“For the first couple of days, I had no symptoms at all. And I was thinking quietly to myself, ‘Oh, this is great, I’m going to be one of those lucky people who has a completely asymptomatic course.’

“But on the third day, I was on a Zoom meeting and I suddenly began to feel terrible, really terrible.”

This is Dr Bronwyn King, a Melbourne oncologist, talking about her own experiences of long COVID and the way it came to rule her life.

“I suddenly had an overwhelming nausea and a very heavy crushing fatigue. So sent a message to the chair of the meeting saying, ‘Look, I’m gonna have to turn off my camera.’