Unfortunately, before going to sleep, I’ve started reading about cytokine storms. That’s when your immune system, threatened, goes into overdrive and causes more severe problems than the original virus. The body’s immune system attacks itself.

One doctor is quoted as saying, ‘Everyone’s talking about the cytokine storm as if it were a well-recognised phenomenon. Actually, two weeks ago, most doctors had never heard of it.’

Nicole has thus far defied medical advice. We’re meant to sleep in separate rooms, but we don’t. We share a bathroom too. Nicole’s convinced she’ll never get ill. Her mother lived to a hundred and two.

Towards dawn, my fever has headed dramatically in the opposite direction and I start to shake with Arctic cold. Not even extra bedclothes, two thick pullovers and a hot-water bottle are doing anything to help. But I can’t help feeling maybe Nicole’s pushing her luck with her own immunity to this virus when she climbs on top of me, stretches her whole body against mine and says, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll get you warm.’

My wife doesn’t seem to have grasped the notion of social distancing.

*

So, unknowingly, we’ve slipped into the mad phase and it will be with me for the next eleven days. ‘Mad’, meaning any symptom can appear at any time. One day it’s conjunctivitis. Next day it’s diarrhoea. Then it’s coughing. Then it’s friendly herpes. But just as my illness enters its mad phase, so does the Conservative government.

They’re exquisitely timed to happen together.

Maybe the politicians are inspired by the medicine. After all, if our vital signs have decided that now is the time to lie to us, maybe our government has decided the same.

Over this exact same period, the long list of the government’s mistakes and failures will become blindingly clear to everyone. In this emergency, if you’re looking for the government, you’ll always be sure to find them running along five miles behind the public.

The problems in the UK start when politicians fail to use the space granted by the westward spread of the virus to make preparation for its arrival. On March 12th, even Jeremy Hunt, a former Tory health minister himself, calls the government’s lack of action ‘surprising and concerning’. The country remains mysteriously open to visitors from viral centres like Italy and Spain, who pour in at airports unchecked and unquarantined.

At a COBRA meeting, also on March 12th, the government are still indulging their more fanciful advisers. They have been flirting with a policy of herd immunity – the happy-go-lucky notion that if the most vulnerable among us sheltered and hid indefinitely, it might be possible for everyone else to carry on and take their chances.