Me and COVID-19

By Flo Brockman

‘So unfortunately, your test has come back positive’

In an extremely melodramatic moment, I grabbed the banister to stop me falling down the stairs. I had coronavirus, yet I felt absolutely fine. How?

Let me rewind a second; me and my family were taking part in the Office for National Statistics survey. Five weekly Covid tests for £150 is not a deal to be sniffed at. The first test went, I thought, without a hitch. I’d met up with a few friends the weekend before but we’d been outside virtually the whole time, yes, I admit sometimes social distancing was a little lax, but no big deal, right?

Wrong.

Cue the seven days of self-isolation and the anxious wait for my symptoms to shows themselves. But they never did. I had read about incredibly fit people being knocked flat by the virus, still experiencing symptoms months after the infection. Apart from a sore back, which I think has more to do with my appalling posture rather than Miss Rona, I was symptom free. I even managed to run 5k whilst my immune system was working overtime, which is something I’m quite proud of.

Thankfully, no one I’d met when I was unwittingly infectious developed symptoms or tested positive. Everything surely pointed to a false positive, but without an accurate antibody test, I’ll never know whether I had the dreaded virus or not. Despite this, its alarming to think how easy I could have obliviously spread coronavirus and raises the question about how many asymptomatic cases are going unnoticed.

I guess the moral of the story is: wear a mask and wash your hands!

Check out Flo on Instagram! @flobrockman