Today's figures have pushed the death toll over 6,000 in this country. So it is more likely that there were 1.2-1.8 million infections at the time that Patrick Vallance told MPs that there were likely 55,000 cases, a figure which itself probably sounded unbelievably too many to most at that time, with an official count of only 1,950. But it was probably an underestimate by a factor of twenty or more, and the official case count was underreporting the amount of infections by a factor between 500 and 1000.
I think given the likely spread of this disease prior to lockdown, especially in London and the South East, which are ahead of the rest of the country, and are where I live and work, it is a strong possibility that the cold that I had in early March was Covid-19. There were likely hundreds of thousands in the region already infected by that point, plus I work for a multinational where people are constantly arriving on, or returning from, business travel.
Sensing the coming situation, the last day I worked in the office was Wednesday the fourth of March. I began to come down with cold symptoms on Friday the sixth. These were fever and sore throat initially, developing into a cough over the weekend, which was at first dry, and eventually productive.
I actually went to my doctor's office on a prior-arranged appointment later the following week. At the time, the official advice was that if you had not recently been to one of of what were considered to be the 'affected areas' (which at that time I think were only Northern Italy, Iran, Hubei, South Korea, Singapore, Vietnam, Malaysia, Hong Kong, and Macau), and you had not been in direct contact with a confirmed case of Covid-19, then there was no possibility that you had Covid-19.
So I phoned ahead, told them about my symptoms, and asked if I should still come. They said it was OK if I used the non-emergency 111 number for advice and they said it was OK. I could not get through on the phone, but I used the website which asked me some questions and told me that I was not at risk of Covid-19. I reported this back to the doctor's office and they said that it was therefore all right for me to come down.
I did not sit down in the waiting room when I arrived at the doctor's office and maintained a distance from everyone else. I mentioned my symptoms to my doctor as soon as I entered the examination room and that I had phoned ahead to make sure it was OK for me to come down. She was not worried and examined me anyway, including an assessment of my cold symptoms by auscultation and temperature readings (which was not the purpose of the appointment).
Later, while instant messaging a colleague, he mentioned that he had a cold also, and that there was a woman in the office the previous week, whom I had seen that week, and whom he was introduced to on the Friday after I had left. She had cold symptoms when he spoke to her and had travelled from Italy. I learnt then that two of my other colleagues from my team had cold symptoms (which added up to all of the ones that had been in the office in that week) and that at least one other person sitting in the vicinity of where this person sat also had cold symptoms. This seemed like an extremely virulent cold, given that all of my team members had been asymptomatic at the time I left.
I contacted my boss about this, and he asked the person who was working with this new arrival about her. Apparently, my colleague had misheard and she had not come
from Italy, but had been intending to travel
to Italy on a holiday (which obviously would not have been able to go ahead by that point), and was from another European country. At the time, that made me feel relieved, because I had put a lot more stock in the official estimates of the case numbers, and I also considered it a negligible risk if this person had not come from Italy. However, thinking back, there is every chance that it was Covid-19. It would be somewhat of a relief to me now if it was. The only thing that worries me is if I inadvertently passed it onto my GP.
