The Covid tester brushed my chin with her surgical glove as she twirled the swab inside my mouth. What if she was infected but asymptomatic? She was in close contact with hundreds of people who had coronavirus after all. I felt a familiar sense of panic. After she had finished, I closed first the car window, then my eyes. Then I sprayed my face with disinfectant.
Several months into the pandemic, I was trapped in a relentless cycle. I drove away from the testing centre to endure another period of self-enforced self-isolation, wondering how soon after the inevitable negative result arrived I would go back for another. I knew that taking two PCR tests a week (I have had 31 in total) was extreme. I knew that none of my friends or family were behaving in this way. But I couldn’t escape my own warped logic.
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