A truth in dreams

Yesterday morning I woke up remembering a fraction of a dream. The dream snippet began when I had just realised I had a cold, followed immediately by the realisation, “Damn. That means I’ll need to get a Covid test.” That was the entirety of the snippet—there was no resolution to the thought, no test or test results. While I don’t know if that was part of a longer dream I didn’t remember, I at least know why even that little snippet happened: It’s obviously because of the times we live in.

For months, the NZ Government has been running ads telling people to get a Covid test if they have “cold or flu symptoms”, a message frequently repeated in media conferences. This wouldn’t be the first time a constantly promoted message leaked into my dreams, but I wonder if this incident might hint at a seemingly widely-held anxiety: The consequences of a positive test result.

A lot of Kiwis, it seems, aren’t worried about catching Omicron itself—they seem absolutely convinced it’d be no worse than a cold, maybe a bad cold at worst. Instead, they’re worried about potentially having to spend 14 days in isolation at home, and how they’d manage that if they were the only one who was positive.

The current rules are that people must self isolate for “at least” 14 days, and non-positive close contacts for 10 days. Most people seem to have added those together and assumed they’d have to isolate for 24 days, but that would likely only be the case for someone like a close household contact who ended up testing positive on day 10 of their own isolation. Nevertheless, a lot of people seem convinced that the period would be 24 days. Why?

Clearly much of this is probably just because people didn’t quite grasp the rules, possibly because they didn’t read or here the rules directly, but also possibly because of mischievous framing by some politicians (and, of course, the usual anti-government types stirring up trouble over anything related to Covid). As we all know—especially with regards to Covid—misinformation and disinformation repeated often enough eventually replaces actual information in ordinary people’s understanding.

I’ve heard rightwing politicians in the New Zealand Parliament deliberately exaggerating the potential of long periods of isolation using theoretical sequential isolation, like that I described above, in order to imply it would be typical for a family to have to remain in isolation for months. That’s mischievous because while it’s theoretically possible, sure, it’s highly improbable that it would be even remotely common.

Because of this misunderstanding of the isolation rules, whatever caused it, I’ve seen suggestions that people won’t use the QR scanner wherever they go, as the law requires, out or fear they might be deemed a “close contact” because, say, they were in a supermarket at the same time a Covid-positive person was. That, too, is a misunderstanding: A person in this scenario would likely be considered a “casual contact”, and so, just told to monitor for symptoms. That’s because the risk of transmission is very low in a supermarket—a big airy building in which everyone is required by law to wear a mask. A close contact would be, say, someone in the same area of a plane, as the Prime Minister recently was, or maybe a household member.

Related to this, some people have said that the only reason there are so many cases is because there’s so much testing (yes, that’s the same moronically idiotic thing that the guy who lost the 2020 US Presidential election once said). Nowadays, though, it’s based on people’s conviction that Omicron is “mild”, so there’s no point in getting tested, and so, isolating. Obviously this is a boneheaded notion: It ignores the risk to vulnerable people, which obviously could include the person holding the boneheaded notion.

I read today that it’s estimated that it was maybe only one in four or one in five cases of Omicron ever detected in the recent waves in the UK and the USA. Presumably, that must mean that—as we would expect—the vast majority of infections didn’t cause disease severe enough to require medical care (because if they did, the fact they were positive would’ve been found out).

Does this then mean that current isolation requirements are too long? Yes—and that’s part of the plan.

On January 26, the government announced its three phase plan for dealing with Omicron. Phase One, where we’re at right now, is attempting to tightly control the outbreak mainly to buy time for more people to get their Covid booster (as of today, people can get their booster three months after their second jab; it had been after four months since the start of the year), and also for children to be vaccinated (5 to 11 year olds have only been eligible for vaccination since Jan 17, but so far, around 39% of them have had one shot).

At Phase Two, the number of positive cases will be growing rapidly, and isolation for people who test positive will drop to ten days, and seven for contacts. Close household contacts will be required to have a PCR test on Day 5. At this phase asymptomatic critical workers (and certain other workers) will be able to use RATs and other approved quick tests to allow them to return to work.

At Phase Three, when there are thousands of cases, “the definition of contacts will change to household and household like contacts only”, and those will be the only contacts required to isolate.

What all this means is that home isolation will be commonplace, and the required length of time in isolation will go down. I expect that it may drop even further in time, but I doubt it will ever go away entirely while Covid is still raging throughout the world.

All of this has been on my mind lately, tethered to the constantly reinforced message to get tested if we have cold or flu symptoms. All of which, I think, is why it crept into a dream. I think that the reason I’d have been pissed off about having to get a test would’ve been the hassle, not the possibility of home isolation—after all, that’s actually more or less been my daily life for ages, as are all the protocols and procedures for avoiding infection in the first place. I’m sure they’ve probably popped into dreams before, but yesterday was just the first time I remembered the dream upon waking.

All of our lives have changed dramatically over the past two years, and for me that was on top of having my life utterly shattered the end of the year before Covid. The surprise to me isn’t that I dreamed about having to get Covid test, it’s that our new collective realities haven’t permeated all my dreams (as far as I know…).

In any case, the snippet of a dream I had yesterday morning was just a reflection of the truth of modern life: Everything’s changed. The other truth, for me, is that I’m okay with that, and with adapting to it. What happened in 2019 prepared me for the constant change and uncertainty of the Covid Era. That’s the biggest truth of all that was hidden in that little dream snippet: I really am okay, and that means that Nigel actually helped me make his own final wish come true. That’s a pretty big truth to learn from a simple dream.