A very sick man is spreading his germs in your house, touching things, shedding pathogens everywhere. Would you gently evict?
A part of you asks what sort of a friend and host you would be if you kicked them out exactly when they were most vulnerable. Illustration by C Y Gopinath using Midjourney
Let’s take a simple situation and complicate it. You’ve invited dear friends from your twenties, Bansi and Asha, to holiday with you and your wife for a week in your Bali apartment. You are all in your mid-30s. It’s going to be fun.
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Arriving late, they check into a hotel for the night. Bansi calls you around breakfast the next morning and casually mentions that he had a weird high fever at night, but it went away with two Tylenols. He’s feeling fine now, and they’re en route to you.
Question: Should you politely suggest that they just stay in a hotel until they figure out what lethal infection started that fever?
It’s just a little fever, you think. We’re Indians. Atithi devo bhava.
Everyone is joyously reunited, there’s a great beer lunch and some sand surfing. By evening, Bansi’s fever is back. At the Denpasar hospital, they rule out COVID-19 but say he has a respiratory disease caused by a seasonal bacteria. A broad-spectrum antibiotic is prescribed.
Question: Now a verified sick man is breathing and spreading his germs in your house. He is touching things, shedding pathogens as he walks and expelling armies of germs into your air with every sneeze. Time to gently evict?
A part of you asks what sort of a friend and host you would be if you kicked them out exactly when they were most vulnerable.
Asha goes down the next day. Still, good friend that you are, you continue to patiently nurse two seriously ill people, right up to the time their holiday ends and it’s time for them to return to shining India.
The next day, you go down with the same bug. You dose yourself with the same antibiotic and wait it out. The first four days are miserable, with high fever, breathing difficulty, body aches and hacking coughs. Ten days later, you’re all right but still slightly battered.
Was it worth it? They didn’t have a holiday. You lost 10 days of life and work. Everyone involved knew it would happen. Why didn’t you take simple, practical steps to protect each other? Didn’t COVID-19 teach you anything?
“You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t,” says Dr Haniraj Chulani, a consulting surgeon with Lilavati Hospital. “Our Indian tradition is to make guests welcome. Telling them to isolate themselves after inviting them in the first place could be considered both rude and cruel. On the other hand, converting your home into an infirmary places you and every other resident in the house at risk. What if you had aged parents, babies, convalescents or immuno-compromised persons?”
I am reminded that on March 13, 2020, the Trump Administration banned non-US citizens from 26 countries from entering the USA in case they brought COVID-19 with them. Was that rude and cruel?
This isn’t a country, you tell me. It’s my apartment. These aren’t illegal aliens, they’re friends I invited.
No one is exempt from this dilemma. You could be the guest with the infection or the host who’s wondering how to deal with it. In a post-COVID world where new diseases seem to emerge routinely, some practical guidelines might be useful.
1. When having people over, discuss health before it becomes an issue. We’d love to have you over — unless of course some infectious bug gets one of us and jeopardises a good time. If that happens, let’s agree to let each other know and modify plans.
2. There’s no such thing as “just a fever” or “slight sore throat”. COVID-19 taught us that innocuous symptoms are often harbingers of worsening, sometimes lethal conditions. A paracetamol might suppress the fever but not the infection. Dude, I’ve got some seriously senior people/little kids here. How about staying a day longer at the hotel till the docs figure out what you have? Then we can make some practical, life-saving
care decisions.
3. If they’re already with you when the symptoms worsen, remind yourself that you would not be rushing to distance yourself if the guests had been your parents, relatives or children. During COVID-19, families bore the brunt of the disease together and overwhelmingly survived. 765 million got COVID; only seven million died.
4. Revive the basic hygiene principles we learned through the pandemic in your home. Love you to death, but we’re going Code Orange now. We’ll agree to wear masks in the house, mini-mize contact, handwash like hell, keep our linen separate and stay in our own spaces until we’re past the infectious stage. We’ll protect each other.
Diseases isolate us. But humans have always survived by caring for each other, not just by fending for themselves. I am guided by a single experience from when I was 18, and living alone while doing college in Delhi. I had had a high fever for a couple of days and was at my friend Vickram Crishna’s house when his mother, who we called Aunty Amie, detected it.
“You’re going nowhere, young man,” she said. A bed was made for me, and I was nursed for a month through a terrible disease called typhoid.
Caring for a sick person was not a dilemma for her. It was a no-brainer.
You can reach C Y Gopinath at cygopi@gmail.com
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.
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