Living with Covid: The virus that came to stay
Nadene Ghouri has had Covid-19 four times and doesn’t want to catch it again. Her first encounter with the virus was in the early days of the pandemic while living in the UK, and it left her struggling with the post-viral effects of long Covid.
“Basically, I lost a year of my life,” she recalls. “I couldn’t walk down the street without being out of breath. My son, Gilbert, was still a baby and I’d have to call my husband at work and get him to come home because I couldn’t even pick him up – that’s how weak I was.”
She was still based in the UK when she succumbed a second time and had the classic symptoms of fever, fatigue, shakes and aches. By her third bout, the family had moved to New Zealand and she managed to get a doctor to prescribe antiviral medication, which helped. Unfortunately, working in a busy open-plan office, the Auckland-based journalist couldn’t avoid catching Covid-19 a fourth time. She is now convinced that she is prone to reinfection, so when her husband tested positive just before Christmas, she isolated him in a bedroom.
“If he had to come out to use the bathroom or kitchen, he wore a mask and sanitised after himself,” says Ghouri. “Thankfully, I managed not to catch it.”
Although she no longer has those more debilitating long Covid symptoms, the virus has had a lasting impact in other ways.
“It’s changed my life and I think those changes will be permanent,” says Ghouri. “Just the thought of getting Covid again is really scary. Because I feel like I’ve got this target on my back, I try to avoid crowded and enclosed spaces. And I find it hard not to get angry when I have conversations with people who don’t take Covid seriously. Even now, if I over-exert myself or get very tired, I’ll feel my heart fluttering and get dizzy, then have to lie down.”
We have now entered the fifth year of the pandemic and although waves of new variants keep coming, most of us are no longer taking the sorts of precautions we once relied on. Dr Amanda Kvalsvig, an epidemiologist at the University of Otago’s public health department, understands the urge to move on and put Covid-19 behind us. “We all want the pandemic to finish and to get back to how we were in 2019,” she says. “It is such a strong pull that it actually shapes our thinking. But this pathogen is still causing illness, hospitalisations and death, and it is still a disruption to society. No amount of wishful thinking is going to make it go away, so we need to deal with it.”
Strategy missing
An estimated 1000 New Zealanders died of Covid last year and more than 12,000 were hospitalised. In the last week of March, 3399 new cases were reported and seven deaths were attributed to Covid-19, taking the total number of deaths to 5922. Kvalsvig is among a group of scientists calling for a comprehensive strategy to mitigate not only the next phase of the pandemic but other respiratory infectious diseases including flu, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and measles.
“There is no one magic bullet, but we do have a toolkit of different ways to prevent, control and mitigate the impacts of these pathogens as we are going about our normal lives. When those tools work together in an integrated strategy, that is when you start to see the results.”
Improving air quality in enclosed environments where people congregate is a key part of the proposal. Kvalsvig maintains we need to starting thinking about air like we do about water. Dirty water is linked to transmission of diseases such as cholera, dysentery and typhoid, and in the 19th century the provision of clean drinking water played a large part in the public health revolution.