self-reporting involved in any COVID diagnosis and the lack of knowledge such self-reporting can involve.  I started feeling ill on the first Saturday of the holidays, worse on Sunday, really bad on Monday when I went and got my test, but it wasn’t until a thermometer told me I had a fever that Monday morning that I booked the COVID test because, up until the confirmed high temperature, none of my symptoms I was experiencing were the classic three we have been told to look out for here in the UK (new, persistent cough; high temperature; or loss of taste or smell).  I just felt exhausted - natural after the end of a long term - and groggy.  A bit of a headache.  Shaky and odd.  At every new physical sensation that emerged, it was up to me to determine whether what I was feeling was a) normal; b) just exhaustion after a long and stressful term; c) just a seasonal cold; or d) COVID 19.  Then, once the diagnosis was made and follow-up checks were made, first from a government call-centre to check that I really was self-isolating, then from my GP to check in on my asthma and how I was doing, that simple question “how are you feeling” meant that my own understanding of what was going on in my body was all the people on the other end of the phone had to go on to determine whether I could treat my symptoms with bedrest and paracetamol, or if I needed to be hospitalised.  And that’s a lot of responsibility to hold when I don’t really know what I’m feeling.  I didn’t have a continuous cough - but the few coughs I had done in the last 24 hours had brought up stuff from the depths of my lungs like nothing I had ever coughed before.  My fever had gone, but they warned me it might come back and to be aware if it did.  Considering it took me at least a day to grab the thermometer last time, I’m not sure I was best placed to do that.  If I feel short of breath…well, I am an asthmatic, it’s not exactly uncommon to feel short of breath!  And being asthmatic, and familiar with the feeling, I am almost desensitised to shortness of breath.  Certainly I notice it far less than a non-asthmatic would.  

This is not just related to COVID 19.  All visits to the doctors usually involve them asking you to describe symptoms as best you can and you hoping that you get the wording right and don’t miss out on anything important.  Is it a “normal” stomach ache?  Does the headache feel “worse” than other headaches you’ve had?  How “bad” is the pain?  My mother died of cancer years ago, but almost died a year and a half earlier than she eventually did, the day before she was diagnosed, because she’d just soldiered on through massive amounts of pain for months.  Having a high pain threshold, she just didn’t really notice it.  Were it not for a blood test, taken because of other symptoms, she would not have been rushed to hospital the day she was and be treated for the kidney failure she was unwittingly experiencing.  

Think about your own aches and pains.  The older we get, the more receipts our bodies hold from the carelessness of living.  My knee gives me some bother, for example.  Would I notice if the bother it gave me today was more than the bother it usually gives?  Might I miss something if relying only on self-reporting because, to me, some symptoms are largely invisible or ignored?  And then there’s the opposite - over-sensitivity.  At some times in my life I have suffered from health anxiety disorder.  During these phases completely innocuous physical sensations become overblown in the mind into something catastrophic.  Philosophers have long known that medicine is as much about logical inference as it is about pharmaceuticals.  Symptom A and Symptom B in Patient X makes it only more likely to be illness A than illness B, not certain that it is.  But when we realise that the information about the symptoms, and what is important about the patient, upon which the inferences are made largely come from self-reporting which has no guarantee of accuracy or truth in the first place, the conclusions made in the doctors’ office become even more tenuous.  How many people have felt ill from a COVID infection that they have not identified as COVID because their symptoms do not match the arbitrary three we have been told to look out for by our government?  How many have gone to work, interacted with others, and spread the virus far and wide?  Judging from the rising numbers and current crisis: a lot.

Which brings another insight which came as I lay in my sickbed: our cultural myopia when it comes to this highly international disease. Being a citizen of both the UK and the United States I have kept abreast of the reporting on COVID, and the science, coming out from both countries. While both are managing the virus spectacularly badly, the cause of the mismanagement in both cases is the government not listening to what the scientists are saying and basing policy on ideology and short-sighted economic pragmatism rather than the real data and information we are gathering about this new disease. However, in each country those details are being reported very differently, and public awareness appears to have vast differences. For instance - why people in the UK continue not wearing masks outside, and seem to believe fresh air is sufficient to stop a virus which travels on the water droplets and aerosols from our breath is beyond me? Also why the UK just accept things like loss of taste and smell without making the further logical leaps that there may be a neurological aspect to the virus as well as a respiratory one? Or the role inflammation plays across the body once infected, and the plethora of long-term symptoms that can persist long beyond our 10 day quarantine period, for which we currently offer no support? The role of asymptomatic transmission has also only recently been fully incorporated into the political dialogue around the virus. All of these things are discussed widely in the American discourse, and the main three symptoms we look out for here in the UK are not the same identifiers citizens across the Atlantic are looking out for. That knowledge is not being shared - and also that what passes for knowledge within public discourse may not actually be knowledge - has been a big concern when suddenly I am relying on that knowledge to get well. Medicine is amazing, and we know so much now that we didn’t in the past, but it is still troubling what a house of cards of inference, questionable self-reporting, and limited information so much of that epistemic progress is based on.  We “know” until we don’t…and other people elsewhere claim to “know” something which contradicts what is “known” here.  

