A Plague So Nice I Caught It Twice!
Do you know how frustrating it is to be fully aware of a car crash coming which you have no capacity to stop? I wear a mask every day at work, every lesson. My voice strains through the fabric so I can be heard by my students, who sit, many of them, with their own masks beneath their nose or around their chin. I am triple vaccinated - both jabs and a booster - and my classroom is fucking freezing as, without multiple windows and the door open, the CO2 monitor which finally came in December tells me that the air doesn’t really move, and after a double lesson of endlessly breathing students crammed into the space it would be thick with who-knows-what without such ventilation. My hands, painful with eczema at the best of times, are red-raw daily with the frequent application of hand-sanitiser. But despite all this I can see the oncoming headlights and I’m not even sitting at the wheel.
There’s no way to socially distance in a classroom without basically ignoring your students. They can’t socially distance from each other due to space constraints. There isn’t any rule or law in place which says they have to either, so they don’t. Then there’s the corridors and stairwells, or that large, airless, study-room we now force truculent sixth-formers to work in silently when their grades are bad, filling up the space behind its ever-closed, unventilated, doors until the room is packed.
Every week I’ve noticed the absences due to covid, or heard the students sitting in front of me talking about the parent, the sibling, the friend who currently has it. I hear the coughs, I see the way they pull off their masks to do it too. The ones who “forget” to put it back on after taking a drink. And I teach, every week, over 350 of them. Students in every year group from 7 to 13.
It was inevitable I’d get the virus again. Just as I got it in December of 2020. The numbers were simply against me: too many students, too few meaningful mitigations. It didn’t matter about the mask - that has always been for other people; an act of kindness in the knowledge of how frequently I am in contact with possible plague; a plea for others to be equally kind - and the vaccine, we have always been told, doesn’t guarantee you won’t get it, only that hopefully if you do the symptoms will be less severe. The hand-washing has always been questionable as most transmission occurs in the air, not from surfaces, and even ventilation and airflow is a crapshoot as it entirely depends where an infectious droplet or spray of aerosol happens to be at the time it flows your way. Unfortunately, as a teacher, my students are frequently looking - and breathing - my way.
I thought I had a cold.
The first one I’d actually had since the pandemic started. As horrible as I felt it was almost like being reunited with an old friend. I’d felt like this before, back when this was the worst that I could feel. Welcome back the old diseases.
My covid tests were all negative. I took them Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday…and I went back to work.
Luckily, my mask stayed on, even though most of my students no longer wore them since the government announced last Thursday - the day I started to get sick - they should no longer be worn in classrooms. I kept my windows and door open. I noticed how a significant chunk of one of the classes I had spent two hours with the previous Wednesday were now off with covid. The one with at least two coughing and sneezing students who liked to wear their masks below their chins. I also noticed how a few kids in every class I’d taught Wednesday and Thursday that week were now off with covid.
But I tested negative and my voice was back so I could work.
Tuesday was odd though. Though my voice was fine now, the cold seemed to be getting worse, not better. My nose felt constantly on the verge of sneezing. I felt a little - not quite right. I was reminded of the beforetimes again. When I’d get the flu following a flu vaccination. It would never quite become a full-blown flu, but every symptom would spend a day in the spotlight, slowly working it’s way around my body and out again until it was over.
I’d had a flu vaccine too. Maybe this was the flu?
Tuesday night my nose was completely blocked. I was sneezing, I was snotty, I was miserable. I woke up after a sweaty sleep on Wednesday morning and called in sick again.
But by lunchtime the stuffed nose was gone and I felt better than I had at lunch the day before following a nap and not having to teach four lessons. I was optimistic I was getting better. Work asked me if they thought I’d be in the next day and I said I obviously had to do another covid test to check, but yes, I was feeling optimistic.
I sometimes take a T’ai Chi class on a Wednesday evening and only decided I wouldn’t go that night because it seemed wrong to have taken the day off work and still be well enough to do that. There’s also some older people in the class and I didn’t want to get them sick, covid or not. But I felt physically better to the point that I imagined I could do some breathing and some T’ai Chi without much difficulty. Although I didn’t go to the class, I did do some T’ai Chi at home. Besides noticing a mild headache and a slight new aggravation in my throat, I felt ok. After the T’ai Chi, I worked a bit on an academic paper I am writing.
