One is recovering steadily, one can figure out just by how restless one is at night. High levels of mental restlessness due to physical inactivity, just means I’ll be back in action. The physical weakness is still prevalent, one prances around the room as one talks over the phone to feel completely exhausted in a bit. Strangely enough, I kept praying for a positive result. Not only for the antibodies but also to know whether the gut instincts are as sharp as they used to be.

Found some useful data, in the middle of the night about CT scans. About how to determine if you’re Covid positive, through a scan and when should you get it done? So this is what I found out. The CT scan should be done after five days, from when the first symptoms crop up. The CT value will determine the severity of infection and the CORAD, which is the standardised grading of the likelihood of being Covid positive is given. The CT score is from a range of 0-25 or in some cases 0-40.

So a CORAD 1, means highly unlikely. CORAD-2- Level of suspicion of COVID-19 is low, CORAD 3- Unsure, typical for other infections, CORAD 4- level of suspicion is high, CORAD 5-typical for COVID 19 and COVID 6- proven RT-PCR positive for SARS COVID 2. Now, in my case on the 11th day the scan says CT-1 and CORAD-6. So the infection is minute but still in the system, but it’s been established as Covid. Thankfully, one was on antibiotics from day one. But this means one should keep one’s butt at home, away from other people, especially when one can spread it, due to the nature of work, till one doesn’t get another test done.

Like me, if you aren’t as terribly unwell, as other people are- with no fever, no severe symptoms but just have a general feeling of lethargy, eye infection, cramps; you’ll know best, what your body normally feels like when its sick or healthy. Listen to it very carefully. This is the time to tune into your inner voice, your intuition because the test results are deceptive, the labs under pressure and the doctors overworked. Plus, come on man, it’s a new virus and a smart one. No one can say for certain, how it’s going to attack each individual and what the symptoms are going to be. So keep yourself safe.

I am convinced, I had it last year, when my mum passed away. People go blue in the face, trying to convince me, otherwise but I’m one of those people who truly believes, no one really knows anything about anything in this world, so I’d rather trust my own instincts. So, let me tell you how it went down. I share this not for the sake of argument but also because you or your family would benefit greatly by being adamant. It might save your life, like it did mine!

My mum passed away on the 18th of March, which was a few days prior to the Janta curfew and a couple of weeks after the first case was declared in Delhi. The virus that we were made aware off, only in December, had been floating around the world, way before that. Anyway, she had been bed ridden for around eight months by then but was doing alright. A couple of weeks before she passed, a new nurse came to look after her. This girl had a headache, a cold and a terrible cough, so I sent her away and got another nurse. Anyhow, the week before she passed away, I took my mum to the doctor for a routine check, she was fine. But on the sixteenth night, she suddenly started running a fever. 99, sore throat and an upset stomach so I took her to the doctor the next morning. Her oxygen levels, sugar, Bp, everything was alright. The doctor prescribed medicines and I brought her home. The next day by the time I woke up, she passed away. The last person she saw that morning, was my dad, who looked at her realized she wasn’t breathing properly. The footage of her death, still sends a shiver down my spine. On arrival to the hospital, she was declared dead. Her death was termed a cardiac arrest!Now, it may or may not have been. Who knows?

But it is the sequence of events which followed, that make me term it a covid death. A few days after my mum passed away, I started to get sick. I had trouble breathing, so much so that I would gasp for air at night. I was taken to the hospital, where they checked my ECG, which was irregular, did my ECHO which was normal and sent me home with a prescription, for Alprax. We were already under lockdown and I told them I tried to give my mum mouth to mouth resuscitation, yet they didn’t ask me to get myself tested for Covid. They said I was just anxious, so every one believed them. I kept getting sicker, people thought I was being dramatic. People kept telling me there’s not a chance she had Covid or you have it. I believed everyone. But Rabb Rakha! Plus there’s someone who is hell bent on saving my life. So, thankfully, he would make video calls at that time, as I was terribly unwell, to see how I was doing and realized I was very sick. He made me take Novamox ( the same antibiotic I took last week) and after a couple of weeks I was fine. I think I had it, am more convinced now, but what do I know? Trust me, you will know, there’s something unusual! So save yourself, if you listen to naysayers you’ll get yourself killed.

Last year, Reuters reported that the Corona virus was circulating in Italy in September 2019. This study was carried on by the National Cancer Institute. Our ceramic rods- raw material for making resistors comes from Hubei in China and anyone who does business, with them will tell you, imports were getting delayed, way before December. In 2019, India was only the 12th largest trade partner of China. How many Indians must have travelled there between September and December?How many people would have come in contact with those people before the declaration? One has to wonder. Anyhow, now look at the current lockdown in Delhi. Do you know how many people are testing negative, inspite of being positive? You think it’s just a failing of the health care system or just that the strain doesn’t get detected? You believe the government will be willing to admit the real figures and would not be pressurising the authorities to keep the statistics lower, like they do in the case of natural calamities or the killings in Kashmir? Maybe they aren’t, so why are the number of tests being conducted decreasing?

Do you really believe a country that is exporting at the scale that China does would let anyone know, what was happening? If this is bio warfare and synthetic, like some people argue, if it is so ( I don’t know) then wouldn’t they wait for it to spread everywhere and then make the announcement or not make it at all, until they feel like they’ll get caught? None of us can be certain what really happened! Even now around the world, the deaths of old, sick, hypertensive, diabetic people are not added to the statics! Do you not wonder, if there was no COVID, would Rishi Kapoor and Irfan Khan, have survived a few more years? I know they were unwell but much healthier, after their treatments. I’m not even counting all the indirect ways in which Covid, has killed many people by playing with their mental well being, like in the case of Sushant Singh. I think all these things all the time, so when I found Vir Das, talking about some of the same thing, on his episode about death, I was glad I’m not the only one. Though, after watching that video, one had to wonder if his mum has actually passed away at the age 65? If when he speaks about this being his job, he’s trying to poke fun at his own grief? But one wonders many things, I’ve been told it’s my greatest flaw.