Hello from Paris!
Well, I’m sick as a dog. Runny nose, sneezing, slight fever, quickly losing the sense of taste and smell (which can also happen with regular colds)—but two negative Covid tests, so who knows?
I know you can have positive or negative tests at different stages of the infection, but I’d have more confidence in mine if one pharmacy hadn’t emailed me the results in less than five minutes, the other after an hour and a half, which means neither respected the delay to consult the little lines on the thingamabob and give me an accurate reading.
And given that I went to two different pharmacies, you have to wonder how widespread the testing buffoonery is, and what the real state of Covid is in France.
Also, now that the primary symptom of Omicron is a runny nose, which for most people is indistinguishable from a cold—so most people don’t even bother testing—I really, really hope they’re still monitoring the waste water.
At least Paris was one of the first cities to sample for Covid in sewage, and pioneered it as a “a cheap, noninvasive tool to warn against outbreaks.”
So hopefully, once numbers start going up again as the weather gets colder, and people are tempted to hang out together indoors, the city re-institutes mask-wearing, at least on public transportation. Because the consequences for the vulnerable are really terrible.
Even after two years of this, I really don’t think most people realize just how terrible Covid can be. In fact, since I started interacting with doctors lately for an entirely different reason, I don’t think they’re much better informed than the general population, which basically absorbed the first wave of information about Covid repeatedly comparing it to the flu. So if you start talking to them non-respiratory issues—like how in serious cases you can see systemic inflammation or effect on multiple organs—they usually dismiss you with a polite raised eyebrow or affect not to hear, even if, according to Wikipedia, of people who show symptoms, 5% of patients become so sick they end up in the ICU, not just with respiratory failure, but septic shock, or multiorgan dysfunction.
Five percent doesn’t sound like much until you consider how many millions of people have had symptomatic Covid (610,457,828 according to the World-o-meter) and do the math which tells us that the Covid experience for hundreds of thousands of people, wasn’t like the flu or a cold at all, but getting hit by a bomb.
So yeah, whatever. I’m going back to bed.
Sick Grrrl Netflix Viewing
That’s it for this time.