The virus is nothing if not adaptable, because it’s meanwhile outwitting the leader of the United States, but targeting quite different shortcomings. In his book The Art of the Deal, Donald Trump has revealed that the best way to do a deal is by denigrating your opponent. This is a man who speaks nostalgically of punching his second-grade music teacher and giving him a black eye.

He’s spent February denigrating Covid-19 – ‘You’re not as bad as the flu, few Americans are at risk’ – but the morale of the virus seems strangely undaunted by his tactics.

Perhaps it’s read his book.

A habitual user of wet wipes, Trump is a man with a lifetime fear of contamination. During the election campaign in 2016, he has spoken in horror of one of his interviewers, Megyn Kelly, ‘having blood coming out of her wherever’. He has also repeatedly characterised Hillary Clinton’s bathroom break during a Democratic debate as ‘disgusting’.

You may predict that this president is not ideally equipped to cope with something which breaks into your body and violently disrupts it.

Trump can’t conquer his natural disdain for anyone who gets ill. Sick people are what he calls losers. He has described his own brother Fred, an alcoholic who died at forty-three, as ‘a mawkish but lovable loser’.

But I’ve noticed among some of my friends that a similar attitude, though not articulated, is not far from the surface.

A famous film director remarks to me that I’m the only person he knows who’s got it. Do I detect an undercurrent of rebuke, as though it’s not the sort of thing the middle classes are meant to get? Apparently, I’ve crossed class lines by carelessly catching a disease which generally attacks manual workers and ethnic minorities. After all, it’s already becoming clear that you’re twice as likely to die if you’re poor. Diseases follow the social gradient.

And skin colour. In England and Wales, you’re four times as likely to die if you’re black.

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But, again, am I dying? This is another very good question. I’ve entered the vomiting phase and I would say it’s the worst so far. Six times daily, I’m beating a track to the bathroom. I can’t keep anything down, and the result is I’m losing strength. Nicole is horrified because I’m the colour of Bela Lugosi, but also frustrated because I won’t eat anything. But what’s the point, I ask, if it just comes up again in an hour?