Misc Magazine: Long Covid

If you look down the next time you are queuing for a coffee at the Perch, you will see faded floor stickers instructing you to stay two metres away from those around you. If you look to the side the next time you wash your hands in a campus bathroom, you will see a laminated sheet of step-by-step instructions on how to wash your hands correctly. If you have a minute to spare, look up and watch any of the television monitors around campus. Eventually you will come across a yellow infographic that has been a part of the rotation of slides on the televisions around campus for 5 years. The infographic asks: are you well enough to be here today? Then, it lists some classic COVID symptoms – a cough, chest pain, fever, and shortness of breath – and tells you to go home if you are currently experiencing any of them.

Guidelines issued by the HSE in 2020 for how to minimise the spread of COVID-19 at work.

On campus, you are never far from an artefact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This year, the last cohort of undergraduate degree students who experienced university with COVID-19 related restrictions will graduate, and I will be one of them. Thinking back to my early days in college, I am struck by how normal it all felt – the masks, the testing, the isolating. I can’t speak for my peers, but when my mum dropped me off at college in September 2021, I thought the way we lived then would last forever.

The pandemic had completely ruptured the trajectory of my life. Overnight, I went from being like any other eighteen-year-old – worried about how I would perform in my school leaving exams and if I had an invite to so-and-so’s house party on Saturday – to worrying that, if I brought COVID home, it could kill one of my parents. It only happened five years ago, but it seems so old-fashioned, like a story a grandparent would tell about a letter that arrived in the post one morning that changed everything.That morning, as the first person to go downstairs, I picked up the post from the floor and left it on the ledge in the hall. One envelope caught my eye – it had a big blue National Health Service logo in the top left-hand corner and was addressed to one of my parents. Perhaps half an hour later, I was in the kitchen and could hear a hushed but frantic conversation taking place in the front room. Curious, I walked over to the door to try and eavesdrop, but it was promptly slammed shut, and the agitated whisperings continued. Later that day, my parents sat my brother and me down and told us that one of them was vulnerable to COVID and that we would have to do something called shielding – it was the start of a long eighteen months.

When it was time for me to leave for college, I uploaded my proof of vaccination for a  45 minute flight (from the UK) that did not require a passport check. Upon arriving at Trinity Halls, I was told that, if I was caught at a gathering of more than six people, I risked a fine or maybe even eviction. Three days before going home for my first Reading Week, I walked half an hour to a testing centre my mum had booked me into to take a PCR COVID test. I then isolated myself in my flat in Halls for three days while waiting for the test result.

In my mind, all of this was normal. This was just how we lived now.

I had a brilliant first semester at college. Yes, the nightclubs were all closed. Yes, many of our lectures were online. Yes, we spent the evenings of our Freshers’ Week in freezing cold pub gardens. Yes, all the society events were held in weird little tarpaulin structures on the green outside the Arts Block and Front Square that gave you no protection from the elements. Yes, we hid in wardrobes and bathrooms so the person hosting the prinks or afters would not get in trouble for having more people over than they should. But at the time, it was all part of the fun. We had no idea what we were missing, as we had nothing to compare it to.

As a History student, I used to struggle to understand why people who lived through traumatic political and cultural events, like a war, would often go through the rest of their lives without ever speaking about what they had been through. I am not claiming to have lived through a war, or anything close to it, but I think I now understand such people a little bit better. These days, weeks can go by without me thinking of the pandemic and, to be honest, that’s the way I want it to be. I have no interest in reading a book or watching a show set during the pandemic. I was there – I know how miserable it was and how inescapable it felt; I don’t need someone else to tell me.

It is really strange to exist in a space where rules are shouted out at you that have no bearing on how you live your life.Occasionally now, I will see one of the COVID-19 artefacts around campus, and it will remind me of something. The week I spent isolated in Halls when my friend group got COVID, having to go to the Arts Block reception to get a mask when I’d forgotten to bring one so I could attend a lecture, or how you had to book a seat in the library if you wanted to study there.

Though it felt normal to me then, I am glad it is not my normal now.

For the past three years, I have watched Freshers nervously frolic around campus and felt both envious of and pleased for them. I had a great first year at college, but I will never know how great it could have been without the pandemic.