23 Jan 2021 - Pulse Oximeter for Finger Oxygen Measuring Device

Despite the relief felt at Joe Biden’s inauguration, optimism was light on the ground in the UK in January 2021. A surge in infections in December had cancelled Christmas for many - our own plans to hire a cottage in the Peak District for a few days away from London had been scuppered by a ‘Stay at Home’ order issued under the confusing new ‘tier’ system. Whatever tier we were in, it wasn’t a good one. A new covid variant was on the march, reducing the efficacy of vaccines and striking down the young as well as the elderly without prejudice. The ‘British Mutation’, as they were calling it in Europe was threatening to send the country ‘back to square one’ and once again sent me into a spiral of fear and caution.

When Covid had originally appeared the horror of intubation kept me awake at night. I could remember the feeling of not being able to fill my lungs with air from my brief brush with pneumonia ten years before and worried that this previous infection might make me more susceptible to getting seriously ill with Covid. I couldn’t stop myself reading scientific advice and news articles about covid, tormenting myself with graphic descriptions about the effects of the disease and the chances of intubation and death once you had been admitted to hospital.

The scary thing about the new variant, officially known as B117, was how suddenly one could go from feeling fine to being hospitalized, intubated or worse. People could carry the virus in their systems for days without showing any symptoms before a devastating, rapid decline. The only way to tell whether early and urgent medical treatment was necessary was, I read, to test oxygen levels in the blood. One could appear absolutely healthy, but a blood oxygen level below 92% indicated potentially catastrophic problems requiring immediate hospitalization.

At a particularly unnerving press briefing on the 22nd January Boris Johnson warned that the new variant might be 30% more deadly than the original strain and the following morning, despite the raised eyebrows from Manon and the kids, I bought a pulse oximeter. I religiously tested myself morning and evening for at least three or four days before I calmed down and decided that being obsessed with my blood oxygen level was probably having a terrible effect on my blood pressure and was confirming my family’s image of me as a hysterical pessimist, Jeremy by name, Jeremiah by nature.

In fact, by the time I bought the pulse oximeter the second wave of covid had already peaked. The vaccination programme was ramping up and new infections and deaths were trending down and on 22 February the Government said that there was evidence that the vaccines were working and shared their timetable for easing of lockdown. Schools reopened on 8 March though Coco was in and out of school sporadically as various teachers and classmates caught covid, requiring everyone else in the class to isolate for 10 days. I got my first dose of the vaccine on 29 March, the day that households were allowed to mix outside for the first time that year.

Two weeks later, non-essential shops were allowed to reopen and by late July almost all pandemic restrictions had been lifted. Our year and a half of retail therapy was finally over.