Covid: Why my family fear we’ve caught the Deltacron variant due to the pandemic complacency of Ministers – Jayne Dowle

Are we living with a virus that changed the world or ignoring it? - Jayne Dowle

And on Monday, after a weekend of feeling exhausted, which I put down to a particularly taxing exercise class on Friday evening, I woke up with a sore throat. My husband woke up with a sore throat. We knew, even before we had dug out the box of lateral flow tests (LFTs) we’ve stashed away at the back of the bathroom cupboard.

It’s a good job we didn’t rely on the official government list of coronavirus symptoms, still reported as “high temperature, a new, continuous cough and a loss or change to your sense of smell or taste”.

They come later, believe me, but everyone I speak to these days says a feeling like you’re swallowing broken glass is the first indication something is amiss.

At least we’d had the foresight to keep those tests. In the great rolling back of ‘freedoms’, the Government has decreed that, from Friday, April 1, free lateral flow tests and PCR tests will no longer be available to the general public.

Given that reported cases of coronavirus are seriously on the rise across the UK, they might – with their old friend ‘hindsight’ – wish that they hadn’t chosen that particular date.

On Monday morning I quickly made contingency arrangements for work and family commitments; one London editor said I was the third person to report suspected coronavirus that day and it was still only 9am. My friend, whose husband is a firefighter, said three of his colleagues have fallen ill in the last few days.

Deltacron is reported to be circulating in France, the Netherlands and Denmark. And maybe in the UK? Nothing to worry about, said Health Secretary Sajid Javid last Friday: “We have no concerns at all.”

Well, I have news for Mr Javid. If what I’ve got is Deltacron – or even if it isn’t – then he needs to have concerns, because my husband has got it too and he’s really quite poorly, with a raging temperature, a wheezing chest and bizarre pains circulating around his body.

He’s 50, a builder, and generally fit and strong. However, he also has rheumatoid arthritis. Thankfully, it’s controlled by medication, but his weakened immune system means he’s at risk from serious Covid-related complications.

And although we’ve been abroad to Croatia and travelled extensively in the UK since the summer of 2020, we’ve literally never had a sniff of the virus. Even when every single family we socialise with regularly has been laid low, some of them twice, even three times.

Even when my teenage daughter had a faintly positive LFT result in the summer of 2021 and took to her bed for three days with what seemed like a bad cold.

Even at the start of January, when my son’s girlfriend contracted a bad dose whilst staying with us, and my parents came back from a New Year break in Blackpool testing positive, we stayed negative. As did my son, who’s worked in a supermarket throughout the pandemic.

With the kind of black humour that has got us through some dark days, the three of us would joke that any day the men in white coats would come knocking on our door and take us away to see what bizarre mixture of luck, genetics and triple vaccinations was keeping us safe.

This, however, is no joke. I’m not whingeing about my symptoms. Apart from confusion. There is actually no longer any legal imperative to stay in and self-isolate, so every day is a judgment call. Drive my daughter to school or dance class, where she could be a vector of transmission? Nothing remotely public, I’ve decided, until two consecutive negative LFTs. I’m fortunate however, I’ve always worked from home.

And it’s certainly not scare-mongering. I have a very robust attitude to medical matters and a huge degree of cynicism about some of the controls we had to live under and who they really benefitted.

No, it’s about the Government’s dismantling of the entire pandemic operation without it ever being declared officially ‘over’.

It’s about fully-vaccinated people still being so ill they can’t go to work, nor claim any kind of financial support. And it’s about politicians dismissing public fears when the evidence is staring them in the face.

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