So I have been single for quite a few months now. I came out of a relationship just after
Christmas. So it was the start of the online dating sagas.
Meet Pam Evans, from Aberdeen, in Scotland. She's in her forties, single and one of millions around the world trying
to navigate the world of love and internet dating in the difficult age of lockdown.
I'm on quite a few. I'm on Hinge, Tinder, which tends to be my favourite at
the moment. And also another one called Bumble where the girls are supposed to talk first,
but the guys never talk back.
Tell me about your dialogue with people now, how far do you take it? How far are they
taking it? What what's the new etiquette these days?
So it seems that everybody starts with the How are you? And it's, of course the next
question is, you know, are you working? You know, what's your setup at home? Are you alone
or, or are you with family or friends? I had one guy at the weekend. I'd spoken to him
a while ago before so I knew who he was and he immediately launched into the we should
meet up we should. I've just been tested last week for Covid. So I know I'm clear. So we
should meet up. I'll come round to your house now. And I said, Oh, no, absolutely not.
I'm not breaking lockdown. You know the rules. You shouldn't be doing that. Because I rebuted
him he turns around and just became absolutely abusive straight away. He called
me, well I can't really say the word what he called me because it was disgusting. And
you know, you've got this abuse verbally just because you were trying to stick to rules.
It seems to be that you're either in one camp of breaking the rules or the camp of sticking
to the rules.
Yeah well welcome to the world of modern online dating, you might say. But the point here
isn't just that some people can behave nastily, aggressively, that dating can be unpleasant. It's that
there is no simple way forward. Until and as when there's a vaccine for Covid-19 - which
could be next year, it could be never let's face it - two strangers aren't going to be able to meet and become
intimate without risk of infection - or are they? What if someone could prove they'd already
had the disease, and therefore that they weren't likely to get it again and to infect anyone else?
Reportedly thousands of people are now using dating websites to advertise this unique selling point about themselves.
They've had Covid-19.
Yeah, I've had a couple that have said that
to me as well. They're absolutely sure that they've had it. So why can't they just meet
up with people and why should they stay indoors? But at the same time, we don't know how long
this immunity could last for. We don't know if it actually is 100% right. If you've had
those symptoms, and I personally just am not really willing to take those risks.
What are your plans? I mean, let's say next month, those restrictions were lifted, you
could go and meet somebody socially. How far are you willing to take it right now in the in the world of dating?
Well, if those rules are lifted, there's no
harm in going and meeting somebody and having a coffee in a park or, or having that
interaction with them, you know. I'm not terribly someone who would kiss on the first date anyway.
So to me, having that two metres apart means a guy can't lunge on you for once, you know,
it's, it's kind of a nice physical barrier there. It's certainly interesting on what
would happen going forwards. Because you would find yourself having to make some pretty big
decisions, taking it beyond those initial dating stages and actually becoming quite
a serious and intimate relationship very quickly. I'm not sure if that's something I would want
to do or something I could do. But I think that you can't live your life in fear. And
that is something that we all have to get our mindset around.
I believe there are some sites in the US where they're starting to introduce immunity passports
as an idea. In other words, they would force people on the sites to sign up or at least
to register whether they had some kind of guaranteed form of, of antibody tests that
they could demonstrate. Do you see it going that way?
Yeah, I could certainly see it going that way. There are certain sites that do that
for HIV. So I do not see any reason why you wouldn't do it for Covid.
So if you met a guy, and he could prove that he had the antibody test that he had had the
illness at an earlier date, would that reassure you to get into a physical relationship do you think?
Yeah, I think that that would be the assurances
that we would need. You know, it's certainly something that that would be more encouraging
than taking somebody's word for it.
One woman's thoughts there - Pam Evans in Scotland.
Well dating is one thing. But the appetite among businesses and politicians for some
kind of proof of immunity is also growing. Chile is the first country to launch what it describes as
"release certificates", a document which allows citizens to prove they've had Covid-19.
The UK and Germany seem to be toying with a similar idea. And many businesses, especially
airlines, are desperate for the reassurance it might bring.
Could we, should we be looking at the possible immunity people get after suffering Covid-19
and make it a tool to make life and business much safer, more bearable, at least for those of us who've had the virus.
Let's start with the basic medical facts first. Is it
true that if you've had the disease, and have subsequently recovered, you are now immune?
Viruses differ in the extent to which you carry immunity having been vaccinated or had
an infection.
So there are no guarantees that you're going to get for example, something like you get
with polio, which is you know, you get your vaccination, you get your antibodies and you're
immune for life.
That's Robert West, Professor of Health Psychology and Behavioural Science at University College
London. He supports the World Health Organization's view on this, that we cannot bank on the immunity
idea. We simply don't know enough about the disease, he says, and even if you carry antibodies
for Covid-19, you might still be able to get the illness again, at least after a few months.
Most flus after all, don't grant long term immunity he says. Plus, current antibody
tests aren't sufficiently accurate.
