COVID Isolation Day 1: It’s the End of the World as we know it and I have a New Continuous Cough

Waking up at a quarter to five, I roll over to check my phone and there it was on the NHS Track and Trace app: “Continue to self-isolate for nine more days. Your Coronavirus Test is positive.” I swear and wake Squish, my partner, who discovers she’s positive as well. And we get no more sleep that night.

In many ways, the hardest part is waiting until the time is right to phone work and family and let them know the news. It’s particularly tough on Squish, who works for Jammy Custard, a small animation company in Cardiff Bay. I’m at a school that has clear procedures to follow and where the decisions about who else, if anyone, needs to self-isolate happens out of my sight and hearing. Squish has to message her bosses directly, who read the guidelines, decide whether or not to shutter the office, and announce the decision on the company groupchat. It’s tough for her, but happily the people she’s most stressed that she might have passed it on to turn out to be double-jabbed.

We’ve also planned on visiting Squish’s parents over the next two weekends, the first of which we’ve already had to cancel since we were close contacts. So our relief is palpable when business hours arrive and everyone proves sympathetic.

We were lucky enough to self-isolate early, and that’s principally down to the Track and Trace app. It alerted us that we’d been in close contact with a confirmed case and would need to self-isolate; I used it to book a PCR test within the hour, on realising that my cough was a) new and b) continuous; and it was the first thing to tell me I was COVID positive. Without it, I might have gone blithely into work on Thursday morning.

It got an avalanche of bad press on its launch and doesn’t seem to be much trusted among my neighbours and friends, which I think largely unjustified. A lot of pieces of software get bad press for being ramshackle at launch but improve massively after a few updates and patches, and that seems to be the case here: one peer-reviewed paper says it may have prevented hundreds of thousands of cases, and thousands of deaths.

Tea, chores and Tesco home deliveries dominate the morning. Track and trace call in the afternoon and spend a long time checking my symptoms and going through my movements all the way back to June 9th. The woman concerned either has a slow laptop or is a bad typist, and data entry takes ages. It’s further complicated by the fact that my phone connection is dodgy at first. I’m grateful for my emergency landline as well as for my working knowledge of the NATO Phonetic Alphabet, which I’ve never used so extensively.

Shattered after all that, Squish and I round off the day with two movies. First up was The Lovebirds, a rom-com about a likeable hipster couple thrust into a crime plot, where they subvert the genre, bicker humorously, solve the mystery and save their relationship. Just the pick-me-up we needed.

We follow up with Anna and the Apocalypse, a low-budget zombie musical which borrows extensively from Shaun of the Dead but manages to get a lot of heart and heft into its utterly daft premise. Cleverly, it takes itself seriously as both a zombie film and a musical, rather than letting the two forms sabotage each other for cheap laughs, and some of the songs are absolute bangers.

I have a headache, runny nose and cough all day, while Squish is only starting to show symptoms, but in any case, we get to bed early.