It Gets Right Up My Nose

 I'm not too brilliant with health stuff. I cannot bear injections [I have to look away if there is someone on the TV having a close encounter with a syringe] I struggle to keep my mouth firmly closed when the dentist wants to X-ray my teeth [that's a distant memory now] I love crime dramas - but not the pathologist's close ups. We had a letter about the Office of National Statistics Covid-19 Infection Survey,  We agreed to take part -  it requires us to home test on a regular basis. Every week an enthusiastic person [not always the same one] arrives at the door in mask and gloves - and hands one of us a test kit, and asks the other questions about our week - then we swap over.

Basically the answers are always about the same - yes we spend about 21 hours in each other's company every day. No, nobody has been in our house, and we have not been in theirs. We've had a couple of socially distanced conversations with people outside. We have briefly been in the post office / pharmacy or supermarket. No we don't have any new symptoms [but I still smell terrible]  ...I can manage the questions.

But the test is the bit I don't enjoy.

Technically we are taking "oropharyngeal and nasopharyngeal" swabs - i.e. from the throat and nose. We pop the stick into the tube, snap off the top section, screw on the cap and seal the tube in the bag with the barcode, and return it to the visitor. We hear nothing and then repeat again next week. If it show up positive for covid19 we are contacted promptly, otherwise our data just goes off to the statisticians. I have to say that it is getting easier each time, I don't feel like gagging quite so much.

• Last week she arrived quite soon after lunch. I hope that the tomato soup I had just eaten didn't affect the results! 
• It feels like a very small contribution to the "War Effort" really. I hope they are able to reach some helpful conclusions when they have gathered all the data.
• At the end of it we will be sent Amazon vouchers for our trouble. I hope I would have done it without that 'incentive' - all those years I gave blood regularly** and my only reward then was a cup of tea and a biscuit, and a sense of having helped save lives.

But most of all, I hope that the research being done worldwide right now helps alleviate the suffering and bring an end to the spread of this virus. My thanks to all the scientists, statisticians and survey collectors involved in this work.

** I cannot give blood anymore - but they still need donations as much as ever. Find out more here about covid-safe ways to give,