It’s just a little fever, no worries

Letrsquos take a simple situation and complicate it Yoursquove 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 mid30s Itrsquos going to be funArriving 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 Hersquos feeling fine now and theyrsquore en route to youQuestion Should you politely suggest that they just stay in a hotel until they figure out what lethal infection started that feverItrsquos just a little fever you think Wersquore Indians Atithi devo bhavaEveryone is joyously reunited therersquos a great beer lunch and some sand surfing By evening Bansirsquos fever is back At the Denpasar hospital they rule out COVID19 but say he has a respiratory disease caused by a seasonal bacteria A broadspectrum antibiotic is prescribedQuestion 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 evictA part of you asks what sort of a friend and host you would be if you kicked them out exactly when they were most vulnerableAsha 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 itrsquos time for them to return to shining IndiaThe 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 yoursquore all right but still slightly batteredWas it worth it They didnrsquot have a holiday You lost 10 days of life and work Everyone involved knew it would happen Why didnrsquot you take simple practical steps to protect each other Didnrsquot COVID19 teach you anythingldquoYoursquore damned if you do and damned if you donrsquotrdquo says Dr Haniraj Chulani a consulting surgeon with Lilavati Hospital ldquoOur 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 immunocompromised personsrdquoI am reminded that on March 13 2020 the Trump Administration banned nonUS citizens from 26 countries from entering the USA in case they brought COVID19 with them Was that rude and cruelThis isnrsquot a country you tell me Itrsquos my apartment These arenrsquot illegal aliens theyrsquore friends I invitedNo one is exempt from this dilemma You could be the guest with the infection or the host whorsquos wondering how to deal with it In a postCOVID world where new diseases seem to emerge routinely some practical guidelines might be useful1 When having people over discuss health before it becomes an issue Wersquod love to have you over mdash unless of course some infectious bug gets one of us and jeopardises a good time If that happens letrsquos agree to let each other know and modify plans2 Therersquos no such thing as ldquojust a feverrdquo or ldquoslight sore throatrdquo COVID19 taught us that innocuous symptoms are often harbingers of worsening sometimes lethal conditions A paracetamol might suppress the fever but not the infection Dude Irsquove got some seriously senior peoplelittle 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 lifesavingcare decisions3 If theyrsquore 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 COVID19 families bore the brunt of the disease together and overwhelmingly survived 765 million got COVID only seven million died4 Revive the basic hygiene principles we learned through the pandemic in your home Love you to death but wersquore going Code Orange now Wersquoll agree to wear masks in the house minimize contact handwash like hell keep our linen separate and stay in our own spaces until wersquore past the infectious stage Wersquoll protect each otherDiseases 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 Crishnarsquos house when his mother who we called Aunty Amie detected itldquoYoursquore going nowhere young manrdquo she said A bed was made for me and I was nursed for a month through a terrible disease called typhoidCaring for a sick person was not a dilemma for her It was a nobrainerYou can reach C Y Gopinath at cygopigmailcomSend your feedback to mailbagmiddaycomThe views expressed in this column are the individualrsquos and donrsquot represent those of the paper