Remember that tsunami which surged across the ocean and devastated entire islands after an underwater volcano in the Pacific erupted a few weeks ago? Apparently, it also resulted in almost-gentle waves lapping against the shores of America’s West Coast many thousands of miles away hours later.
That’s what’s been happening to my family household these past few days. Not literally, I caution (and thank goodness – the carpet cleaning bills after a soaking like that would have been horrendous) but in the strictly metaphorical sense, as, two years into the pandemic, we’ve all three of us at last caught Covid for the first time, but in the most mild, undramatic fashion.
A week ago, it was my daughter with a touch of the sniffles that turned into a fever with a moderately sore throat, prompting the obligatory test which came up positive. Cue an extended stay at home, mostly on the sofa and devoted to industrial levels of television watching.
I succumbed just a few days later to what felt like the kind of common and garden infection you’d hardly have bothered to even mention prior to 2020, but lo and behold the faint but telling line came up twice in a row (I wasn’t quite sure the first time around) and that was me confined to barracks, with nothing worse than a few aches and pains and general lethargy. The only odd note was that, exhausted though I felt, I was unable to sleep for two nights. Then my wife, who never - and I mean never - gets ill, also drew the dreaded positive test and soon was bedridden.
Do you want to know how bad things got? I had to do the family cooking, resulting in an attempt at chicken soup missing almost all of the vital ingredients. Happily, I did at least remember the chicken. Somehow, we survived.
After two days under the duvet with the radio and a box of Kleenex for company, my wife is now back up and about (I fear at least in part motivated by preventing me going anywhere near the kitchen again as long she draws breath), our daughter’s clear and ready to go back to school and even this decrepit soul has all but shaken it off.
It’s almost cruelly comical to bracket this entirely unremarkable experience with the devastating death toll claimed by the virus since 2020. What are the lessons? Well, as the science-fiction visionary Arthur C Clarke once observed: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," and feel free to rewrite that as "Modern medicine is indistinguishable from miracles," because what we have with the Covid jab is, for most of us, a full-blown miracle. Yes, the sticklers will note, it evidently doesn’t always stop you getting infected. But so what, as it flattens the curve and reduces the tsunami of devastation that surged across the world to those lapping waves.
I’ve never felt so grateful for the ordinary affliction of a cold. Perhaps I should be offering a berakha of thanks.
