Britain’s got covid

Last Friday I began to feel unwell: headache, muscle ache, lethargy and a strange taste in my mouth. By Monday my chest hurt – in fact I described it as feeling fizzy. According to the World Health Organization, the respected US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the government websites of nearly all countries I have checked, including France, Spain, Canada and New Zealand, my symptoms clearly point to covid-19.

WHO lists the most common symptoms as fever, dry cough and tiredness. But it identifies other less common symptoms: aches and pains, nasal congestion, headache, conjunctivitis, sore throat, diarrhoea, loss of taste or smell, and a rash on skin or discolouration of fingers or toes – none of which are mentioned anywhere by the NHS.

Those other countries, as well as the CDC, all adopt various long lists of symptoms that largely overlap with the WHO list. It’s rather like researching a chicken soup recipe – everybody makes it a bit differently, but they all agree there are more ingredients than just chicken and water.

So, if I happened to live in nearly any other country, my symptoms would indicate that I had covid-19, and in many of them I would be tested, and of course told to isolate.

However, here in go-it-alone Britain we appear to have a different disease also known, confusingly, as covid-19. According to the NHS website, it presents as fever and/or a new, persistent cough. That’s all. They are described as the “main symptoms” but nowhere are any other symptoms mentioned. I did the self-assessment on 111, but as I did not have a fever or cough, predictably it said that I probably did not have covid-19. A visit to my GP’s website refers me back to the NHS covid page. So there you go – I don’t have covid-19! Great news! I don’t need to self-isolate – I can go to the supermarket and give all the avocados a good squeeze, I can sneeze on my shopping trolley, I can go for a run in the park (or I could if I had the energy).

And yet … this doesn’t seem quite right. Is it really the responsible thing for me to respectfully follow the NHS line, and conclude that I do not have covid-19, but rather some other unnamed illness? Should I blithely ignore the weight of evidence from around the world, both scientific and anecdotal, that my symptoms accord with covid-19? The WHO data I looked at was based on a study of 56,000 confirmed cases – can it really be wrong, while we here in Blighty have got it spot on? Doctors treating covid patients on a daily basis recount a wide range of symptoms, including mine.

Absurdly, because I am not eligible to be tested for covid-19, the decision is essentially mine as to whether I have it or not. While I don’t feel I can legitimately declare with certainty that I have it, equally it seems wrong to act as if I do not. It seems worrying that if I followed our government’s published guidance, I could legitimately say, I don’t have covid, and I can continue to go out (no mask required). Having weighed up the evidence, I have chosen to take the cautious route and self-quarantine. Already I know several people who have died of this disease, which brings home its seriousness, and I want to act responsibly.

I cannot be alone. Surely this narrow British view of the symptoms means that many people who probably should be self-isolating are not, so the spread of the disease is greater. Equally, because of the lack of testing, there must be people who are self-isolating who do not need to, causing them inconvenience (and worse), and depriving the workforce of important people. The narrow definition may also mean that sufferers do not seek medical help when they should. And surely it leads to a serious underestimate of the number of infected people. How many of us will never know if we had covid-19? Finally, it seems to me, trust in the NHS and government advice is seriously undermined.

The NHS is where I turn for impartial, best health advice based on science, and I am reluctant to knock it. Yet its covid-19 information appears to be either hopelessly out of touch, or to smack of political meddling, part of a futile bid to downplay the pandemic. My confidence is shaken. My research into the information available elsewhere has revealed websites rich in detailed and supportive information, compared with the minimal (and probably wrong) data on the NHS website. (Incidentally, I have noticed guidance elsewhere available in many languages, while the NHS is English-only (eg the Canadian province of Alberta, with a population of 4.3 million, has covid advice in 15 languages).

Is it any wonder that we now hold Europe’s top spot for covid-19 deaths? We always knew we were exceptional. Each country has responded differently to this pandemic, and in the realms of economic and political decisions such as what financial support to offer, how to manage a lockdown, how to plan for the future, perhaps that is inevitable. But it seems particularly worrying that this misplaced British sense of righteousness even extends to ignoring the near-global consensus in science. And how depressing when this country has such a fine tradition of scientific excellence.

Surely the NHS must accept the evidence gathered around the world and reflect it in its description of and approach to this disease? And that must happen hand-in-hand with widespread testing and tracing. We are the sixth richest country in the world – is that really too much to expect?

In the meantime, I’ll continue to stay at home, resting and washing my hands – and I’ll stand outside this evening to bang my drum for the NHS workers.