But I noticed I kept having to clear my throat.
I decided not to wait until morning for the next covid test. To put my mind at ease I would just do it now so I could sleep easy.
And then came, of course, the car crash I knew what coming but had briefly forgotten about.
Two lines.
Positive.
Hopefully this means the vaccines are doing their job. I definitely feel ill still - the throat/cough/muffly head feeling is a struggle - but I feel nowhere near as bad as I did in 2020 when I got it pre-vaccine. Back then, I could barely get out of bed. Today I am in bed to rest, but will have no problem getting out of it to make lunch in a bit. I feel just…ill. Beforetimes ill. Don’t go into work and get some rest ill, but not plague ill. Like I said, I thought I was getting better yesterday! (Psychologically the positive test was a bit of a head-fuck which sent me spiralling all night and feeling worse psychosomatically for a while. I barely slept as images of two red lines kept rampaging through my thoughts).
It’s always possible that the illness I had last week wasn’t covid at all. That I did have an old-school cold which left me run-down and more susceptible to a covid infection which got me later. Maybe not in school at all? Maybe on the public transport I shared with so many Londoners on Saturday afternoon, or at the theatre where so many used their drinks or ice cream as an excuse not to put on their mask? Perhaps the coffee I bought from that late night service station which prevented us from being in a real car crash was where I picked it up? Or the Pret we decided to eat lunch in because it was too cold to eat outside…
It doesn’t really matter because the car crash was inevitable. The schools are just a symptom of the society. We’re not taking care of each other. We’re not wearing masks, we’re not keeping distance, and some of us aren’t even getting vaccinated or testing ourselves. There is no plan to protect us, there is no shared public understanding about what is and isn’t good practice. We’re just living the same lives we did before, occasionally coerced into compliance with rules we do not fully understand, some of which seem arbitrary or contradictory, or maybe even absurd or cruel. Some of which do so because they are. Because, again, there’s no plan. Just cross your fingers and hope for the best. Try not to die.
That I’d get the plague again was inevitable the moment the new term began and the approach was to pretend there was no more pandemic. The same approach we were seeing everywhere across the country. An act of will: it’s over now because I want it to be.
It was nice that it didn’t ruin Christmas this time and it is nice that the vaccines, so far, seem to be keeping its worse elements at bay. But it is still a car crash I saw coming and couldn’t avoid, despite doing everything I could to grab the wheel and steer myself to safety. Because we can’t do right on this alone. And until we learn to look out for each other and not only ourselves, there will be many, many more car crashes like this where we find ourselves locked in the passenger side of someone else’s hurtling vehicle unable to grab the wheel.
I am not perfect myself. People will be unwilling passengers in my own hurtling car dragging them towards a collision with covid. Eating at that Pret wasn’t the only dumb move (although the mask was off only to eat and back on again as soon as the last mouthful had passed my lips). Foolishly, I didn’t wear the mask while visiting my sister and her family later that day either, although I did give fair warning that I was ill and testing negative and gave them the option of not seeing me. And when a birthday cake was given to me I waved out the candles with my hand rather than blow on everyone’s food - so there’s that. I do my best. At work, on the Underground, at the theatre…I wore my mask. I kept my distance. Hopefully, that means despite potentially being infectious while out in the world earlier this week, I kept most of my plague to myself.
Hopefully I’ll get better quickly. The vaccines will continue to do their job.
Until a new variant and the next crash comes, inevitably.
We’ll see. Not all car crashes are fatal, some are just annoying. Maybe soon covid will be like the guy you notice rolling slowly backwards at a light, tapping your bumper lightly and scratching the paint instead of a head-on collision. The real hope is that this is covid now. Like a cold, like a flu. The myth becomes real through science and mutation. We adapt, it adapts, and we manage to live symbiotically with this virus the way we do with others: a shitty part of life. A few grim days. An inevitability. But not a death sentence. Cold, flu and covid season. A bummer, but not the end of the world.
For the foreseeable though, I’m self-isolating until I can unlock the next level with two negative tests and be free.