I was on a walk with my friend Ivan, talking about the time I had Covid, and how it was bad but not too bad, and on the bright side at least now I had some antibodies, before he interrupted me and said: “You didn’t have it.”
“What? I didn’t have Covid? Yes I did!”
“No you didn’t. You didn’t get a positive test.”
“I couldn’t get a test.”
“So you don’t know you had it – and therefore you can’t say you had it.”
“But I was sick. I had all the symptoms.”
“It was probably a cold.”
“You weren’t there. What are you, a pathologist?”
And so on.
I’ve had this fight with a few different people. They are Covid deniers … as in, they are denying that I had Covid.
Like a lot of people, I reckon I caught the virus in early January during the perfect storm of the Omicron wave, mass infections, an unprepared government and a stressed and broken testing regime.
I had gone to a Melbourne wedding that was held indoors – and two days following the event, the bride’s step-dad and the groom’s father, as well as various cousins and friends, all got Covid. And so did I – or so I thought. Their symptoms were similar to mine: a scratchy throat, muscle aches, fatigue, a cough. But I tested negative on my one and only RAT, no other RATs were available and I didn’t have access to PCR testing. It left me wondering – if you had been to a super-spreader event, could you assume a positive result by proxy? It was the epidemiological equivalent of that philosophical conundrum: “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”
If you were exposed to the virus and had the symptoms, but no one is around to test you, did you have Covid?
I was not alone in believing I had Covid but lacking the proof to back up my claim. When the Omicron wave hit in late December and early January suddenly half the people I knew were sick – but half of those people, with all the classic Covid symptoms were testing negative on RATs or couldn’t get RATs or had PCR test results delayed and then voided or were testing negative on as many RATs as they could get their hands on, but positive on PCR tests. Or negative on four or five RATs until they stuck a swab right down their throat and then got a positive result.
It was a confusing time – the predictable extension of what happens when the government pivots sharply to personal responsibility – making everyone into their own mini-health department of one, and tasked with having to take over the detection, management, treatment and reporting of the virus.
Last week news.com.au political reporter Samantha Maiden tweeted, “Has anyone else in Melbourne or elsewhere experienced a strange phenomenon where they have lots of Covid symptoms – sore throat, spots on throat, extreme fatigue, nausea but test negative? Including via PCR?”
In the more than 1,500 replies, the answer was overall a resounding “Yes”.
For those of us who were sick but lacked a positive result it could have been ineffective tests or some other illness such as a cold – but I got to thinking that maybe some people, including myself, could have been suffering from a variation of Havana syndrome.
Havana syndrome was named after the mysterious illnesses, experienced by CIA officers around the world and originally thought to be a result of the use of biological weapons, but later thought to be a form of mass hysteria and a psychosomatic illness, to eventually – as of this week – found to probably be a bit of both.
The victims of Havana syndrome reported a variety of symptoms, including headaches, dizziness, hearing loss, fatigue, mental fog and difficulty concentrating after hearing an eerie sound.
But after extensive testing, nothing came up.
According to Professor Robert Baloh, writing for the Conversation in September, “Mass psychogenic illness typically begins in a stressful environment. Sometimes it starts when an individual with an unrelated illness believes something mysterious caused their symptoms. This person then spreads the idea to the people around them and even to other groups.”
In my case, I had been writing about Covid for two years and it had so completely taken over my psychic, physical (restrictions and lockdowns) and online landscapes, that when a real life situation (a wedding in a closed room with 75 people) occurred where it might be likely to catch it, I was probably psychosomatically primed to think I would get Covid.
In fact, at the wedding reception, several of the guests said they had feared they might catch the virus at the event and so had cleared their schedule for the next couple of weeks to allow them to recover.
This week, a report by a panel of expert scientists named pulsed electromagnetic energy and ultrasound as plausible causes for the mystery Havana syndrome symptoms but said that psychosocial factors could have worsened symptoms. Such factors could also explain other incidents which “could be due to hypervigilance and normal human reactions to stress and ambiguity, particularly among a workforce attuned to its surroundings and trained to think about security”.
That all sounds pretty familiar.
