28 June

A mum I know was despairing this week that her kids are sick again, for the third time this year. ‘They just seem to catch everything now, and it doesn’t go away.’ That’s Covid at work. It suppresses (technically exhausts) your immune system. Leaving you wide open to all other infections. I share these images of Freddie Mercury as a prominent example of mistaking acute and chronic infection. The acute impacts of catching something, like HIV or Covid, can be literally ‘just a cold’. You think you get better, and life goes on. For most of the 1980s when Queen were at the peak of their fame, Freddie was living with HIV in this way. Nobody, including him, knew he was on a terminal train ride. But he was dying with HIV, every day, that whole time. You can see the earliest public evidence in that Kaposi sarcoma I’ve highlighted on his face, in red, the snap of him playing tennis. The virus was eating him away, from the inside. Covid does this too. Does it do it as badly as HIV? Nobody knows, yet. It certainly kills in an acute way in a way HIV never does, so it’s actually the more aggressive virus. And its chronic after-effects, like the mum at work is seeing in her kids, are beginning way earlier than happened with HIV. You got 8-10 good years ‘living with’ HIV. These Covid after-effects are kicking in after 1 or 2. I wouldn’t roll the dice. But most people are. It’s Russian Roulette, at a global level.