As daytime highs here in Texas plummet to the upper nineties, my own temperature feels a bit dysregulated. I am also dealing with a recrudescence of the cold I caught on my South America trip – either on the first long flight or on the first overnight bus ride. Now, it's just a little congestion. At times, a cough. I mean just one; and hours later, another. I'm OK. I'm still riding my bicycle every day, and posting on the Internet with evidently unreduced frequency. Nevertheless, modern advances in hypochondria have been catching up to me. I say it's just a cold...but how smoothly we lie to ourselves.

It could be speed Covid.

Each cough is a discrete episode, lasting hardly a minute, during which the pathogen's population rises and falls. Each is a separate case. None confers immunity to the pathogen. Or if it does, this is unavailing, as the pathogen mutates. The population slowly rebuilds itself, indeed reinvents itself, and the cycle is repeated.

Due to its nature if any, this ailment is hard to confirm. There's a rough and ready test – "In the past 4 years, have you been within 12,000 nautical miles of the Diamond Princess?" – but it yields lots of false positives.

If, precisely during one of those isolated coughs, I ran an mRNA check, I might nail down the diagnosis. But spearing a ribosome during such a paroxysm would be very hard.

Meanwhile, this could be a marketing goldmine. For those who market panics, I mean.

Those who do struck out with speed Zika. Remember that? Wasn't it reported in young males entering the armed forces, many of whom found their hats suddenly falling over their eyes, but this was soon reasonably attributed to their getting boot-camp or basic-training haircuts. Oh, that's why my head is smaller!

Likewise speed AIDS was a flop. Just an illusion arising from too much granola and spicy food, if you know what I mean and I think you do. All we got were those tasteless "race to the bottom" jokes!

Monkeypox, at any timescale, failed too. If you ask me, the very name was too cheery. It was fun to say "monkeypox"! Who wouldn't want to raise his forearm grandly, affect a great study of his wristwatch, and announce he'd just had that pestilence for ten seconds? I understand there was a last-ditch attempt to re-brand it as "mpox," but as the consensus pronunciation was "mmmmmpox," this just sucked all the gravity out of the room.

But you know what they say: life goes on. It may yet become a bedrock tenet of modern medical practice that we all get horrible diseases all the time, indeed several times a day, each incidence rapidly fatal except when it's rapidly not. Or perhaps I should say all this becomes a bedrock tenet of modern public-health practice.

(10/5/23)