Nine new official symptoms of Covid-19 have just been added to the NHS website. Symptoms may or may not include the following:
- Sneezing in the past 10 months
- Possession of a cat
- Feeling like a week off (public sector only)
- A runny nose
- Memory loss, especially if employed by the DVLA, when you find it hard to remember the nature and place of your employment. (Perhaps because you haven’t been into the office since March 2020?)
- Netflix
- Fog. Not brain fog. Just fog. Any fog.
- Irritability following the ending of free Covid tests in England, thus making 3. less likely.
- Dry throat, splitting headache, intermittent vomiting, throbbing behind the eyes (not linked in any way to working your way through the cocktail menu in the Goat and Grapes).
You have to laugh, although this is not really a laughing matter. Not when the new “symptoms” – which sound remarkably like the condition formerly known as “a bit of a cold” – are basically an open invitation to call in sick. Not when the NHS seriously appears to be suggesting that people with a blocked nose or a headache should “stay home and avoid contact”. Most especially not when Covid-related absences are still causing havoc in essential services such as schools, hospitals and airlines.
I can’t be the only one who finds it startling that, on March 31, 120,000 pupils were off school with confirmed cases of Covid, even though nearly all of those kids must have had Covid at least once by now and many will have no symptoms whatsoever. (Perhaps the teenage habit of taking a screenshot of a positive test and reusing it several times is a factor?) On the same date, 46,000 teachers and 53,000 teaching assistants were off sick with the virus. Who knows, maybe adults also make sly use of screenshots of a positive test?
This malarkey is meant to be over. Universal free Covid testing for the public was scrapped in England on Friday and – hey, whaddya know! – there has already been a massive drop in “cases”. On Monday, cases were down 33 per cent from a week ago. If people have to pay, turns out they don’t have any urgent need to do a lateral flow test after all. That is exactly how it should be.
Despite bellows of protest from Labour and the trade unions, who have shamelessly used the pandemic to bash Boris and hold the Government to ransom, the fact is providing lateral flow tests gratis was costing taxpayers a maiming £2 billion a month. (There are better uses for that money; subsidising scary energy bills for the less well-off would be one.)
Free national testing was also giving Covid a prominence it no longer merits. The wretched virus, which has dominated our lives for two years, must now take its place among scores of contagious critters that give rise to indistinguishable symptoms.
Among people I talk to, cynicism about the high level of absences is spreading faster than the BA.2 variant. “Fortunately, I’m self-employed so immune to Covid,” quipped one Amazon delivery guy bitterly. The truth is, beyond the laptop classes and public-sector workers, most people simply don’t have the luxury of being able to miss another week of work.
Of course, it is common courtesy not to expose colleagues to your high fever and to have a couple of days in bed if need be – just as you would with flu. It is common sense to postpone a visit to an elderly relative if you are ill. But ringing in to a school or an A&E department to announce you won’t be in again because, although you have no symptoms, your test is still “positive” on Day 8? Nope, sorry. That’s just taking advantage. Selfish – but Covid is the excuse that keeps on giving.
The ramifications of this epidemic of absences are bleak for those who have suffered enough already. Schools have just broken up for Easter but, due to the staff absences quoted above, many were struggling to stay open anyway. About one in 12 teachers is off sick. Yet nearly all teachers will be triple vaccinated by now or will have Covid antibodies from prior infection. Dare I ask, how many of those missing from the classroom are actually, you know, unwell? Or incapable of stirring their stumps after a couple of days of rest to teach kids who have already missed so much of their precious education?
Children? Hmmm… what are they again? The teaching unions seem to neither know nor care.
In an open letter to Nadhim Zahawi, the Education Secretary, unions representing heads and college leaders say that “in the face of this extensive and ongoing disruption”, the decision “to remove free access to symptomatic and asymptomatic testing for almost all pupils and staff feels reckless in the extreme”.
Hang on – it was testing staff and pupils who had no visible signs of illness that caused the crazy disruption in the first place.
At long last, I’m delighted to report, the Government has stood up to the unions and advised children to go back to school “if they feel well enough to do so”. (The fact that it should be a remotely controversial idea tells you a lot about the feverish depths of our coronaphobia.)
Millions of kids have missed weeks, even months, of school over the last two years when they weren’t remotely ill. Utter madness.
