Mike's Minute: It was our fault Covid turned into a "thing"

I watched an interview the other week with Marama Davidson.  It came after the elevation of Chloe Swarbrick to the leadership. Davidson wasn’t at the press conference, Chloe told us, because it turns out she had Covid.  In watching the interview, although Covid ridden, Davidson looked and sounded perfectly well, although she was isolating, which is what we do, isn't it?    Well, some of us do. A friend of the kids had Covid the other day and hopped on a plane, the way I am sure many people do, and have done, for ages.  But the power of the narrative is still on display by some because we were convinced, or have convinced ourselves, that Covid, although affecting the vast majority of us in exactly the same way as any other flu-like, viral type condition, is different.  And one of the outworkings of getting Covid is some people ended up with what has become known as long Covid. Now, the research out this week from Queensland's Chief Health Officer is that long Covid does exist, but we need to stop calling it that.  Because, to use their words, it creates unnecessary fear and it's probably harmful. In other words, we have freaked ourselves out needlessly.  They studied more than 5000 people and found similar functional limitations a year after the event as they found with those who had seasonal flu or other respiratory illnesses.  In other words, it didn’t matter what you had, some people still felt the effects 12 months on, the same way it didn’t matter what you had at the time of infection, it still hit you the same way.  You might have lost your sense of smell, or you might not have. You might have been fatigued, or you might not have been.  But the fact you could take a swab and get a red line gave us all a chance to say "oh it's Covid, I'll isolate" for whatever the current rules were.  If it wasn’t Covid we reacted completely differently, the same way we had our entire lives until Covid came along, got a massive Government backed tag and reputation and messed with our sense of common sense.  We turned it, because we were allowed to, if not told to, into a “thing”.  Well, slowly, as common-sense returns and a slightly more real-world perspective evolves and the test results come in, we can increasingly see this period as some sort of out-of-body experience where we let fear play far too great a role. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.