I caught Covid and it was no big deal. By Adam Creighton.
“Living with Covid” became a reality for me a few weeks back after I contracted the disease on a trip to New York at what turned out to be a superspreader event.
Three friends and I, all fully vaccinated, at least according to the prevailing definition, had a week of fever, aches, fatigue and some of us, not me, temporarily lost our sense of taste and smell.
It was unpleasant, but we’d all been sicker before and we’re all back to normal. My Johnson & Johnson one-shot vaccine, which I had in April, probably helped soften the blow, although a recent research paper found its effectiveness dropped to 13 per cent after six months.
Whatever, it’s obvious vaccines do not stop transmission of Covid-19, which was the only justification, however flimsy, for mandating them.
Not wanting to become an official case, further fuelling the interminable hysteria, we tested ourselves at home using $US24 ($34) test kits that are widely available at pharmacies in the US, a reminder that official Covid-19 case tallies are likely gross underestimates of the number of cases.
Whether it was Delta, Alpha, Mu or, heaven forbid, Omicron I do not know, but the bright pink line from the testing kit was unambiguous: Covid-19.
Testing is becoming increasingly pointless, but it’s very profitable (second only to vaccines). Will it ever go away?
The US has conducted more than 620 million tests since the pandemic began, even more per capita than test-obsessed Australia. At a cost of a few hundred dollars each, when the whole chain of Covid ticket clipping has been tallied, that’s more than $US100bn spent on testing in the US alone.
What’s worse, testing is becoming mandatory. On the back of the Omicron variant of concern, which it seems hasn’t killed a single person in the world yet, US President Joe Biden announced new testing requirements last week. Other nations did the same. …
The virus is already rampant in the US, as it is practically everywhere else. Does it matter if someone flying to the US has Covid when practically half the country already has had it? In short, got Covid, who cares. …
Once the tests are introduced, the businesses that will reap billions from them will fight to make them permanent. If mask mandates have lasted hundreds of days, expect testing mandates to last just as long, a cash cow for the Covid industrial complex.
Bring on the anti-virals, which will obviate the need for both testing and vaccines.
hat-tip Stephen Neil
