19 June

Raina Macintyre is a global expert on infectious disease and public health. She’s also at my old stomping ground, UNSW, which is really kicking some goals. In this book she compares Covid-19 to syphilis, which has been called ‘the great imitator’, causing a whole range of terrible health problems that seem like something else. That’s what Covid does. That acute infection you get, which the mental midgets call ‘just a cold’, is just it making its way into your body. The on-ramp. Only then does it really get to work, fucking you over for the rest of your life in any organs or tissue, exploding blood cells, blocking blood vessels, causing cancer-forming inflammation etc. You’ve let it in, and it will never leave. Like a psychopath lodger.