But I guess the first lesson COVID taught me was that in a world where the only way to protect yourself is to protect others and hope they do the same for you, the personal vulnerabilities caused by other moral agents’ inaction or bad actions can become stark.  I wore my mask everywhere.  I washed and sanitised my hands, singing the “happy birthday” song twice through every time and playing havoc with my eczema.  I kept social distance wherever I could.  But none of that stuff was ever about protecting me.  I did it to protect others, in case I had the virus and was asymptomatic.  In case my lack of vigilance caused a vulnerable person to die.  In fact, because of my good practice with COVID safety I don’t believe I infected anyone else with the virus except for my wife (and sharing the same house and bed, transmission here was inevitable, even though once the symptoms started the outside practices of masks, ventilation and distance became the norm at home in a vain effort to try and keep her safe…until it became obvious my wife was getting sick anyway).  The last day of term when I was probably already infected, my mask, distance, hands and obsession with ventilation protected a lot of people.  Yet somehow I myself still got the virus.  A student, a colleague - it only takes one infected person choosing not to wear a mask, make space, open a window, wash their hands, etc. to spread it (especially this new more transmissible variant), and sadly, despite the rules on paper, there were plenty such people I encountered every day at work - both students and staff.  In a system where personal safety relies entirely on the actions of others, I learnt, your safety is never guaranteed.  To me that therefore makes it all the more important to play your small individual part in the collective safety of the whole.  Be it protecting people from COVID 19, the damage humanity is doing to the environment, the erosion of truth from public discourse, every tiny crack in the defences could be the breaking point that destroys everything.  You can’t guarantee your own safety, but you must do all that you can to guarantee the safety of everyone else.  And if everybody did the same - only if everybody did the same - then your own personal safety is guaranteed.

I also learned - as so many of us have in the last ten months - that those personal choices individuals make can be significantly influenced by the general tone of the whole community they are a part of, be it a family, a workplace, or a whole country.  Those people refusing to wear masks, who don’t understand the need for distance or ventilation, those who believe COVID to be a hoax or conspiracy, they are created, not born that way.  Whether its propaganda on their social media feeds designed to intentionally disrupt and sew discontent, or merely a lack of scientific knowledge or understanding about epidemiology which makes them act recklessly, people tend to act believing they are doing the “right” thing even when they have deferred some of their thinking about right and wrong to external forces who do not have their best interests at heart.  In education, the ridiculous practice across the UK of letting masks be optional in crowded classrooms (or in some schools even banned from the classroom entirely) came from deferring autonomous thought to the dangerously flawed guidance from the Department for Education.  An organisation which in the space of three weeks between December and January threatened a school with legal action when they wanted to close early because of the mass of infections ravaging their community, told everyone schools were safe, forced primary schools students to return to school, and then closed all schools in the country the very next day.  Following the “official” advice without some sort of critical analysis and autonomous thought is never wise, but on COVID, in the UK, time and time again it has been fatal.  In schools, especially, I doubt the school leaders juggling the ever-changing bombardment of bad advice from the Department for Education even had time to read any sources outside of that official advice, with which the official advice could be meaningly questioned. As I fought against the deep anger I was feeling towards the people I worked with and for who had put me in this state - relying entirely on the luck of the draw as to whether I would survive this deadly virus or not because of their negligence - I tried to be charitable and remember that they acted the way they did not to harm me, but because they thought what they did was allowed and therefore, because it was allowed, it was OK.  Just like all the people in the country who ate out “to help out” last summer and allowed the pandemic to run wild by their carelessness, or who visited re-opened but still dangerous public places because they were told that they could, regardless of whether they should, it seems that humans find thinking for themselves quite difficult when doing so puts them at odds with what everybody else is saying.  Even those seemingly autonomous “free-thinkers” who deny even the science on COVID and fall down the rabbit-hole of conspiracy do so because what they find down that rabbit-hole is a community of fellow believers who encourage their shared sloppy thinking.  They are not thinking for themselves, they are agreeing to a pre-packaged collection of other people’s thinking. Like wearing the one side-parting in a room full of mohawked punk rockers all “being themselves” by wearing the same spiked hairstyle, true freedom of thought requires standing alone and not being contrarian just for the sake of it.  It is a freedom which must be constrained by the facts, by the evidence, constrained by reason and consequence.  A freedom which, if it makes you stand apart from your community, or forces you to reject prior beliefs you once held dear, seems to be a freedom that too many of us are not brave enough to commit themselves to.