We don't know an awful lot about them as they would operate in the fields. Because it's
when you get out into the field that all sorts of practical issues come into play and, you
know, human operators and so on. The problem here is that they need to be like really,
really sensitive and specific in order to be able to do the job. I mean, we're talking
in the 99 percentile to be able to do the job that we need them to do. And even if they
have above that in a laboratory situation, that doesn't guarantee that that's what it's
going to be like when they're rolled out on a mass scale.
If we proceed, though, on the assumption that those of us who have had Covid-19 will be
carrying around with us a degree at least of short term immunity from getting it again,
does that not lend itself to the idea that it would be useful for us to know who had
and who hadn't had it? Who was and who wasn't at least temporarily immune?
The issue really with propositions like what they're calling the "immunity passport" is
that what are you going to do with it? There are so many potential negative spillover effects.
False reassurance obviously is one of them. You know, you cannot have a situation where
people might have the virus, not be immune and be able to pass it on to far vulnerable
groups that they're interacting with. You can't have a situation where people themselves
might be putting themselves into harm's way because they think they're immune. Another
one is you get not to put too fine a point on it fraud. You get people sort of
forging these kinds of certificates or certification, which would probably be more likely to be
online than anything else, you know, someone is going to do it. And so you you have to
build in safeguards against that. And that might be quite difficult and expensive. It's
not insurmountable, but it has to be looked into. And then a third one is the issue of
potential divisiveness within society. If you have people who can go about their business
in a much more free, shall we say way. And that might have implications for what they
can earn, what they can do in their leisure time and so on, then potentially, that, again,
causes problems. So, you know, these are all hypotheticals, but they obviously have to
be taken into consideration.
Professor Robert West. As for the claims that having Covid-19 doesn't provide immunity,
and that antibody tests are unreliable, not so according to Franz Walt. He's the
Chief Executive of Quotient, a Swiss firm whose diagnostic system, Mosaic, is said to be one
of the market leaders testing for antibodies.
It has extreme high accuracy. We achieved 100% sensitivity and 99.8% specificity. So that
means the probability that you get a false positive is 0.2%.
So that's terrifically good news. I suppose if people are keen on the antibody test. The
challenge put forward by the WHO and others that immunity may not be conferred by having
had the virus by having antibodies. You think that that is being overplayed at the moment?
I can only reflect what I hear and what I see from different experts. And I think there
are a lot of experts out there believing that it will provide immunity or a certain degree
of immunity. And also the study conducted in South Korea is indicating that there is
a certain degree of immunity otherwise there would have been a reinfection. And they also
stated that positive tests in the recovered patients were false positives, not reinfections.
Franz Walt of the Swiss diagnostics firm, Quotient.
So imagine you've had the disease you can prove you've had it, maybe you can push them
to the front of the queue in terms of work opportunities, travel, dates. In parts of the
US recently, there were unconfirmed reports of people organising infection parties with
this very idea in mind. This was spotted on Facebook recently.
Hi, everyone. I have three young kids who are currently contagious. If you'd like your
kids immunised let me know we can make arrangements for a playdate. We are full through Tuesday
but have some time Wednesday or Thursday afternoon.
Sound crazy? While of course it isn't even that new an idea is it. Parents in the US and
Europe have been organising chicken pox parties for decades. I think I went to one as a child.
There is in fact a lesson even further back in history. Back in the 19th century, the
citizens of New Orleans at that time had their own killer disease, yellow fever. It accounted
for tens of thousands of deaths. And there were people competing at the time to achieve what
was known as acclimation, to be acclimated in other words. Which meant proving they'd
had the illness and therefore had immunity. Kathryn Olivarius is a Stanford historian,
who has been writing a book on this.
I must say it's a strange thing for a book on epidemics to have so much resonance now that we're in
the middle of our own pandemic. Yes, you see very similar patterns taking place. Now, the
way that it is, you know, sort of your imperative to be brave in the face of Coronavirus to
get back to work that those who care about the economy and making sure that the sort
of lasting economic depression that's gonna come out of this as short as possible that
you see this language of people are who are equating going back into society reopening
with a kind of morality and that's scary because it suggests that history's indeed repeating
itself in this regard.
One thing that people do say about epidemics across time
is that so much depends on the relationship between the population at large and those
giving them information, giving them support giving them advice. Do you see parallels between
now and that era of the Deep South in the 19th century?
I think that epidemics and pandemics don't necessarily sort of create new inequalities, they lay bare the ones that we already have.
So you see these epidemics in the past, definitely show who belongs and who does not. And that
the state, you know, quite literally did not care about you until you're acclimated because
it was considered to be a waste of political capital. You know, the rich have always had
the benefit of being able to flee. So if you were rich in New Orleans, you can in the 19th
century, and you are a white person, and you were free, you could leave town during epidemics.
You could go to your countryside plantations, you could go to New York and conduct business,
you could go to London. But if you were poor, and if you didn't have the freedom because
you were enslaved, you would have no choice as to whether or not you could leave. And
that's, I think, we know we've seen people, you know, rich people in the United States certainly
being able to escape to their, you know, second homes or to their, you know, mountainside
or seaside retreats and they bring the disease with them. Well, we'll see how this sort of
plays out over the next coming weeks and months as the summer continues.
Professor Kathryn Olivarius of Stanford University.