长新冠手册(2022)

In early March 2020, I was in the hills above Los Angeles – getting a suntan, trying to get my second feature film off the ground and training for my fourth marathon. The weather was delightful, my legs were strong, and I was confident of hitting my two hours fifty minutes target in the London Marathon the following month. The only problem was that somewhere in central China a pangolin had partied too hard with a bat, and now a pandemic was brewing. The world – and my life – was about to change immeasurably.

I flew back to London on 6 March, and less than a week later had my first symptom – a peculiar nausea. The following day, chills and stomach upset. All the colleagues I’d shared a meeting room with a few days prior were ill too. There were no tests, so no one could be sure, but Covid was exploding across London.

My initial illness wasn’t too severe. I was able to work a few hours a day and felt foolishly and quietly smug that my immune system was obviously better than my colleagues’, who were feverish, coughing and having a general shocker. The London Marathon now looked like it was going to be cancelled, but I was so keen not to lose my hard-won fitness that in the second week of the illness I tried going for short jogs.