A coughing catastrophe

I am caught in a Covid-caused isolation scenario. Let me say straight away – I have tested negative for coronavirus. But I am feeing incredibly shitty and have been for a few days now. It started with a tickly cough, but has developed over 48 hours or so into a full-blown Summer cold and possibly a minor chest infection. I am hot, fatigued, sniffly, with a pounding headache and lungs that feel like they’re full of feathers. I blame Catarina – one of the cleaners at one of our sites. I popped over for a visit and she was working away despite being in the throes of a snot tsunami. Now she is on the mend, but three of her colleagues (and me) have all ended up with the same thing. We’ve all had PCR tests, and all been given the all-clear, but the bosses are so worried about the whole Covid thing that they’ve ordered us all to stay home for a week. A bit of an over-reaction, I feel, but I can understand their reticence to have their holiday centres staffed by people who are displaying all the symptoms of the Delta variant, even when they’re confirmed as virus-free. I can’t imagine I’d be pleased if I arrived at my holiday location to find half the employees coughing their lungs up. And who am I to complain? It’s allowed me to watch more of the Olympics, and I have to be honest and say I’m not up to working anyway. Walking through the house to go to the toilet is leaving me breathless and sleepy; the last thing I need is a 10-hour shift at work.
I guess that when the science and medical people were warning us there’d be a post-facemask explosion of other viruses because no-one has been catching them for 18 months, they weren’t kidding. I feel utter crap.

RC 7-8-21