Perhaps the next lesson I learned is a little bit trite, but I see no less importance in it because of that.  Getting COVID 19 this Christmas also taught me that I don’t want to die.  It is not often that we get genuinely confronted with the real possibility of our deaths and live to tell the tale.  As someone generally dissatisfied with the world I’m living in - it’s flawed structures, economies, politics and ideas - it is easy to imagine that perhaps, despite the daily things which feel like they make life worth living, when the Reaper knocks on my door I might see it as blessed relief.  Happily, I didn’t.  Waking up to the text message that told me the illness I had gone to sleep with was potentially fatal sent a wave of horror through me which I will be lucky never to feel again.  I thought of the wife I would leave behind, of all the things we would never get to do if I died, and I vowed to do whatever I could to ensure I got better.  Which also showed me how easy it is to fall into magical thinking, even when you’re a rational sceptic like myself who knows such thinking is nonsense.  My will has no bearing on my body’s ability to fight this infection.  Illness is not a battle we have much control over.  Yet, I argued to myself, a bit of positive thinking couldn’t hurt.  I didn’t fall so low as to actually pray, but I did swear to myself I would make the most of things if I got through: a deal made not with god, but with myself.

Getting COVID 19 was no pleasant, and I was lucky to survive it. I am still not fully recovered after nearly a month and the studies from countries more interested in facts than the UK suggest people like me could still have further setbacks even after weeks of seeming recovery. More than anything, COVID 19 taught me that doing everything we can to ensure people are safe from this virus should not be limited only to preventing the old and vulnerable from catching it for fear that they could die. Even if you don’t die, it’s just a horrible illness to have. And just as we put safety measures in place against avoidable harm as well as potential death, COVID 19 is definitely a harm we should not knowingly inflict on others. It would not be a strong legal defence to tell the court my stabbing a man was OK because the wound would eventually heal, or that the robbery I committed should be ignored because insurance has covered a replacement of everything the victims have lost, and it should not be a strong moral defence to say certain people can be put at risk of this virus because they will likely get over it. When our actions affect others, we need to own that moral responsibility for our choices. And where economic or personal circumstances make it difficult, or even impossible, for us to make good choices, it is our collective responsibility as a society to protect each other by changing those circumstances to make good choices easier to make. Lockdowns are an example of this, but telling people to stay home is not enough. They need money, security, food, and a home to stay in. Furthermore, they need the scientific understanding - not government spin - of why we have been asked to stay home and why measures like masks and distance are so important. Without that other stuff, a grand gesture such as a lockdown can only do so much. And it does it in a way which doesn’t resonate with the population in a meaningful way. My main lesson from having COVID 19 was really just a confirmation that the UK government have been messing up their handling of this virus at every stage along the way since day one. Poor communication, poor infrastructure, poor planning, poor support, poor understanding of the science, poor relationship to the truth… every one of us who got COVID 19 since it arrived in the UK in February of 2020, and especially those who died, are the victims of this incompetent government and their incompetent policies, which gamble on the lives and wellbeing of their citizens in order to maintain the status quo from which they benefit. We saw it with austerity, and we’re seeing it with COVID 19. As an anarchist, I am not a fan of governments in general. But the consecutive Conservative governments we’ve had in the UK since 2010 have been some of the poster examples of all that is wrong with contemporary democracy, with our current administration being the absolute nadir. There is simply so much blood on their hands that their continued grasp of power leaves me, as I recover from COVID 19, asking far more questions now than I ever had before. And, despite their best efforts, I remain alive to keep asking them.

Author: DaN McKee

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