Allison Pearson Allison Pearson

How did the virus get past my Obsessive Compulsive Corona Disorder?

When two members of my family went down with what appears to be Covid-19, I felt concerned. What I hadn’t bargained on was the sense of wounded pride. As the patients, pale as veal, collapse into their beds for 16 hours of fretful, jagged sleep, I ask myself how the wretched virus could have penetrated my defences. Have I not for three weeks of lockdown carried out normal household tasks with the heightened vigilance of a Porton Down lab technician moving radioactive material across an infant-school playground? If an Amazon parcel came to the door, I commenced the Corona Protocol. First, don safe-cracker gloves (the indoor pair not the supermarket pair) to take package. Immediately, march packaging out of back door to recycling bin. Now wash hands with real soap, not sanitising gel, because, you know, contamination and phospholipids. Retracing my steps, I wiped each doorknob and surface with special alcohol wipes which cost an extortionate £27.95. In their favour, they smell of hospitals and ‘kill 99.999 per cent of germs’. Logically, I know they may not kill the virus. But what is logic to those of us in the grip of Obsessive Compulsive Corona Disorder? Everyday objects — credit cards, country gates — assume a heightened, sinister quality like the close-up of a key in a Hitchcock film. I ask a scientist friend why I appear to be the only one in our house who doesn’t have Covid. ‘Hate to tell you this,’ he says, ‘but you could be Typhoid Mary.’ It’s just possible that I brought the virus back from my ‘healthy’ break in Austria and don’t have any symptoms. I peel and segment a couple of satsumas and take them up to the sick bay. One patient is complaining of a throat filled with shards of glass.

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