When the Rain Comes

 A good rain metaphor from tern:

Some people just can't wrap their heads around the multiple dangers caused by covid infection. 

Speaking to a colleague yesterday, I tried to describe it like the effects of rain. If your roof is solid, and there's a light rain shower, your house can handle it easily. Absolutely no cause for alarm. But rain isn't always light, and your roof isn't always in good condition. 

Our bodies are set up to be self healing to some extent, but if they lose that ability due to exhaustion, damage, overload, age, etc, then they can lose the capacity to bounce back. And if it rains heavily, once, twice, three, six, ten times in succession... You may start to get problems with more than the roof. 

Waterlogged ground and foundations. Rot. Mould. Flooding. Overload to drainage. And if the roof is flawed, the water will come in at the weakest point. 

Covid and Long Covid act just like that, finding different weak points and vulnerabilities in different people. And rain storms can come from different directions with different intensity and wind speed, causing different problems. Mutating variants in successive waves of Covid can do the same. And then the after effects can show themselves in different ways over time. Both rain and covid. And those repeat rain storms... 

Covid isn't a rain storm. It's a mixed up bundle of codes looking for cells to replicate in. If you get those two red lines on a test, it's been replicating throughout your body in cells everywhere, and the question isn't whether it's done any damage, the question is what damage it has done. I'm watching people around me age twenty-five years in the last five. People are getting hit by once in a hundred year storms every six months round here. Their tiles are coming off. Their joists are rotting. There's damp in the walls and in the bed.

And the floodwaters are rising.