COVID-19 and Lockdown - This time it's personal!

So, Ireland has been on the highest lockdown level again since midnight on October 21st. To be fair, this was kind of inevitable, given the massive explosion in COVID cases in recent weeks, something that was accompanied by an equally worrying increase in the percentage of COVID-19 tests coming back positive. However, unlike the complete lockdown back in spring, this lockdown is not quite as severe, as cafés and restaurants can still sell take-aways, while the definition of “essential” retail stores was expanded somewhat. Still, the effect has been immediate and somewhat severe, something not helped by the usual shower of anti-mask cranks, racists, neofascists, religious nuts and other malcontents raising a huge stink.

This time, the impact has been a bit more personal though. I’m currently half-way through a two-week time off period that was more than overdue! A few days before this time off was supposed to start, I started feeling a bit sick. A persistent cough, a tingling soreness at the back of the throat, I felt like I was running a fever, and I had a multi-day headache. At the same time, my sinuses remained completely clear, which is very much unusual. Either way, with two days to go to my time off, I had to call my GP. Typical. Just my luck!

Then again, it fit right into 2020. Anyway, within twenty minutes of talking to my GP, I received a text message stating that I’d been booked in for a COVID-19 test on the following day. It was only later when I realised that they hadn’t actually sent me to the COVID-19 testing centre down the road, which I could have walked to in less than three minutes, but to an address in Cork’s North Link Business Park, somewhere halfway between Blackpool and Blarney. There was no way I’d be able to walk there. This was quickly sorted though, and another call-back later, I had a ride arranged for the following day, one that never showed up. Because of course it didn’t. 

To be fair, the issue was sorted out in fairly short order, I was rescheduled for the next day, and my transport on Saturday finally showed up at around 10 AM. It must have been quite a sight for my neighbours to see me loaded into the back of a van by two soldiers in full uniform. Now what the hell is that German up to now?

JTF/OP Fortitude

Before I continue with my COVID-19 test experience, I’d like to expand a bit on why the hell they sent the army after me, particularly for my non-Irish readers. After all, only 5% of the visitors on this blog came in via Irish IP addresses in the last month. Hey, Blogger.com is a Google service, what did you expect?

Anyway, back to the topic at hand. Back in early March 2020, as the first COVID-19 wave began to hit Ireland, the Irish government at the time recognised that the HSE, that’s the Irish Health Service, may be overwhelmed by the demands of getting a full testing and contract tracing infrastructure off the ground quicky, and decided to get the Irish Defence Forces involved. Some of you may have seen the pictures of Irish Navy warships moored in Cork, Dublin or Galway to act as the base for pop-up testing centres. The actual involvement was, and still is, a lot more extensive than that. The whole operation has been dubbed Operation Fortitude, with JTF (Joint Task Force) Fortitude coordinating the whole operation out of McKee Barracks in Dublin. In addition to the deployment of the warships mentioned above, Op Fortitude also encompasses the airlift of samples to a testing lab in Germany, contact tracing and patient transport, simply to ensure that the HSE and National Ambulance Service still have their full set of ambulances etc. available.

Ford Transit vans like this are being used to transport suspected COVID-19 patients to the testing centres if they can't drive.

Image: William Murphy from Dublin, Ireland, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

With that little explainer out of the way, let’s get back to the story at hand, shall we? I was ushered to the rightmost seat in the last row of a Ford Transit. That seat was covered with plastic and designated for the patient in question. The driver’s seat and passenger seat next to it were separated from the back by a clear divider. All in all, a simple but effective setup. I’m not sure whether I’d consider the drive to the testing centre as effective as well though. There are two ways to get to the testing centre in question: One that leads through the city centre, mostly on wide multi lane roads that takes a bit longer; and a nominally shorter route via the towns of Tower and Blarney that leads across a number of winding back roads. You can probably guess which road we took. Yep, the back roads, which were not only narrow and winding, but also pockmarked with potholes and ruts, which caused our van to bounce all over the place. Since my own seat was slightly behind the rear axle, I was regularly catapulted around. When we finally arrived at the testing centre, I felt like James Bond: Shaken, not stirred!

The test centre in question is located in a vacant unit in the North Link Business Park, which sits astride the N20 road leading from Cork to Limerick. It operates as a drive through centre, with multiple lanes of testing stations. When we got there, the queue was already quite impressive, and all of the regular lanes in the centre were in operation. I have to admit I was taken aback by the sheer number of tests conducted there. Slightly off to the side from the other lanes was a dedicated testing station for patients being brought in by the army. My van was the only one at the testing centre at the time, so I was seen to within a couple of minutes. 

Now, there’s been a lot said about the tests and how unpleasant they can be. In my case, two samples were taken. One was a swab of the upper part of my mouth, while the other consisted of a swab of the back of my nose. This nasal swab is definitely very unpleasant, it felt like they were drilling for oil in my skull! However, it was also fast. It took the nurse only three seconds to get the sample, with the mouth swab taking about five seconds. Within a minute of getting out of the van, I was back inside and on the way home. This meant another fifteen minutes of being bounced around the back roads of Cork before being dropped off outside my apartment. 

I received my all clear message on Sunday evening. The test was negative, meaning I could theoretically enjoy my time off. You know, if it weren’t for that whole “stay within five kilometres of your home” business that came into force two days later, when the country was moved to a Level 5 lockdown. All in all, the whole testing experience was very professional, nasal swab notwithstanding, and it was also very fast, with the test results coming in on the same weekend. And of course, having a negative test result is even better.

Yet, the whole thing also got me thinking. This isn’t an academic or abstract issue anymore. For those few days between the first call to my GP and the arrival of the test results, the possibility of COVID-19 suddenly felt very real and immediate, particularly since I didn’t have any family of spouse who could look after me if things had gone downhill. As someone once said, the shell impacts are getting closer, and there’s still a very real chance that this could take a turn for the worse. This IS 2020, after all.