Is it really possible to get Covid for a fourth time?

‘I can’t go through this again!’ I groaned, as I lay in bed encased in icepacks, one on my eyes and the other round the back of my neck. Covid – which seems to be alive and kicking this summer despite being pronounced over by the World Health Organisation – always strikes at my nervous system and sets off existing problems, including my fragile emotional stability.

The builder boyfriend brings me orange juice and breakfast on a tray, walks the dogs, feeds the horses, goes to work and comes back to find me huddled under the duvet, sobbing. He is weather-beaten from his day on a roof, and feeling rough himself. ‘It will pass,’ he says. I looked up the latest variant and it is called BA.2.86, which sounds like a flight to somewhere nice, like Lefkas or Majorca. In fact, it’s a trip to somewhere not nice at all.

This is my fourth rodeo that I know of. I might have had it other times and been ‘asymptomatic’. The point is, I can now evaluate the pandemic through my personal encounters with it. We all can, surely. So you would think there is an opportunity for truth and reconciliation there.

Mine began in winter 2019/20, when I sat down next to a famous author at a New Year dinner party and he told me his wife wasn’t there because she had just got back from China with the worst flu ever.

The next morning the builder b and I awoke in agony and I declared the host had poisoned us with the gravy.

The Delta was next, which the BB caught from a children’s nanny who made him lunch while he was working on her employer’s house. She was back from a festival, fully vaccinated. She collapsed the next day and he a few hours later.