On Ending Restrictions

So Northern Ireland just said fuck you to immunosuppressed and other high-risk people, because of course it did.

These protections that we’re now losing have made me feel safe enough to take calculated risks. While I have attempted eating out indoors exactly twice since 12th March 2020, both made me really uneasy because it was very obvious that it was a situation where there was more chance of infection. I have however gone into shops because proprietors didn’t allow them to get overly crowded, and taken the bus at quiet times.

At peak times, there were still too many people without face masks in the bus, with no enforcement. Now the protection that there was, the signal to the public that Covid is not over, has been severely weakened, and I’ll have to rely on the kindness of others to protect me. Last summer, a writing group for speculative fiction writers started in a pub literally! a stone’s throw away. It wasn’t safe enough for me to go.

The bottom line is: I cannot afford to get Covid. With my underlying conditions, it’s easy for me to get Covid, and getting Covid (even the ‘mild’ variant) would severely impact my health. Would be dangerous. Getting Long Covid, something most people don’t seem to think about, would mean having my already limited energy and functionality even further reduced.

It seems people like me are resented for even asking for the precautions that allow that extremely truncated level of normality. So often you hear people saying that we should just stay in, while that means we lose the stuff we do feel able to do.

And I hate being like this. I hate the feeling of wasting a very hard-won Crohn’s remission. I hate saying no to stuff all the time. I hate how impossible it is to make new friends and how hard it is to keep old friendships going. I hate seeing films and gigs coming up which I would love to go to, and knowing that a small enclosed venue with a lot of people is not a good place for me.

But here’s the thing: I’ve seen plenty of vaccinated, chronically ill friends get Covid, and I’ve seen some of them take months, even years to recover even a fraction of their former activity levels. And I am painfully aware that my medical team know me as that one patient who gets all the weird, edge case complications.

I’m the one who got that weird mystery illness months before Covid was a thing – and yes, you can bet I’ve been over the calendar a dozen times wondering about that; but if that was Covid then I would’ve had to have it several months earlier than the earliest documented case. That seems unlikely. Regardless of what it actually was – and they tested me for a lot of infectious diseases at the time – it caused untold disruption in our lives, as it came back over and over, caused five separate hospitalisations, resisted multiple courses of strong antibiotics, and finally forced an incredibly challenging and difficult change of treatment for my underlying condition.

That illness, whatever it was, was hell bent on lying dormant in my system. We still don’t know what the hell it was, and we don’t know how I finally beat it. We only know that every time we fed it TPN, it roared back into life. I recovered from the effects of transferring from TPN back to enteral feeding just in time for the first lockdown, and you’d better believe that shapes my bitterness about how much freedom I’ve lost.

And I’m not prepared to go through that again, and potentially much worse, with Long Covid or worse. I’m just not.

So, I don’t know what happens next for me. A lot of people in my position don’t. When I go for medical appointments, when I go into shops, when I eyeball the number of people on a bus before getting on, I am going to be watching for the number of masks. I am going to be watching how crowded things get. I am going to be watching the Covid numbers – if that’s even going to be meaningful any more, with the pressure from Westminster (and in this, as in other things, we must assume Northern Ireland will follow, as if with no mind of its own) to wind down testing.

That’s actually one of the scariest things about all this: if we reduce testing, we have no real way of quantifying the absolute risk around us, and to take that away from clinically vulnerable people forces us to make choices based on unknowns. So it’ll be my mental health and my need to be among other human beings, having a life, versus potentially spiralling infection rates. We’ve seen the latter happen over and over again, and we can’t pretend that’s not what happens when we get rid of protections.

I want to be wrong about this. I would love nothing more than to be wrong: for Covid to just fizzle out, for us all to be able to go out unmasked and hug each other with abandon, belting out the choruses at gigs with our friends – all stuff people think is worth any cost to individuals medically, and to the NHS as a functioning system. But what has been made clear to clinically vulnerable people over and over again is that many voters and politicians would sooner see us disappear from public life indefinitely than extend the protections that let us be included.

(ABA)